Finding online content efficiently is increasingly important to users. Lumi.do, a new and rather useful web recommendation engine launched by two founders of Last.fm, is now here to help through a browser plug-in that tracks the websites you visit and suggests other sites it believes you’ll enjoy.
This service doesn’t require the user to do anything beyond installing the plug-in, which works on Firefox, Safari, and Chrome. You can then navigate the web normally – when you want to see Lumi’s suggestions, you simply log on its site.
Lumi records only the URLs you visit, not the content you view. The company claims that the data that is collected is saved on Lumi’s servers, where it is encrypted and rendered anonymous and secure. Of course, such information is really valuable, especially to advertisers – however, Lumi’s privacy policy states that this data is only ever used to improve user recommendations.
I tried out Lumi by installing the plug-in in Chrome. After Lumi’s software analysed my browsing history, it took me to a web page showing a seemingly endless array of colourful squares, each linking to a page it thought I might like to visit. The site also shows popular pages, determining popularity by tracking pages that other users visit.
In the few hours I played around with Lumi, it did make some good suggestions based on the kind of things I look at throughout my day, such as a rather long list of Android and tech news, IT security news and social media news and highlights.
If you’re interested in being a more active Lumi user, you can star pages you like, either on your Lumi profile page or out on the wider web.
Other users can follow you and see the stars that you’ve made publicly viewable. Of course, you can follow other users to see pages they’ve starred and you can also gather similar starred pages into groups.
Some users might be a little nervous about having their URLs tracked, but I liked Lumi’s approach. It’s simple to integrate, and while it shares the basic idea of content discovery with StumbleUpon and many other services, I liked that it didn’t rely on me to seed it with my interests or offer recommendations heavily based on my social friend’s posts.
Jesmond Darmanin is a technology enthusiast who has his own blog at www.itnewsblog.com.