CNET covers a “stealth startup” about to launch in beta that reportedly is personalized and mines the “social graph” for recommendations and suggestions:
At a high level, Mechanical Zoo is building an application–rather than a destination site–that will help people tap into the knowledge of their social circle to find information, such as what movie to see or where to go out on a Friday night. The company is not ready to publicly preview or talk about its technology, but it currently has at least 100 “alpha” users testing the service. According to [ex-Googler Max] Ventilla, it will be a Yahoo Answers-type product, with more built-in intelligence about your personal tastes.
My write up is at SEL.
It appears to be seeking to address the problem of social network fragmentation, among other issues. Any recommendations component about places to go, things to do, etc. makes it at least partly local. Yahoo Answers, for its part, has lots of local information that isn’t well aggregated and presented.
Who knows what Mechanical Zoo will turn out to be in fact; but from the description it’s quite intriguing. Loladex is trying to do something similar on a somewhat smaller scale in Facebook, rolling out to other networks later.
Screenwerk 
May 12, 2008 at 6:23 pm
[…] there may be a new generation of sites (e.g., Mechanical Zoo) that try and do a “next generation” of recommendations […]