Hooks for Facebook was originally written to showcase our innovative technology for integrating social networking and recommendation systems. Over time Hooks has grown into an award-winning new music discovery application with a true life of its own. The premise behind Hooks is that we can use relationships in social networks (in this case Facebook) to recommend music to users based on what other users like. Most of us have been getting personalized, word of mouth music recommendations from friends our whole lives. Hooks simply provides the technology to make this automatic and is 100% free to use.
Hooks has often been compared to the Genius and Ping features of iTunes. Although Hooks was actually written before Ping was announced, our technology is actually somewhere in between the two. One of the key differences between Hooks and Genius is that Hooks uses your Facebook friends instead of everyone who happens to be an iTunes user to help create recommendations. We believe this actually leads to more apropos recommendations in the long run.
Please click the image on the left to view a video introduction to Hooks. If you want to try Hooks right away, visit the Hooks for Facebook Application page.
How Does It Work?
Hooks combines two of our core proficiencies: collaborative filtering and social networking. Hooks works by comparing the music you like to a library of music that your Facebook friends like. Hooks figures out which of your friends likes the same types of music as you do and recommends songs from their library that you do not have.
Hooks showcases a rating and recommendation system developed by Synclab that implements our customized collaborative filtering algorithms. Our recommendation engine is written in Java and embraces open source building blocks such as Linux, MySQL, Google Web Toolkit, and Apache Tomcat.
Our Facebook integration platform is also written in Java and GWT. Facebook can be a difficult platform to program for since it’s APIs are poorly documented and constantly changing. To avoid issues with deprecating services, we utilize only the new Facebook Graph API, new OAuth 2.0 authentication, or new Javascript SDK.
If you are interested having a custom application created by us using any of these technologies, we would be delighted to hear from you.