We just made recommendations much better!

We're hitting our stride!

One of the biggest feedback items centers around the quality of the recommendations we're offering. Last night, we believe we took a big bite out of refining the search within Amazon and now our recommendations really nail it.

For example, in the past, if you wanted to look for items centered around 'Lost' and selected 'DVD', you would have to scroll through a couple screens to get to actually get to the 'Lost' season DVDs .

With the new updated, when you type 'Lost' and select 'DVD - Title' (shown below), the results will show the Lost TV show first.

Another example, on the 'Getting Started' tab, we added new text fields to help refine what recommendations we can offer. For example, the user can move the Beastie Boys from 'Music' to 'Music - Artist' and get much better results.

Thank you all for the great feedback and special thanks to the following: Milt R., Stokes, Jen S., Brett R., Yen T. and all others that helped get this feature on the radar. We're really listening!

Stay tuned, we have some really big ideas a-coming...

-- BaconMarathon team

We just helped launch a new Skinny Songs special offer...!

We just worked with Heidi to introduce a new "special offer" to get the song 'Skinny Jeans' free on itunes!

To get the song and see the widget we created in action, go to: http://www.skinnysongs.com

...and click on the offer. (example, within the red square pictured below)

The top3Clicks elevator pitch...!

We're very excited to mention here first that we're pitching top3Clicks to participate in the Facebook Fund. The submission is due by the end of this week but here is a taste of the video elevator pitch that will be a part of the submission package.

We're going to just have to wish ourselves luck...

..."luck" ;)

the BaconMarathon Team

'Getting Started' just got 1000 times easier...

Last night, long after Hillary said, "No way. No how. No McCain", BaconMarathon Labs quietly went live with a major tune up centered around making it 1000x easier for you and your friends to get started on top3Clicks.

We have added a new 'Getting Started' tab to the application that allows you to see all of the items you would like to watch by category before you start receiving recommendations.

Starting today, top3Clicks will examine your profile interests. The picture below is an example of interests you may have on your Facebook profile.

When you get to the 'Getting Started' tab, notice that we have pre-populated categories of items. You are now free to add a ton of new items to the list to watch. We made it so you no longer have to add one new item at a time.

Once you are satisfied with the items in the list, hit the 'Suggestions' button and you will be sent to the suggestion tab where you can see recommendations for each item on your list.

This new tab came from all your excellent feedback. One of the themes we heard from you was how did we come up with the initial list of items to get started, the Getting Started tab tackles this request and also provides and easy interface to add/remove many items at a time.

Thanks for all the support. We would love to hear from you about this new feature.

The BaconMarathon Labs Team

BaconMarathon was at F8 yesterday...

...and here are the take aways.

The BaconMarathon opinion of the state of the Facebook Partner Platform:

Year 1 = a ton of abusive applications taking advantage of the fb tools that were provided

Year 2 = will be about creating engaging 'real' applications by playing by the rules to build user trust and focusing on engagement

Year 3 = making money. So much talk about needed payment systems, etc.

The new Facebook user experience is all about the 'news feeds'. When we started top3Clicks the news feed was really the 'third' option behind the emails and notifications for getting the word out to friends on what is going on.

In the business track, Mark Pinkus and panel had some great advice for the young entrepreneurs:

1. If you are building an app on Facebook today you are way ahead of everyone out there today.

2. F8 feels like the first Internet World back in 1995 (we were there and agree!)

3. If you go to Yahoo's front page there will probably be an fb app for every link on that page by next year.

4. Make something engaging and use the social graph as a 'tool' to achieve viral-ness. don't make something viral then figure out engagement.

5. Good VC's focus on the team first and the idea second.

6. Ship often and learn <-- something we learned many many years ago.

Great EC2/S3 Tool

Tim Kay of ActiveBuddy fame has been working on aws, which he says provides “simple access to Amazon EC2 and S3”. I ran into Tim a while ago and we chatted about aws – around the same time, I also heard about it from Mike.

As all the BaconMarathon apps are running on EC2 and using S3 for storage, I’ve been looking for an easier way to interface with S3 in particular. I finally got around to trying out aws the other day and found it be more than advertised. Finally, I had one simple command to examine buckets on S3:

aws ls

That was it. Creating buckets, puts and gets are just as simple:

aws mkdir BUCKET
aws put BUCKET/[OBJECT] [FILE]
aws get BUCKET

We’re now using aws to push our MySQL backups to S3 on a scheduled basis – a simple change to our existing backup jobs