Laurence Hooper and Dan Goodman (former AOL), created Loladex, a local search application for Facebook. The two men took some of their AOL earnings and founded Loladex, which launched end of March, 2008. We added this application to Facebook and were sad to see it was focused on Washington DC; however, once added it immediately pulled up a bunch of local Arizona restaurants.
With Web 2.0 and users relying on social reviews in their decision making process, this tool is a great idea and integrated with Facebook could become quite succesful. Loladex combines local search with the recommendation and rating possibilities inherent in social networks. Loladex already has about 16 million listings. The application is able to return localized results based on recommendations and ratings made by Facebook friends. “Loladex mimics the way people think about things in the off-line world,” Goodman said.
These kind of applications from outside developers have taken advantage of the site’s open application platform. Check it out at Loladex.
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Wikipedia, the community driven encyclopedia, passed a huge milestone this week in the form of 10 million articles in over 250 languages. As explained by Emily Chang, the 10 millionth article was a biography of a 16th century English goldsmith and painter named Nicholas Hilliard, written by user named Pataki Marta.
Before you click to look at the entry, it might be good to know first that it exists in the Hungarian annex of Wikipedia. This of course shouldn’t be much of a surprise to Wikipedia fans. While English is the number one language on the site, others have quickly grown to nip at it’s heels. Some of the other big languages include German, French, Polish, Japanese, Italian, Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish, and Swedish. Marathi, Tagalog, and Cantonese are also said to be experiencing rapid growth.
Despite the site’s numerous critics for accuracy, it is obvious that people love the idea of such a resource being out there for them to access so freely and contribute so easily and openly. Can Wikipedia now double its count? We’ll just have to wait and see. Read the rest of the article at Mashable.
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