<http://schema.org/articleBody>
"Lumi is the latest venture from two of the three founders of Last.fm, a popular Internet radio service that keeps track of what you listen to and then recommends new tunes based on your tastes. Similarly, Lumi is a browser plug-in that tracks the websites you visit and suggests other sites it believes you\u2019ll enjoy.\nThis service is now in a private alpha test with around 1,000 users. It doesn\u2019t require the user to do anything beyond installing the plug-in (it works on Firefox, Safari and Chrome). You can then navigate the web normally\u2014and when you want to see Lumi\u2019s suggestions, you simply log in on its site and take a look.\nLumi records only the URLs you visit, not the content you view. The data that\u2019s collected is saved on Lumi\u2019s servers, where it is encrypted, anonymized and secured. Of course, the information you provide is still valuable\u2014especially to advertisers\u2014though Lumi\u2019s privacy policy states that this data is \u201Conly ever used\u201D to improve user recommendations. (The founders say Lumi still hasn\u2019t settled on a business model.)\nI tried out Lumi by installing the plug-in in Firefox. After Lumi\u2019s software analyzed my browsing history, it took me to a web page showing a seemingly endless array of colorful squares, each pertaining to a page it thought I might like to visit. The site also shows popular pages, determining popularity by tracking pages that lots of people visit, says Martin Stiksel, who created Lumi with fellow Last.fm cofounder Felix Miller. Both left Last.fm in 2009.\nWhile social recommendations through Facebook and Twitter are a common way to discover new content, Lumi\u2019s creators are betting that an automated recommendation service can also prove useful.\nIn the few hours I played with Lumi over several days, it did make some good suggestions based on the kinds of things I look at throughout my day (tech news, startups\u2019 websites, Facebook, Twitter and pop-culture blogs, to name a few). I checked on it several times a day and saw things such as a link to a Kickstarter campaign for a file-sharing service, a design company\u2019s neat portfolio site and a review of the new iOS Gmail app.\nOnce you\u2019ve clicked on a Lumi suggestion, it will be grayed out on your page of squares to indicate you\u2019ve already taken a look. Older suggestions seem to move down the page over time.\nIf you\u2019re interested in being a more active Lumi user, you can star pages you like, either on your Lumi profile page or out on the wider Web. Other users can follow you and see the stars that you\u2019ve made publicly viewable, and of course, you can follow other users to see pages they\u2019ve starred. You can also gather similar starred pages into groups.\nSome users might be a little nervous about having their URLs tracked, but I liked Lumi\u2019s approach. It\u2019s simple to integrate, and unlike the somewhat similar social search tool Wajam, it doesn\u2019t literally follow you around on the web, which can get annoying. And while it shares the basic premise of content discovery with StumbleUpon, I liked that it didn\u2019t rely on me to seed it with my interests or take any action on the Web to get better recommendations.\n\u201CWe don\u2019t want you to change your behavior as such,\u201D says Stiksel. \u201CWe want you to carry on doing what you\u2019re doing: browsing.\u201D\nOne thing that seemed a little odd: Lumi seemed to get both better and worse the more I used it. After a few days, I noticed it was giving me more interesting links that fit in with the kinds of things I was checking out on my own online. \nYet it was also giving me more links to tech news that I\u2019d either already read about or even written about. As the \u201Cprivate alpha\u201D designation suggests, it\u2019s still very early days for Lumi. Its creators still have much work to do, including (eventually) convincing a lot of people to use it. But given its purpose and the success of Last.fm, there\u2019s a good chance that Lumi will win fans, too. \nImage courtesy of Flickr, Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2012/12/12/lumi-web-recommendation-plug-in/?utm_medium=feed&utm_source=feedburner&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+mashable%2Ftech+%28Mashable+%C2%BB+Tech%29>