Apple Acquires Social Search Engine Spotsetter

redletterdave (2493036) writes 'Apple has purchased Spotsetter, a social search engine that uses big data to offer personalized recommendations for places to go. Spotsetter was designed to combine recommendations from friends with trusted reviews and other data to create more social maps. It would show you which friends were 'experts' in a given area, and you could tag your friends as experts (like LinkedIn) to boost the influence of their recommendations. You could also discover new places by browsing Spotsetter's maps to see where your friends have been and what they've recommended. Spotsetter's app, which was available on iOS and Android, officially closed down just six days ago.'

Comments

social search and data mining

[TheGratefulNet]

if there's one thing we need more of, its this.

I mean, how can I find out about my friends unless they report up to some big corp?

oh right. I could just call them or email them directly. and that does not involve ANY spying at all.

yet another useless 'company' and 'product'. sigh.

I guess, like the movie industry, the software world has just run out of truly new ideas and just keeps rehashing the same old shit.

Re:social search and data mining

[Plumpaquatsch]

I mean, how can I find out about my friends unless they report up to some big corp?

For me, the real question is

"Why would I have people using this service as friends?"

You obviously didn't understand TFS. Your friends don't need to "use" this service for it to get information from them. The service digs through publicly available information on the internet, info that people give up voluntarily as if somebody gave a shit. You can boost the ranking of information coming from certain people, be they your friend or foes or Kim Kardashian or Eric S. Raymond.

There's no magic about it, it's just a meta-crawler.