My old OpenCola partners have started a new company, Dude Research, to work on the kind of predictive recommendation service we were hot for a couple years back. The product is called Dude, Check This Out!. Sadly, it doesn’t work on the Mac yet, but these are good guys and they promise to get it working on the Mac as soon as they get through the primary development phase. From the looks of it, the Dude is a very simple blogging app (WYSIWYG, drag and drop, no HTML) that forms an associative relevance network that suggests new items to Dude users.
Dude 2.0 supports the RSS and Atom XML formats for content syndication and the FOAF XML format for social networking.
They have some cool features, including some social networking stuff, send-to-a-friend, and the ability to post to an external Movable Type or Blogger blog. It works with Bookmarklets or a Toolbar in Explorer only. However, the Dudes at Dude Research want me to warn you that this is still a Beta app, so please don’t beat them up too badly if it doesn’t work perfectly. Fortunately, it’s a Web app, so as they catch bugs the app can be quickly improved without users having to download a new version. If you’re Dude enough, give it a try and send your thoughts to support@duderesearch.com.