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It’s hard to keep up with all the newly released movies and music these days, but a lightweight social network with a whole lot of smarts under the hood says it can now offer you personalized recommendations of new releases that suit your very particular interests. GetGlue is a semantic web browser plug-in that has, for years, been smart enough to recognize when you’re looking at the same musical group across different websites, be that on Last.fm, MySpace or elsewhere. The service recently added a stream of recommendations of music, movies, books, magazines, wikipedia articles and other things you might like. How can it tell what you’ll like when something is brand new, though? Today the service has launched a “new releases” section, where human editors rush to classify brand-new media. Then the semantic robots can serve it up to the right users, still hot out of the oven. It’s pretty cool. Sponsor GetGlue founder Alex Iskold says he’s learned a lesson similar to what formerly automated tech news aggregator Techmeme has learned: algorithms and user generated content can take you a long way, but there comes a point when it’s good to hire some dedicated editors. The service asks you to like or unlike a wide variety of things. It then uses that feedback to build a taste profile to compare against things it finds put into its database and find the stuff it thinks you’ll like. That’s harder with new releases, though. “When something new is coming out, we don’t know what it’s like, so you need to have proffessionals tag it,” Iskold told us. “We have two editors on staff who look across the spectrum of new releases each week. They draw the similarities between things in a deep way – the tagging system we use will be unvieled later. We use really eclectic tags to characterize what kind of zombie or vampire movie something is. We also use tags brought in from other systems and our users find cool new things really fast.” The end result is a nicely displayed stream of big icons for personally recommended newly released movies, music and books. You think you’re hip to your scene now? Wait until you’ve got a network of contacts, a semantic robot and real human editors all working together to bring you the freshest content in your weird little niche. To be honest, I’ve been testing it out today by switching from new album recommendations on Glue over to Apple’s Lala.com , where it’s easy to listen to full albums once for free. That’s not the way Glue wants you to use it, but that’s the way I like to use it so far. The Down Side It’s an incredible system, when it works. GetGlue knows though that there are some challenges in this kind of game though. First, it’s not easy to present this kind of flow of data to users without either overwhelming them or boring them. Many of GetGlue’s latest changes are focused on making the user experience more pleasant: bigger images, collapsed bundles of shared items, etc. Can the service find a balance between giving you strong-enough recommendations on one hand and regularly offering up new recommendations on the other? In past versions of the product, I’ve received too few recommendations to keep me coming back. Hopefully new releases will scratch that itch. Iskold also says that after “liking” only 15 musical artists, I’m actually much less active than most of the 400,000 registered users of the service. Personally, I’m more drawn to the Wikipedia recommendations on GetGlue than anything else. The new releases in music might be roughly in the same sub-genres I usually listen to, but that doesn’t mean they are any good. Finally, all this “liking” obviously begs the Facebook question. Writing as an ostensible Facebook competitor about that giant network’s radical innovations unveiled last week, Iskold wrote the following in a widely-read article here at ReadWriteWeb about Facebook’s Open Graph: “Time will tell where we land, but my gut is that positive things will come out of this. If nothing else, let’s give Facebook credit for innovation and re-imagination the Web.” Today he emphasized in speaking with me that Facebook is new to what it’s just begun to do, but his company has been doing it for years. There’s no guarantee that Facebook will get it right, he said. It’s hard to say for sure that GetGlue has got it right, either. But as a work in progress, it’s pretty darned good and today’s new additions are very interesting. Discuss

Google and 45 other organizations have sent a public letter to President Barack Obama calling for federal support for technology and education that would give consumers access to information about their energy consumption and give companies the ability to build applications on top of that information. Google, AT&T, General Electric, Intel, The Climate Group and the Natural Resources Defense Council and others will hold an event tomorrow titled ” Power in Numbers: Unleashing Innovation in Home Energy Use .” Sponsor “By giving people the ability to monitor and manage their energy consumption, for instance, via their computers, phones or other devices,” the group wrote in its letter to the President, “we can unleash the forces of innovation in homes and businesses.” Substantial challenges stand in the way of widespread smart-grid innovation. We highlighted a write-up by green tech reporter Katie Fehrenbacher last year that discussed the foot dragging going on in the world of local utility providers. ( Why Smart Grids Could Be Slow to Beat Web 2.0 ) Fehrenbacher argued that utility companies don’t get it, are afraid of the costs, and are thus unlikely to offer the kind of “real time” data delivery that could serve as a foundation for eye-opening innovation like we’ve seen from the networked world of the Internet. Fehrenbacher wrote last year. Many people (myself included) have painted a picture of how the consumer piece of the smart grid could develop into a real-time, two-way communication network that looks a lot like the Internet. In that world, consumers would be able to see variable pricing change in real time, while smart meters and energy management devices read and visualize energy consumption data every second, leading to changes in consumer behavior. The ultimate vision of that landscape is that real-time energy data unleashes innovations and applications that we haven’t yet thought of, which will deliver substantial behavior changes. Well, that’s the outcome for which entrepreneurs and innovators are hoping. The reality is that the consumer piece of the smart grid will look very different for many years to come. Perhaps a large coalition of organizations can prompt meaningful government support that will engage with these and other obstacles to energy data innovation. Discuss

When people talk about managing communities in this new online world, one name is mentioned more often and with more respect than any other: Heather Champ of Flickr . Today Champ announced that after nearly 5 years and more than 4 billion photos uploaded, she is leaving Flickr to start a community management consultancy called Fertile Medium . Flickr went from a Canadian social gaming company in 2004 to a photo sharing service to a Yahoo! acquisition in 2005. 3 years ago next month, Yahoo! shut down its giant Yahoo! Photos service and moved everyone over to Flickr instead. Sponsor Champ put her work in perspective on a blog post that included the following: “How do you take a community the size of small town to the size of a nation? How do you grow a site that began in one region and make it truly global by adding languages and localizing in what’s now 25 countries? How do you apply a content filtering system to a living site to ensure that members can be respectful of one another but still share the greatest variety of content? These are some of the big hairy challenges.” Just as most of Yahoo! has, Flickr has seen budget challenges as well. A substantial number of the Flickr team members were laid off one year ago this month . Facebook has long been larger and now sees almost an entire Flickr’s-worth of photos (3 billion) uploaded to that social network every month. As Facebook pushes its users more and more public with their content, it would be well served by paying attention to what Champ did at Flickr. The succinct and oft-learned from community guidelines at Flickr are among the work that Champ says she has been most proud of. Those challenges were experienced at Flickr in some of the earliest days of what’s now called “social media” and Champ helped forge best practices that have served as a foundation for communities all over the web ever since. Photo by Beth Kanter. Discuss

It’s no longer a secret that China’s online gaming industry is booming, and growth is set to continue with companies such as Shanda Games , Netease and The9 leading the way. In 2009, China’s online gaming industry earned nearly $4 billion, growing 39.5% from 2008 . Each day, millions of high school students trying to forget the pressures of college entrance exams and young adults discontent with their jobs flock to Internet cafes to play online role-playing games. They’re part of China’s 384 million netizens , and they sit in front of rows of computers in dimly lighted smoke-filled rooms for upwards of eight hours at a time, living in virtual worlds to escape the pressures of contemporary Chinese life. Sponsor Guest author Joel Backaler writes The China Observer , an award-winning blog focused on Chinese technology trends and consumer culture. His writing has appeared in and he has been quoted by the Wall Street Journal China Journal, BusinessWeek, and Seeking Alpha. Joel is a Mandarin-speaking former Fulbright Fellow who has worked and lived in Taipei, Beijing and Singapore with Frontier Strategy Group. Follow Joel on Twitter . But beyond the Internet cafés, social games have emerged as a convenient alternative for students and workers alike to gain a sense of release and revitalize themselves before tackling the next assignment of the day in their everyday lives. They take breaks to tend to their garden on 5 Minutes’ Happy Farm (Kaixin Nongchang) farming game, or steal their friend’s car parking space on Kaixin001 ’s Qiang Chewei. RenRenWang (formerly Xiaonei), Kaixin001 and Tencent’s QQ Xiaoyou are leading SNS portals, and are the go-to sites to access China’s most popular gaming applications. The widespread popularity of social games is not solely limited to white collar workers in their 20s – social gaming appeals to China’s youth, their middle-aged parents, and even elderly retirees looking to share a common hobby with relatives spread throughout the country. The social gaming landscape is developing at an extremely rapid pace, with competition growing increasingly fierce by the day. What Makes a ‘Winning’ Social Game in China? The most popular social games in China are simple to play and appeal to a broad audience. These winning games take place in easily recognizable environments such as kitchens, gardens and parking lots, and only require a few clicks of a mouse to have a shared social gaming experience with your friends. Happy Farm is the most popular Chinese social game to date. Created by Shanghai-based social game developer 5 Minutes, the game is quite similar to Zynga’s FarmVille. Players own a virtual farm where they plant fruits and vegetables. They purchase supplies like seeds, pesticide and fertilizer at a virtual market. While part of the game is about growing and protecting your own harvest, the real fun is sneaking into your friends’ farms to steal their vegetables. The game is easy to learn, taps into traditional Chinese farming culture and is extremely addictive – appealing to the young, the old and everyone in between. Which Social Game Developers in China You Should Know About? 5 Minutes (五分钟) , CEO: Shaofei Gao 5 Minutes was founded in 2006 by three college students. In November 2008 it released Happy Farm (below) and achieved immediate success, partnering with leading SNS portals, and receiving a one-time multi-million Chinese RMB payment from Tencent for full rights to the game on its QQZone platform. At the end of 2009, 5 Minutes received $3.5 million in venture capital funding from Draper Fisher Jurvetson . Rekoo (热酷) , CEO: Yong Liu Founded in 2008, Rekoo is one of China’s leading social gaming developers with several domestic partners: RenRenWang, 51.com, Alibaba, Baidu and Sohu . Rekoo also has strategic overseas partnerships with Facebook, MIXI, Myspace and Cyworld. Rekoo’s most successful games are Sunshine Ranch and Animal Paradise. IsMole (奇矩互动) , CEO: Edwin Chen Founded in 2008, IsMole started off as a market-leading game developer for social networks, but quickly lost its competitive edge to others like 5 Minutes and Rekoo. IsMole’s is best known for its Xingfu Chufang (below) cooking social game that has been released in five different languages across seven countries on thirteen different SNS platforms. Kingnet Games (恺英网络) , CEO: Yue Wang Founded in 2008, Kingnet first released Tower of Babel in April 2009, and within three months had over 500,000 users. In July 2009 Kingnet received venture capital investment from KPCB China. In October 2009, Kingnet had over 2 million users on Facebook. Challenges Facing Social Game Developers Social game development in China has entered a period of tremendous growth, but it has yet to fully mature. Companies compete fiercely with varying levels of experience and capital to create the next winning game. Two major challenges have arisen as a result of this environment. 1. Lack of Innovation: There is an overall lack of diversity in gaming context. Copying is rampant amongst competitors – once a social game is proven successful, competitors begin producing their own versions. For example, there are numerous games that take place in farms such as 5 Minutes’ Happy Farm: Rekoo’s Sunshine Ranch, Kaixin001’s Kaixin Huayuan, and Zhiming Xingtong’s Happy Farmer. 2. Lack of Continuous Improvement: There is a tendency for developers to stop investing in the game after it is on the SNS platform. In some cases this is due to lack of sufficient capital, while others stop because they’re trying to make multiple games to obtain a quick return on investment. This lack of continuous improvement creates short game lifecycles, as user experience ultimately suffers, and a short period of success finally leads to replacement by the next popular game. To win in this environment over the long-term, it is unavoidable that operational costs will continue to rise, as developers must continuously improve the quality and uniqueness of their games to fend off domestic competition and maintain their market share. This Is Only The Beginning Despite these challenges, there is tremendous growth potential in social gaming in China. The first years of growth in China’s social game development have served as a foundation. The next few years will see a convergence between social games and 3G mobile gaming. The social game user base that is predominantly comprised of students and young white-collar workers will continue to grow with even more older players joining the crowd. While Chinese companies will continue to face a competitive market at home, the best companies will develop unique winning strategies domestically and localize them to win success overseas. In a recent interview, 5 Minute’s CEO Shaofei Gao was quoted as saying : “China’s netizens are becoming more mature, they are gradually becoming more accustomed to paying for gaming, and social gaming market opportunities will definitely continue to increase in the future.” Discuss

CA completed its acquisition of 3Tera today in what seems like a successive line of announcements about CA’s push into the cloud as an infrastructure service provider. In fact, the 3Tera announcement feels like yesterday’s news in wake of the most recent announcement that CA is acquiring Nimsoft, the California based startup. Overall, CA has been a buying spree, acquiring a total of five companies in the cloud world. In addition to 3Tera and Nimsoft, CA has also purchased Cassatt, NetQos and Oblicore. CA realizes that the halycon days of being an IT vendor are as solid as vaporous cloud. The real future is in adapting to the enterprise and its efforts to shed IT assets and move its applications to a cloud environment. Sponsor The 3Tera and Nimsoft acquisitions exemplify this move. 3Tera 3Tera’s AppLogic is a cloud management platform to move applications to a public or private cloud. It’s widely viewed that AppLogic gives CA the ability to provide service providers with a set of management tools. It also gives 3Tera the capability to sell to enterprise customers. Some of the challenges concern the scope of AppLogic’s virtualization capabilities. It is limited currently to the Xen platform. This could prove an issue as most companies have standardized on VMware. CA says it will broaden AppLogic’s virtualization capabilities to VMware ESX and Microsoft HyperV. Nimsoft Nimsoft is a cloud management platform and benchmarking service. Cloud computing sounds fine and good but how it compares to on-premise applications can be a challenge to quantify. Nimsoft provides a unified monitoring environment for Google Apps, Salesforce.com, Amazon Web Services and Rackspace. Nimsoft also provides benchmarking tools that actually test and compare the differences, giving quantified results about the actual performance. What’s Next? As stated on GigaOm , CA will hold its annual CA World event in May. We will learn more what is in store at that time. But we can expect to see its cloud strategy unfold a bit more, including SaaS services with upgrades at a pace that we see with SaaS providers. The cloud management market is getting quite competitive but we have to keep in mind that customers are still a bit wary about cloud computing. And when companies are wary it means long decision making processes. And that means a longer sales cycle for the likes of companies like CA. Discuss