Social bookmarking and news aggregator Digg has announced that it will integrate a new recommendations engine. This will track users’ activity and recommend stories according to the behavior of other presumably like-minded users.

This is mostly a filter to increase relevance — a move toward letting users cut through the clutter, now that “Dug” stories are reaching 12,000 to 14,000 per day.

This will be a passive recommendations engine by automatically formulating the stories you might like, and the list of “Diggers Like You” (ranked by compatibility percentage).

But it will also allow for a certain amount of manual override by letting users delete those whose diggs they might not like. And they can also choose to forgo the feature altogether and go back to the traditional list of top diggs from the overall community.

The feature not only brings an additional layer of social relevance to the service, but also seems to bring it a step closer to new forms of monetization. These could include ad placements based on behavioral targeting from users’ level of interaction with news stories and active diggs.

It will also generate a social graph, which has implications for ad targeting, as shown by early monetization efforts by and within other social networks like Facebook. Check out a video demo of the new feature and an explanation from founder Kevin Rose on the Digg blog.

Lots of talk about the 3G iPhone this week. We’ll see lots of local applications developed that make use of faster speeds and GPS capability, as speculated. The $199 price tag will also make it more mainstream friendly than before.

One example of a local application we’re hearing about is the Yellowpages.com local search app. This will be the second iPhone app from the IYP, and will add local social networking features. Social networking around local businesses (particularly bars and restaurants) is another possible killer app on the mobile device that could be realized through the 3G iPhone and other rising hardware and software standards we’re seeing.

Other mobile, local and social mashups we’ll see emerge on the iPhone include one from Yelp and another from Loopt that was demoed on stage with the 3G iPhone’s launch at the WWD conference on Monday. Expect others.

The folks at Common Craft have put together another video with their signature elementary style. This one explains the underlying benefits of social media marketing for SMBs in an abstract but informative way (see previous post on their social bookmarking video).

Elsewhere in social media video, Current has an amusing animated short about the social network wars. Among other things, it gets at the issue of social networking fatigue we’ve explored in the past. A nice quick viral video to break up a Tuesday afternoon.

Hyperlocal community site FatDoor has shut down and reopened as Center’d, an event planning and neighborhood search site with the tag line “people, places, plans.” This follows last week’s fall of Grayboxx, rise of Angie’s List, and birth of OurTown.

Like FatDoor, the company is in stealth mode with not much more than a landing page offer to join a private beta. After attempting to join, I received an email saying that that my request was being reviewed. But past the front door, more details emerge (per Erick Schonfeld’s sleuthing at TechCrunch):

At Center’d, we’ve been thinking about how to solve the challenges that exist in making plans. From the smallest get together, where you just can’t decide on where to eat . . . to the large fundraisers and school activities that require signups and hundreds of emails and weeks of meticulous planning

Hear us out. We can give you the tools you need to easily organize people, places, and times. Using the latest space-age technology, we have concocted features such as:

Polling tools: Enable your guests to take some of the burden of coming to consensus on the place and time to meet.

Task Management and Volunteer Sign-up : Now you can easily get the team you need to do the stuff you need.

Connection management and calendar sharing : Now that you are suddenly so organized, and ready to pull off the perfect girls’ night out/summer camp/grandparents day/birthday party/first date/last date, let’s make sure those who are important to you can view your calendars. But not everyone, and not every event. We can keep a secret.

Explore neighborhoods : We’ll even help you out with finding other places and events. How would you like a view of your world filtered by the recommendations of people you trust? How would you like to be at the center, and have the people, places, and plans you care about revolve around you, just waiting to be experienced? We like that idea. In fact, we like it so much, we built it.

This sounds like a mix between evite, Yelp and Google Maps. It also comes with some of the social recommendation aspects of Loladex, but without piggybacking on an existing social graph. There are some attractive features, but launching a destination strategy in local is a tough proposition, as the company likely learned with FatDoor.

But there are also some mashup possibilities that come to mind with local sites that already have a lot of content and traffic, such as Yelp. We’ll talk to the company soon, test out the product more comprehensively and give it the chance it deserves. Stay tuned.

________

Screen shot courtesy of TechCrunch.

If Facebook is really the next marketing platform, the guys at Loladex will have guessed right. The new rating and review company, formed by two alumni of AOL Search and Yellow Pages, had initially been incubated as a destination site that enables user reviews, business listings and third-party content from sites such as OpenTable.com and ServiceMagic.com. Sometime last year, the decision was made to build specifically for Facebook.

The key advantage of the Facebook-only strategy? Leveraging Facebook’s discrete social and geographic groups, and growing user base. It is something that destination sites such as Yelp, Kudzu, Citysearch, YellowBot and Boorah don’t easily do. When was the last time you looked at a review and wondered whether the reviewer had similar tastes? The idea here is to stick with established friends.

But there are risks. Facebook could compete directly against the site, marginalizing Loladex as a little used “application” (like six other applications I have that are already shunted to a side menu). Or maybe Facebook never really becomes a universal platform, and users find themselves shut out of the larger universe.

That seems possible. Facebook may be a little stratified between the college/post-college crowd, and an older professional set. There is little in-between. And the professional group of friends on Facebook may not have common tastes in restaurants (or gyms).

But Loladex founder Laurence Hooper is gungho on the Facebook tie — which is one-way. The company doesn’t actually work with Facebook. “Some people believe it is on the verge of being abandoned, but I believe the opposite,” he says. “Facebook has enormous potential, and the serious applications are just starting to arrive. Products like Loladex will help people realize that Facebook is useful, rather than just entertaining.”

In any case, it isn’t really about Facebook. In July, the site will launch a broader site based on the new “open social” standard that Yahoo!, Google and others are participating in. What Hooper and fellow AOL YP alum Dan Goodman are looking at is a social network that is “fully portable” and “scales easily. Don’t ask people to do the work” of exporting their friends — and their friends’ content — from one network to another, he says.

Yelp! has announced that it got $15 million in a fourth round of funding led by DAG and existing investors.

The company also sent some growth metrics:

October ‘07 — 5M Unique Visitors
December ‘07 — 6M UVs
January ‘08 — 7M UVs
February ‘08 — Numbers aren’t in yet but there were 8.3M UVs in the past 30 days.

Total number of reviews posted to the site = 2.3M.
It took 2 years and 3 months to reach 1M reviews (May 2007).
In the past 8 months an additional 1.3 million reviews were posted.

In its short history, Yelp has become something of a model for how to build a local review site and has become a clear favorite of the twenty- and thirty-something urban “foodie.” Its success has also spawned a number of similar models in Europe, such as Qype, Welovelocal and TouchLocal.

The challenge for Yelp will be to replicate itself in new cities, broaden (and deepen) its base of users, and spread its ad support beyond restaurants and bars into the services arena — something it says it has been having success with.

It’s clearly strongest in hometown San Francisco, and it has good traction in New York. It also sells ads in Los Angeles, Chicago, Seattle and San Diego.

So –what will it do with its new money? We’d guess it is likely to be used to expand to new markets, add new verticals, make minor acquisitions and do more marketing. The company has certianly used some interesting marketing tactics to seed reviews in San Francisco such as providing “People on Yelp Love Us” stickers for businesses to put in their windows, or lobbying the SF City Hall to establish a “Yelp Day” in the city (there has also been a small but interesting Yelp backlash as there is with any social phenomenon). Expect more of this kind of marketing in new markets.

To help this growth in New York, the company is also in the process of opening an office there. I plan to talk to Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppleman later this week to dig deeper.

Linkedin has become a valuable resource for connecting business professionals. Recently Linkedin has added a professional services feature that allows members to share their business contacts in specific service categories. The new “Services” tab allows users to find people via recommendations from colleagues. You choose someone from your network, select which category you’re recommending them for, then fill in additional information related to the work you’ve done together. If you then want to find a graphic designer, career coach, consultant or even a child-care provider, you can browse the new section and see how the members of your network have ranked particular service providers.

Linkedin is a powerful and growing business network that recently reported topping the 17 million-member mark, making it one of the world’s largest business networks on the Internet. With a large base of business-focused members, finding ways to share vendors and service providers seems like a natural extension with the possibility of enhancing its revenue generation and profitability.

Business projects often involve multiple partners where companies seek various businesses to bid and often require recommendations as part of their selection process. Being able to tap into a network that provides insights on how to approach projects and who to contact is a valuable resource and a smart way to leverage Web 2.0 features and functionality.

This type of social/business linking approach is one Yellow Page publishers could adopt. With vast databases of local business information and a strong link to local communities, directory publishers could encourage users to share their experiences related to kitchen remodeling, home improvement projects, purchasing a home, planning a wedding or setting up home health services. They could then link the providers used with ratings of each that could be shared with others needing similar services. Imagine approaching an unfamiliar project with no vendors in mind, then visiting a publisher site where they offer consumer advice, step-by-step instructions and locally endorsed vendors (via consumer reviews) who can help complete the task. That would be a powerful use of the local community as well as a stronger linking of buyers, influencers and sellers. 

Following closely behind its integration of Citysearch content (including reviews) last month, Local.com announced today that it will integrate 2 million reviews from Yelp. This was made possible by Yelp’s recent release of its API for local search sites to build mashups and pull in its reviews. LiveDeal recently did the same.

With this move, and many of its recent developments, Local.com is doing exactly what it should be in the crowded local search space: differentiating itself with more content. Related to the general “universal search” trend online, users are coming to expect more sources and formats of content in their local search experiences.

Reviews are one of the fastest growing pieces to this puzzle and this was a logical step for Local.com. Expect video integration — another important piece of the universal search trend — to follow closely behind for Local.com and many others that haven’t yet integrated it.

“Our strategy is to be content aggregator first,” Peter Hutto, Local.com VP of business development and sales, told me a few weeks ago. “There are lots of different forms of content out there, and you’ll see us make a broad range of deals to bring in content, such as deals we’ve formed with Superpages and Citysearch. Part of this will be to aggregate video from other folks.”

Last week the Swedish directory publisher Eniro announced that it has selected Stockholm-based Picsearch to power a video search feature on the eniro.se portal.

Picsearch has an existing relationship with Eniro via its provision of a video search feature on Kvasir.no, Eniro’s Norwegian Web search platform. Eniro has already launched video search on eniro.se (Sweden), eniro.dk (Denmark) and eniro.fi (Finland). Eniro claims that it reaches more than 15 million users via its Nordic online network, which includes general search, IYP, B2B and vertical search properties.

According to data cited in the deal announcement, more than 54 percent of Swedish consumers watch online video at least once a month. Picsearch indexes millions of videos worldwide (including content from YouTube and other video search sites), and also filters out offensive material to put families at ease.

Video search helps Eniro build out its content offering and buttress its goal of being the leading provider of search in the Nordic markets. This means providing a better Nordic search experience than external competitors like Google. While Picsearch certainly indexes the same cats on skateboards video as YouTube and others, it also offers a unique focus on the Nordic markets. Picsearch has an ongoing effort to index video content originating in the Nordic regions.

Eurekster is an interesting company in the general category of social search and discovery engines that provides a search widget (Swicki) for publishers to plant on their sites.

Swickis essentially refine search results over time based on the search behavior of past users of a given site. This makes search results more socially relevant over time, and within particular communities, than the broader algorithms that rule Google SERPs. Swickis have also been made portable so those created for various niches can be shared and planted on any site (see examples here).

Eurekster’s publisher community now stands at 25,000 and just over 100,000 Swickis have been built. These collectively see about 25 million searches per month and 9 million unique users. The Swicki also came out of beta last week after being there for a few years, and launched new features that ease the process of Swicki creation for publishers (more details here).

Also notable is that the Swicki was recently launched for video search, a growing area being explored by companies we’ve profiled here in the past, including Blinkx, ScanScout and Adap.tv. This happened through a partnership with Blinkx formed earlier this fall, about which we recently had the chance to catch up with Eurekster CEO Steven Marder.

“We were waiting for video to mature to a certain point,” said Marder. “One, where video feeds were good enough, and two, where we could parter with someone aggressive enough to do what we want to do. We think Blinkx is the most advanced in analyzing video for content and meaning.”

Blinkx does a good job finding and indexing video content online and this essentially pushes this content into the search results Eurekster is performing across all these vertical and niche publisher sites. This is also the next step in the meta search that Eurekster already performs with blog content, Web content, images, UGC, site search, etc.

Swickis also make full use of the buzz cloud, a discovery engine that is gaining user appeal in lots of search-based products. This partnership will now bring the buzz cloud concept and form factor to the nascent video search segment. The deal also brings social relevance to video search, given that online video is shared a great deal among users and is inherently social.

“There is so much video online. We have in our index something like 14 million hours of content. It’s very difficult to find what it is that you want to watch,” said Blinkx CEO Suranga Chandratillake in a video announcement of the deal. “Part of the challenge is being able to find it and make sense of what’s there. The second part is going to people whom you trust, [who] you know are experts, and who have an idea of what you might be interested in.”