Ex-Googlers Start Up Likaholix, A Micro-Sharing Service For Personal Recommendations (200 Invite Codes)

Likaholix is a brand new web service that lets you share personal recommendations about virtually anything with the world. The tool lets you build a list of things you like and recommend with the help of a pre-populated database of items (think books, movies, tv shows, products, etc.) readily available and put together from sources from across the web.

For each of those items, Likaholix provides you with list of landing pages with descriptions, various topics centered around the items along with relevant image and video material so you’d have a central point to add information about stuff instead of having to gather it from multiple sources.

The service, which is sort of like a Twitter for personal recommendations, is still in private alpha, but we scored 200 invites for readers: simply head on over here and complete your details. The company is also giving away Amazon Kindle devices to 5 lucky beta testers.

I’ve embedded three screenshots below, showing the steps I took to add a like for the movie Office Space (which I honestly recommend to everyone). It’s a very easy process, and you can instantly push your personal recommendations to third-party social networking services like Facebook, Twitter and FriendFeed.

It’s easy enough to add likes, and it can be a fun and engaging experience when you invite your Gmail contacts (the service also lets you connect your Facebook profile and invite your friends), but I’m missing an incentive that will make me want to go back to Likaholix every time I think of something I like. I’m also not sure about which business model the team intends build around the tool, although I suspect it would be easy enough for targeted advertising to be displayed on your profile pages based on the recommendations you’ve added.

Likaholix was founded by Bindu Reddy and Arvind Sundararajan, a former Google Product Manager and Senior Staff Engineer, respectively. Both were among the key people behind GMail, Google Base, Google Docs, AdSense and Google Video.