Pocket has announced Recommendations, a new feature which is available on its website and Android and iOS apps. As the name suggests, Recommendations provides content suggestions based on your reading habits and what you save in your Pocket.
Pocket is one of the most popular, if not the most popular, ‘read it later’ services on the web. Previously named ‘Read it later’, Pocket was the re-branding which made it popular to all users.
With Pocket 6.0 for Android, iPhone, iPad and the web, users can train Recommendations to improve what they are shown by saving the right content ( articles or videos ). The more users save, the better content recommendations user will get. However, in case there is something that is not accurately recommended, users can also remove them from Recommendations.
Pocket claims that instead of dictating the popular content by page views or the number of likes/retweets, such as on Twitter and Facebook, they are using a unique ‘human understanding’ of what is the best content to surface to users via Recommendations. The content will not only be ‘fresh’ but it will be based on what is best. An important point highlighted by Pocket is that great content does not have an expiration date but with the focus on real time and what’s new, the good content gets pushed down and buried to never be discovered again. Recommendations will bring that content back through relevancy of what you and other Pocket users save the most.
Pocket is in a unique position where it does not depend on any particular social network or their ‘graph’ to hand pick the good content. It does not need access to the likes and favs of social networks to work well. All it needs is the number of saves through its various easy to use apps and extensions across smartphones, browser and desktop to determine what to recommend to its users.
If you have not signed up to Pocket yet, now is a good time to give it a try.
