There is something so powerful about online communities and recommendations. The combination delivers high quality recommendations that are amazing.
Classic example: my post yesterday about a ski trip that I’m planning. I wrote that quickly and then shared a link to that post on Twitter.
The comments were wonderful and informative. And I am grateful for that. It’s a huge help.
The comments were not only helpful but extremely fast and efficient. Basically by mid-morning I had narrowed down our choices to two destinations.
Last night we also started planning another trip that we have on our list for 2011.
I didn’t want to write another post about that trip so I tried doing it “the old fashion” way – ie Google Search. But the amount of searches required for this trip was cumbersome and slow. And 90 minutes of searching and bookmarking, I’m still not done but I was very tired.
I’m obsessed about high quality, social recommendations. I love that my music recommendations are powered by my friends (via tumblr and ex.fm). My television is almost powered by my friends social recommendations (via Boxee) and there is more to do in this area. Much of my restaurant choices come from friend recommendations (foursquare, twitter). My newspaper is built on the back of friend recommendations (via flipboard).
Now, I want this to happen for everything – from gadgets, to shopping, to schools, to movies, to babysitters…the list goes on.