Loomia Powers Social Recommendations for WSJ, CNET, and NBC by Leveraging Facebook

Recommendations engine Loomia has signed deals with the Wall Street Journal, CNET, and NBC to provide users of those companies’ news websites with recommendations based on what their Facebook friends are reading. Readers of these publications who are also Facebook users with Loomia’s SeenThis? application installed will see a list of recommended news articles like the one seen to the right. These recommendations are in addition to the ones typically made by the news sites, and they are derived completely from what your other SeenThis?-using friends on Facebook have been reading on the site. The so-called “social annotation line” below each headline gives users a sense of how the recommendation was generated. Loomia co-founder and CTO David Marks says that there are several factors that go into determining whether a recommendation should be made. Of course, a user must actually visit an article before it can be considered for recommendation, but other factors such as link clicks are also taken into consideration. If a user explicitly shares an item on Facebook through Loomia, the behavior will show the strongest preference for an item. As for how the system decides which of your friends’ articles are most appropriate to show you, SeenThis? considers which Facebook groups and networks you are part of, in addition to which articles you have read personally.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/01/30/loomia-powers-social-recommendations-for-wsj-cnet-and-nbc-by-leveraging-facebook/