Douglas Merrill, Non Executive Board Director of The Filter
After a few weeks of keeping quiet we’re really pleased to announce that Douglas C.Merrill, ex-Google CIO and author of ‘Getting Organized in the Google Era’ has joined our Board.
Douglas joins us at a time when we’re focussing our attention on our B2B Software As A Service – delivering the best recommendations for major content publishers.
Douglas said,
“What I love about the Filter is they’re solving the right problem at the right time… The Filter analyses user data and behaviour to provide measurably better, more relevant recommendations.”
We really value Douglas’s breadth of technical and strategic expertise and his help will also be important in driving forward The Filter’s aggressive plans to expand our platform and increase our global operations during the coming months.
We’ve just slapped up a bit of a refresh to TheFilter.com, and we’d like to run you through why we’ve decided to do this.
When we launched last year, our aim was to be the home of recommendations on the web – so we recommended music and movies to you on your homepage. However, the world/Internet is moving on and there’s lots more content out there than just albums and movies. So, we’ve tweaked our goalposts a bit and now want to filter the whole of the web for you – to find the entertainment (and relevant bits of information related to the entertainment) that you’ll love.
The very first iteration of this process is up now on The Filter. If you log-in you’ll see a feed which contains news stories, reviews and recommendations – all based on your tastes (the items in your taste cloud).
In the coming months we’ll be adding lots and lots of great content to this feed, such as Tweets from your favourite artists/movie stars, the best videos, gig recommendations, concerts from photos – you name it, it will go into your feed. We’ll also be tidying up the design considerably (there’s even rumours that those floor tiles will go soon!)
Anyway, that’s the premise behind the updates to the site today. Please let us know any feedback you may have in the comments.
Hope you enjoy discovering new content in your feed.
Our CEO (or “boss” as the BBC likes to call him) is still at SXSW, and tweeting every five seconds about it. Sample tweets: “Shall I go to the Google or Facebook party tonight?”. He’s even got into the habit of saying “Goodnight” on Twitter, which I think is the invisible line between being a normal person and being a complete geek. He’s crossed it, and there’s no coming back. He’ll probably come back to the office with about ten sickening new buzz words and make us work while perched on space hoppers with a GPS chip built into them.
Despite going to Facebook parties (he thought the band were brilliant, while I noticed that Mike Butcher from Techcrunch thought they were awful) it does appear that he has been doing some work – having a nice chat with the BBC.
Hopefully the video won’t shatter your illusion of SXSW like it did mine, you can take a look here. I expected the whole thing to be super-cool and trendy, with drunk rock stars walking around, but it looks like they are conducting the interview in a school library.
You can read the full BBC article here, featuring David and a host of other British start-ups that joined forces to take on SXSW with the folks at Digital Mission.
Christmas is nearly here and that means two things; watching Muppets Christmas Carol and spending time with the family. This can be dangerous territory for any music fan. Last time I went home my dearest mother played Girls Aloud on the kitchen stereo, which resulted in a little bit of me dying inside. There’s little you can do in moments like this, it’s not like I can whip out Dilla’s version of Fuck The Police or anything, that would bring unsavory language to the kitchen…
So, how can The Filter save Christmas for millions of music fans?
Well, we’ve invented something called The Taste Mixer… and it goes a little something like this:
On the new profile pages, there is a shiny box called The Taste Mixer. What happens in this shiny box is very special. You get a chance to mix your taste with the taste of your friend/family member.
So, if I want to listen to Fuck The Police – and my Mother wants to listen to Sounds of The Underground on Christmas Eve, all that needs to happen is that I need to get my Mother to sign up to The Filter and mix our tastes on my profile page. The Filter will then do some geeky maths (I hear words like Neural Networks, grok, Artificial Intelligence, however I just imagine robots coming to kill me) and what comes out is a playlist that both parties will enjoy. It’s the playlist of where their tastes meet.
And you can then listen to a radio station of all of that. Yes, that’s part two of the new features on The Filter – you can now listen to recommendations radio thanks to a deal we’ve done with We7.
There should also be more news, as Idolator (great site, check it out) have let us use a bunch of their news stories on The Filter.
Anyway. Check out the new features, let us know what you think of them and have a happy holiday.
If you subscribe to our Twitter feed then you’ll already be aware that we have released ‘The Taste Cloud’ (as previewed in this post)
When you log-in to your home page, you’ll see a “mini” taste cloud with six flashing dots.
Don’t be alarmed, what all this flashing is about is to alert you as to what bands/movies that you like were chosen by The Filter to generate your recommendations. (You can see from my image that The Silver Jews and The Darjeeling Limited are two of the six items being used to generate my recommendations)
More on this: The Filter doesn’t actually generate recommendations based on all of your tastes. Otherwise, you’d get the same recommendations every day. Instead The Filter chooses three artists that you like from your Taste Cloud and generates a set of recommendations from these artists. The Filter then has applies a second layer of filtering and adds your personal profile to these recommendations – taking away the stuff we know you already own, or don’t like etc.
So, it is really important that you keep your taste cloud up-to-date and accurate. The more interesting and accurate it is – the better your recommendations will be. You can keep your tastes up to date by pressing the “edit taste cloud” button, on the Taste Cloud.
We’d love to hear your opinions on The Taste Cloud – so please drop any thoughts in the comments area.
Also… you might have noticed that when you log-in you’ll be asked to choose a new username – this is because the next thing we are tackling on The Filter is a redesign of the profile page, so you’ll have a cool place to show off your music tastes.
Unprecedented scenes of joy here at The Filter HQ. There’s web-developers running around the office half-naked, twirling their XXL T-Shirts above their heads, the Mac loving designer is spraying vintage Champagne around the office (and I think he is purposely aiming at the PC’s) and the CEO is simply stunned, crying with joy and pride.
The Filter was pre-selected after extensive review of over 700 companies and was approved by the selection committee based on its strong growth potential in the US market. The selection committee includes senior executives from leading American technology companies and venture capitalists. “We observe a steady appetite from American technology titans for European ventures. Despite California’s leadership in high-tech, Europe still generates unique innovations. The Filter along with the remaining of the delegation will show it at the Euro Tech Showcase.” said Jean-Bernard Guerree, Managing Director at Avise Partners.
In all seriousness, these things are terrific and it’s fantastic that The Filter has been selected for another top-drawer showcase event.
Today we announced a major new deal with download music website We7. The partnership will enable We7 users to get filtered recommendations based on their listening habits.
We7 which recently signed EMI for its ad-supported streaming music service now has a catalogue of over 3 million tracks. But with the huge choice of music available on this website, users have found it difficult to discover music based on their tastes. This is where The Filter’s recommendation engine will come in handy, it will be used to recommend artists, albums and songs first within a specific genre and then across more genres as it gathers more data related to the We7 catalogue.
This is also great news for us at The Filter because the partnership will mean we’ll be sharing usage data with We7 and the more consumption data we have, the better our music recommendations.
The Filter tools on We7 are expected live shortly after their launch later in the year.
We’ve sneaked out The Filter a bit earlier than we expected. A whole twelve hours early. You can go and have a play now.
I’ll update this blog with more information tomorrow, including news about a competition – but for now I’ll leave you with a clip from Going Live – a British Saturday morning kids TV show that I watched when I was young. I thought Gordon the gopher was super-cool.
So yes, The Filter is still in ’super-beta stealth mode’ and our team of developers are tapping away at their keyboards building/breaking/fixing things in an amusing hyper-animated cartoon style.
Here’s a rundown of what the caffeine laced coders been up to while tied to their little desks for eighteen hours a day:
New Profile Pages:
Each user on The Filter gets their own profile page where you can blog your discoveries.
For example, this morning I stepped out of my car hit shuffle on my iPod and was greeted by the plucky bass intro of ‘Don’t Lie to Me’ by Big Star. I decided then are there that every one of my friends should be aware of this little tune from the olden days of rock. It’s good news then that the development team here at The Filter have just finished building/breaking/fixing that very feature; take a look at the screenshot below for visual proof.
I’m an effort-hater – so this makes it easy to recommend music to all my friends.
If you are a beta tester then you should be able to head to your profile now and try it out. So log yourself in and head over to your profile page by hitting your name in the top navigation bar.
You’ll now find yourself in the profile area.
At the top of this page are all the special buttons that allow you to write a note about any music or movie that you want to tell your friends about. Be mindful that it is still in super-beta, aka: bugtastic.
Instant Playlists now for Windows.
Mac users have had instant playlists in their downloadable app for a while now (you hit apple + 1 in iTunes if you’ve downloaded the app) but now the Windows client can build ‘em too. Don’t ask me how to do it because I refuse to boot up from Mac into Windows. It’s wrong. They tell me it works for iTunes, Windows Media Player and Winamp.
Personalized RSS feeds:
You can now grab an RSS feed for any of your music, movie or web video recommendations. We’ll be opening a lot more of our data in the future, even opening up our recommendations engine – so this is the first baby step of a long walk to open goodness.
As always, feedback on this blog post, over in the forum or to our dedicated and exceptionally well-manned support email address.
I just wanted to say a massive thank you to all the people that have signed up to join the private beta program. We’ve had a great response, which has been really encouraging.
From Monday, we’ll be slowly turning on the tap and letting a lot more people into the site – so if you have already registered but haven’t got an invitation yet – there’s a good chance that you’ll get lucky this week.
There’s still plenty of time to register if you haven’t done so already.
