I got onto the beta for a new kind of social network site, Likaholix. You create your page and begin listing things that you like. You can add comments to go along with your liked items (books, music, movies, parks, restaurants, products, Web sites, cities, etc.) and say why you like them. You also can view other people’s pages and like items on their list, or just learn more about things people like. After awhile, Likaholix will begin recommending things you might like and is usually fairly accurate. The more you like, the more personalized the recommendations become. Of course, the coolest part is being the first to like something.

At first, it was like Facebook or Twitter (read: crack), in that I couldn’t stop. Within the first week of  joining, I was liking like a mad woman:

activity

I was the first to like 52 individual items and 113 people liked things that I liked. I’m thinking, I’m pretty popular. Plus there’s a neat contest giving away Kindles for top beta users. Rockin’, I can do that. Then I realized there were people with literally thousands of likes. I don’t even know if I like thousands of things. Am I just a pessimist? It appears not. I noticed that many people were “liking” items but then their comments would be negative about the product or often along the lines of, “I haven’t seen this movie/read this book but I want to.” Kind of defeats the purpose of the recommendation part of the site.

Another problem I’ve noticed is people liking the same thing multiple times. The site doesn’t seem to have a method of catching duplicates.

Likaholix suffers from being just another social network that’s fun for a short time but fizzles out after the initial use. There’s no real way of interacting with people yet, other than liking things on their profile or liking them. I’m sure I could list every tiny thing I like but after awhile I start to think, what’s the point? The list gets really long and people aren’t going to look much farther than your first page.

The site is still in beta so there is room for improvement. If you’d like an invite to check it out for yourself, you can contact me or leave a comment with your e-mail address under this post.

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