Charbax.com

I have been posting this as a feature request on Google feedback groups since May 2007, today Google is launching real feed item recommendations, which they call Magic.

My request from May 20th 2007: Backup up somewhere cause I cannot find it in the archives of the official Google Group

Subject: Personalized News Items Suggestions Actions…
From: Charbax ()
Date: May 20, 2007 7:14:39 pm
List: com.googlegroups.google-reader-past
We can star items, now all Google Reader needs to provide is a
“Recommendations” button, which would display a list of recommended
news items, based on comparing this user with the activity of all the
other Google Reader users.

There should be some settings for different kinds of Recommended news
items:

x Generate Recommendations Based on read news items

x Generate Recommendations Based on starre news items only

<------------> A slider to choose level of obscurity that news items
may be, thus only fetching the most popular other news items, or also
recommending some more obscure stories that only a few other Google
Reader users have read or have starred.

Some other algorithms and functionalities might be chosen in the
settings of this feature by the users.

And as there is a Star function now, it is important to also have a
“Discard” item button, which basically tells the Google Reader
Recommendations engine that it should please try to avoid recommending
this type of news item in the future.

A history of chronologically starred and discared news items should
also be consultable so as to maybe later make some changes in those
ratings.

Also this could be used to Suggest similar news item that is better
suited than the one that is being read. Basically, Google knows all
the related news items that talk about the same things, so using the
stats of starring, it could display a “Hey, try reading this version
of the news item on this other blog, it should be a better one and one
Google Reader thinks is of your personal taste”.

Google should contact me if they are going to steal my idea, or I have
lots of other similar visions, I’m sure they are in the works and
studied, but maybe they are not..

In December 2007: http://groups.google.com/group/google-reader-feedback/browse_thread/thread/655e44352560e9ab/

And a couple of months ago: http://www.getsfn.com/google_reader/topics/feed_item_recommendations_based_on_likes