The growth of our network is remarkable. On July 26 this year we posted about the state of our traffic at that time:

“Since we opened our service as public beta three months ago, nearly 2,000 websites chose to install our rating and recommendation tools, generating a total of more than 500,000 pageviews per day.”

Now, less than two months later, we are happy to report that our installation base has grown to more than 3,000 websites and we serve recommendations to more than 1,200,000 web pages per day.

To learn more about our rating and recommendation tools, please visit http://spotback.com

About ten days ago, Seeking Alpha launched its new website. The new site includes a number of new additions (you can read about the new version here), including a great new story feedback and recommendation system powered by Spotback. The new recommendation system allows users to rate specific stories as interesting or not interesting and receive recommendations to additional relevant content based on their preferences. Spotback also handles Seeking Alpha’s Top Stories.

If you are interested in stock market opinions and analysis from blogs, money managers and investment newsletters as well as high-value, complementary financial content, you should check out Seeking Alpha.

Screenshot of Seeking Alpha story rating and recommendation powered by Spotback

Screenshot of Seeking Alpha top stories powered by Spotback

The first generation of our rating and recommendation tools was primarily focused in offering better content discovery inside a specific domain, increasing pageloads and visit length. As of today, Spotback releases the next generation of its tools, helping content owners to expose their content to a wider audience and drive more traffic from other sites in the Spotback Network.

Since we opened our service as public beta three months ago, nearly 2,000 websites chose to install our rating and recommendation tools, generating a total of more than 500,000 pageviews per day. Using our new tools, any content owner can now enjoy the benefits of being a part of this fast-growing network and promote their content throughout the net.

This is an example of one of the early adopters of the new Spotback widget

It the lovely blog of the great photographer “Jeff Singer Photography Blog”. As shown in the screenshot below, the widget also has a new look and feel and number of great new features.

Another new ability (not shown on the screenshot) is the full integration of the rating with the RSS streams, allowing RSS readers to rate directly from the RSS feed.

If you want to get the new widget or upgrade your blog from an earlier version, simply visit http://spotback.com/joinspotbacknet/invite and create your new widget.

That’s right boys and girls - from now on you can rate photos using the new ‘Spotback-Flickr Photo Rating’ service. Photo fans will dig it.

The new service allows you to rate any photo you find in Flickr, without having to install anything. It is so easy and effective way to give feedback to photographers and expose their photos to others.

You can rate your own pictures, your friends pictures and any other cool picture you ran into.

Your rated pictures will be saved, along with the rest of your rating in your user page at Spotback.com, as well as in the Spotback - Flickr page.

All you need to do is drag a small ‘Spotback Rater’ button to your browser toolbar and start rating!
Get the toolbar button here

When you use the toolbar button when visiting a specific photo page on Flickr, a small comments is inserted below the photo on Flickr with your rating. Clicking on this comment will allow others to rate this photo as well.

Go to Spotback - Flickr page to find to find the hot photos and personal recommendations to more photos that you should check out.

How cool is that?!

“I’m telling you, they have to die!” he looks at me and I recognize the laser beam red in his eyes.

“What’s happening, man?” I smile at him, and he shoots me down with a scowl.

“What’s happening? The Spotbacks! They have to die!”

“The Spotbacks? Who are these Spotbacks?”

“Two brothers, the Kaufmans, developed this widget to rate the net, the whole world, all the information existing within mankind.”

“Rate everything? In what way?”

“In such a way that will determine for me, for you, for all of us, what we really love!!!” he barks and his red robe flaps with his winds of rage. “They are the beginning of technology’s world takeover!”
“The beginning of the takeover?“

“Yes!”

“Then what are you so mad about, man?” I smile at him, scratching my head.

“What am I so mad about? I’m mad! I’m mad because they decided to give people the power to rank who they love more.”

“Right!” I suddenly hear a voice behind me and turn around. “Batman,” I smile, “how you doing?”

“Worried to death, just like me,” I hear another voice, and smile at Spiderman hanging above us.

“What’s gotten into the three of you?”

“What’s gotten into us???” the world suddenly shudders to the voice of the Amazing Hulk, “Spotbacks!” Batman cries, stomping his foot.

“What about them?”

“They decided to let people rank which of us is the cooler.”

“And…?”

“And?” Spiderman exclaims, “And then humanity will decide which of us is the coolest! What do you think will be left for all the rest? A piece of tights? Look, look,” he cried, pulling the clothing clinging to his body, “do you know how hot it gets?”

“Chill, guys…isn’t it a shame…to get so upset?”

“I need an Advil,” the Amazing Hulk murmurs, holding his head, “I need an Advil…”

“Chill, man, chill…” Superman signals towards him and Batman pulls out some Advil from a pack hidden somewhere on his body.

“We have to stop them,” he shakes his head, troubled, while handing the pill to the Amazing Hulk.

“Guys, why are you acting like this? What’s with you?” I laugh, “It’s the Spotbacks, Micha and Amit just developed some widget which could help humanity, and not demolish it or censor it, but quite the opposite…the opposite…” I say, swallowing my saliva in response to the Amazing Hulk’s glaring eyes.

“Who is this dumbass?” his voice suddenly trembles.

“A friend of mine,” Superman says.

“And why is he here?” Spiderman asks.

“Dunno,” Superman shrugs.

“Guys, relax, Spotback is just software that helps us find what we like and need in out lives.”

“Spotback you say?” the Amazing Hulk mutters.

“Yes,” I smile.

“Then spot this,” Spiderman calls out, and for a minute I see black.

“Why did you do that?” I yell, in response to the pain in my right eye.

“That’s our Spot Back at you, man,” the Amazing Hulk laughs, and I close me eye, thinking how black it will be during the coming month. Afterwards, I sit on the edge of the sidewalk, and look down at them, fighting, raging, plotting. I smile. I can’t help but think if a Spotback can drive crazy the four greatest superheroes the world has ever seen, what will they do to the way we use the Internet…

To be continued…

Many thanks to our friend, Itay Adam, Teachlies.net author.

We are delighted to announce a new partnership with YouLicense to provide music discovery and recommendations to an online licensing marketplace.

YouLicense, the online music licensing marketplace has chosen Spotback as its rating and recommendation platform.

YouLicense enables artists and those seeking musical content to conduct business directly without the need to deal with music companies. Through their unique search engine content is indexed and easily searchable.

The special thing about this business relationship is that Spotback have provided YouLicense tools to improve search results. The rating data is not only used to show music buyers personal recommendations and top rated content, it is also used within the search engine to achieve more accurate search results.

Maor Ezer, CEO of YouLicense:

“Implementing the Spotback technology on YouLicense has given us a competitive advantage and I am certain this will improve user experience, in the short and long term.”

If you own a website and you wish to implement our technology, please contact business relations: dana [at] Spotback [dot] com

Here’s an implementation of the rating widget in Japanese. Kudos yoichi!

This is a really great site that has recently installed the Spotback rating widget.

Drink of the week is a treasure trove of drink recipes, bar tending tips, cool drink ware and other fun tidbits.

In http://www.drinkoftheweek.com you can find a new delicious cocktail recipe every week, and by using the Spotback widget you can then rate and view other recommendations for more excellent drinks.

What’s also cool about the rating in ‘Drink of the week’ is its very unique widget design as shown bellow.

This is a great example of what can be done with the widget builder to create your on look and feel.

If you’re also interested in a special design for your widget, visit our widget gallery.

Need help? Feel free to drop us a note at feedback(at)spotback(dot)com.

Cheers!

The Spotback Team

This is an extremely useful feature that instantly connect stories that people like with other relevant stories. When hovering with your mouse over the rating widget, a list of related content will appear exposing users to additional relevant content that other users liked.

It looks like this: