TryThis Offers Innovative Approach To Recommendations

Up until recently, I have found it difficult to use the internet to my advantage when I need help finding the best brand of a product to buy or to get some help finding, say, the best places to eat on a budget.

For this purpose, I have found Twitter and Pownce quite useful, once you build up enough followers, and also Yahoo! Answers, which has been wildly popular while Google's offering faded away.

TryThis is a new service that provides a unique way to both request and give recommendations, all in a neat and clean interface. Its founders have envisioned it to be "a place where people can give and receive recommendations from other people about books, movies, music, gadgets, restaurants, venues and even other people." From my point of view as a web user, this service, given more time, could become a great web destination.

TryThis uses the widely-cloned Digg ranking method for the recommendations that users provide, and also offers users the ability to just post comments about the topic at hand if they do not have any advice. All of this information is presented in an uncluttered, easy-to-read format.

After the sign-up process, users are instructed to build their group of interests, which I found to be one of the most interesting features of the site. During this phase, users are presented with a grid on the right side of the screen, and a search box on the left. Using search, users can find products that they are interested in, represented by thumbnail images. Any of these images can then be dragged over to the "Interests" grid, where it will save that product as one of the user's interests.

The process of putting up a request for recommendations is very simple and straightforward. Users are also required to provide tags for each post, which is a useful addition when trying to search the site.

When making a suggestion, users are provided with the same "drag feature" from the Interests section to recommend a product. The search is conducted in the same way, and users must simply drag the desired product image to the small box below. During this process (unlike the Interests section) search results can be narrowed by store, with choices available including Amazon, Buy.com, CompUSA, PC Mall and others.

"We're working to add a lot of new features including categorization of requests and suggestions and to kick off the site, a point system to award prizes to users with good recommendations. We're still working out the details but hope to introduce the contest soon," said Shoaib Anwar, co-founder of TryThis.

One small issue I have discovered within the service occurs after actions are made like submitting profile changes or adding a friend. Each time one of these actions is performed, a small dialog box pops up in the center of the screen, as shown in the screenshot below.

Each time this box shows up, though, it essentially freezes me from taking any other action (no clicking other links) until the box disappears, which takes longer than 30 seconds. I am not sure if this flaw is occuring with others, but if so, this would definitely turn away a big portion of impatient web users and should be fixed soon.

Other than that, I was very intrigued by what TryThis offers. Although it currently focuses on products and shopping, I can see that the service is trying to expand beyond this and offer much more, such as opinions on local hot spots around the nation. It is only a month old, and still has some growing to do, but TryThis is worth a look.