For those of you following this new blog, I just noticed that CRITEO now allows you to register for their FREE API online. It takes about 2 business days to setup your database ID, but once it is set up, you can move forward!

I’m also running a separate blog that will be focused on integrating CRITEO with blogs, hopefully working on building plug-ins or code modifications to use their free API with your low-traffic site. This is really exciting stuff for even the smallest blogger or online retailer: by allowing your users to log-in and rate your posts/products/services in terms of what they like and dislike, you will be able to give them very relevant links to other items you offer. This will increase the chance of them staying on your site, which means more products/services sold or more ads displayed. This is a win-win situation for anyone of any business model or size.

Get going and register for their free API engine access today!

Here’s some amazing news on the collaborative filter front — relevancy prediction engine developer CRITEO has made it to the Top 30 leaderboard for the NetFlex Prize, a competition between 13,610 teams to try to beat the current NetFlix prediction engine. What is even more interesting is that the CRITEO engine performs the analyses for this competition in real time, versus most of the competitors that are churning information that can take minutes, hours or even days!

On top of all that, CRITEO offers this predictive engine as a public API right now, and you can try it on your site for free. Check out CRITEO’s DVD recommendation test site to see how quick and relevant their engine is — and realize how this public API can help your site no matter what products, services or articles you cover.

The CRITEO API offers huge opportunities for both online companies as well as brick and mortar service and product providers. The NetFlix system is one that is constantly being beaten up by all of their users — and with a system like CRITEO, the off-site maintenance and management makes great sense since it relegates many responsibilities to a third party, so you can focus on providing your users with the service they want. The API isn’t just for huge companies like NetFlix, though, it also will work great with smaller online merchants and publishers. You can allow your users to find other items or services based on what they’ve used or like, or even allow them to show relevant articles to what they come to your site or blog to read about.

Why just base your relevancy comparisons to keywords and visit popularity when you can actually allow your users to quickly rate their visited pages/items to instantly give them relevant topics? This means you’ll retain them on your site longer, increase the opportunity to offer them what they want, and produce a site that is more competitive than others that not offering relevant advice. Also, an API like the CRITEO engine allows you to offer relevant in-links that are not biased by your views — the relevancy results are only biased by what that particular user has chosen to rate, giving them a unique view of your site and services/products.

Check out the API today — it is free to try, and easy to work with.

I’ve always loved the news — I can remember scanning the newspaper even before I could really read. Now that news is available in such a wide variety, covering opinions from many different angles and qualities of newscasting, the sheer amount of choices out there makes it hard to find all the relevant news out there. What is relevant to me may not be relevant to you — we might agree on topics, but our regions might be far apart. The wonderful news sites out there are still “one size fits all” in many ways, even if they have different sections or categories. I’m a regular at slashdot, NewsVine and digg, and I love their interfaces, but they’re still very one-dimensional. Sure, digg lets you vote up or down a particular article to hit the home page, but if an article hits a homepage, everyone sees it. We’re all thrown into one pool. Slashdot has the moderation system, a system that is a little more adaptive since you can modify moderations using an individually-managed preference (giving more “mod points” to your friends and taking away from your foes), but even slashdot isn’t very collaborative. Newsvine is gaining a lot of speed, but it is still a “Yay” or “Nay” system — not much collaborating going on.

Who wants to be the first news site that truly allows collaborative filtering, such as the API engine provided by CRITEO? Imagine a news site that lets individuals submit articles, comment on them in a blog-like fashion, and rate them using a collaborative filter? I might love a particular news story — you might not. Over time, as thousands or millions of others rate articles submitted, a good filtering engine will give us the stores that WE specifically are interested in reading — with great accuracy! Instead of trying to wade through thousands of articles a day, you can just do your normal scanning of the sites you like and submit links to those articles just like you do at newsvine. You can comment on the article, just like you can at slashdot. You can rate the article, just like you can at digg. But with an API such as CRITEO, that site would weigh the articles differently for each individual — some might love news on puppies, others might want news on the latest lawn mowing technology. Some might love news from major trade corporations, others might like news from small bloggers. It doesn’t matter, because the collaborative filtering engine will handle figuring out what you’d like to read, and what you should pass on.

Who wants to step up?

It was by chance searching that I came across CRITEO, a French company focused on personalized relevancy sorting through any kind of data. The company is a recent startup in the last few years, focusing on a new pre-emergent market product that is utilized through an API, allowing websites of all sorts to enter user preferences and come up with a real-time match for each user. Currently they are demonstrating their API for YouTube videos and Amazon movies — their system operates much like a “thumbs up, thumbs down” style interface, where users can rate a variety of products and be shown relevant products that should interest them.

The CRITEO example is limited, though, only because their current drive is to show website operators the power of their API. The limitation is a requirement for their early business, since they are not concerned with specific markets — they’re concerned with markets finding relevancy in this product. For most Web 2.0-style applications, the market is relatively unknown. Instead, the hive of users that can use a product will be the ones that develop a new market, regardless of what the developers of an interface desire. This is good for the end-users, good for the product suppliers, and good for the company acting like a middleman.

CRITEO is offering their entry-level API free of charge for website operators to use and test. Playing with their Amazon relevancy site is incredible — in less than 5 minutes of rating movies, I was really impressed with how quickly their engine offered me insight into what I’d like. 5 more minutes gave me an incredibly accurate diagnosis of what I’d like and what I won’t like.

This blog is an attempt to discuss the idea of relevancy from a perspective outside of CRITEO and the current players in the consumer-relevancy market. I hope to discuss ideas on what these engines can do outside of the norm, outside of the box, and outside of common thought. Without taking risks, website operators will not realize rewards. I believe entering into a relationship with a company such as CRITEO can give the common and complex website operators significant retention in terms of users, and therefore customers.