Have you tried MyLikes? It’s a generic social based recommendation service, where you can “like” virtually anything (e.g. a hotel you’d like to check out or a personal finance service) and share those likes with your friends.

I have to admit when I signed up when it first launched that I was intrigued but very skeptical. After playing around with it for a few times, I forgot about it and didn’t become a very active user aside from the occasional email notifications when someone I knew had “liked” something. But overall I wasn’t that impressed.

Now Bindu and Arvind have made some interesting additions to MyLikes, and I think they’ve stumbled upon an interesting model: you can get paid for recommending things to your friends. Clearly most people won’t make a ton of money by doing this, but there are some influential individuals out there who could do well with MyLikes, if they play things well. And I think a lot of companies could benefit as well, by seeding the eco-system with suggested “likes” and then have people tell their friends about it if they are interested. Assuming a perfect world, this is probably one of the strongest form of advertising one can find: a referral from a friend.

But that’s assuming a perfect world, and unfortunately it never is. I don’t know all the details of MyLikes’ approach, but I am sure there will be challenges related to spam and general honesty of the sponsored recommendations. How MyLikes deals with spam and ensures that there are incentives to keep the recommendations honest and legit will probably be a major factor in the company’s success. I wish Bindu and Arvind all the best in their exciting new venture!

[btw, given that MyLikes sponsors people to recommend stuff, including MyLikes, you might wonder whether this is just a sponsored blog entry so I can make a few cents, and I think that'd be a fair, paranoid observation :) and that's why I've decided to not include any referral links to MyLikes in this blog entry, just direct links - this is just me talking honestly about a product I think has some interesting potential - or is that perhaps defeating the whole purpose of MyLikes? I probably should have included a referral link... ;) ]

- Gummi