Aditya Kothadiya’s Blog

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Suggestion for Suggestica!

August 11th, 2006


Rajesh Setty and Vijay co-founded their new venture – Suggestica a few days back. I am impressed with the innovative concept and equally neat implementation.

What it is?
Suggestica is a collection of recommendations from the trusted authorities on which books you should read in different areas. As of now, Suggestica targets only on book recommendations.

Why do we need it?
I persoanlly love reading and I keep asking my friends what they are reading and what is worth next reading. As per the statistics given on their website, there is a 93% chance that you might pick up a wrong book to read. You are investing your time and money while reading, but if you pick the wrong book, your investement is wasted.

To solve this dilemma of reader, suggestica is trying to answer this question -”How do you find a good book to read to take care of your current and future concerns?”

The prime idea is to filter out the noise of thousands of books and prepare a concised inventory of best books. These best books are decided by the trusted authorities who are well known personalities in the respective fields.

Suggestion to Suggestica:

Situation: As per their website,
We are continuously adding to the list of Trusted Authorities featured on the site.

Now if they try to add more numbers of Trusted Authorities, then they will get more recommendations of books, and thus now reader has more numbers of options to select the book from.

Problem: Now again with increasing number of options for a reader to choose from, I think again there will be more noise. And again reader will land up in the same old dilemma “How do I find a good book from these all recommended books?”

Suggestion: Many times all readers don’t know who are the trusted authorities are and how great they are. So deciding between whose recommendations you should follow can be a tricky situation. So I think Suggestica can implement “Rate the Trusted Authorities” feature.

If I read a book recommended by some XYZ trusted authority, and I really find his suggestion fully worth, then I should be able to support XYZ’s recommendation by rating him 5 stars. Similarly if I find that XYZ’s suggestion is not that worth then I should be able to express it by rating him 2 stars.

Solution: This way Suggestica can add different layers of filters and more noise will get reduced over the period of time. Now readers can first look for the recommendations from the top rated trusted authorities and this will help them to narrow down their search.

Afterall, many head many minds. If some individual authority likes something, then that does not necessarily mean that all readers should also like it. But the probability is high if large numbers of readers are supporting any individual’s recommendation then you also like it.

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  • Rajesh Setty

    Thanks Aditya.

    All are good comments. It is in our roadmap to ensure that while “trying to increase the ‘signal to noise’ ratio” we don’t end up contributing to create the same problem at a different level.

    Our goal is to help people – save TIME and save MONEY to find the good stuff.

    More update in the upcoming weeks.

    Cheers,
    Raj

  • Lalit Lohia

    Nice Blog Aditya.

    One more thing that can be done is that for every book please mention what kind of book it is or what kind of person will like it.

    e.g. English August is a nice book. But a person who takes life very seriously or who believes in hard work won’t appreciate it. You can write

    Book Type: Sarcastic, slightly philosophical and appealing to 16-36 years of age group.

    I hope I am able to make my point through.

  • Rajesh Setty

    Thanks Lalit.

    You should see every book tagged very soon. Good point. Thank you.

    Best,
    Raj