LoveThis launches – because your friends know best
LoveThis.com, which launches out of Beta today, is firmly in the social camp with its ‘black book’ of your friends’ recommendations, from websites and apps, places to eat and go, or something more practical like a good plumber. That may sound like a very general list of recommendations but the site’s premise is that your friends not only know best but also vouch for products and services all of the time, just not necessarily when you actually need those recommendations. LoveThis attempts to solve this problem of recall by encouraging users to store this info as structured and searchable data for later use.
Notable also is the startup’s founder: Alexis Dormandy, former Virgin Group board member and a founding director of both Virgin Mobile and Virgin Active. He has since been Chief Marketing Officer at Orange and been Chairman, investor and advisor to a variety of European businesses.
As well as entering recommendations into the site, users can search for recommendations on any topic via their social graph i.e. people they’ve friended (and therefore trust) on the service, which is the whole point. Interestingly, however, LoveThis also offers up ‘Experts’ as a separate tab in those results. These are super users picked out by the service who are screened based on their expertise. Anybody can apply to be an expert.
So, yeah, your friends know best, according to LoveThis but not always.
Based in London, UK, LoveThis has been in private Beta for two months and is privately funded.