How di I get recommendations?

I'm fairly new to the site (I joined three days ago) and I'm just wondering how I get to see recommendations? Are they automated or just provided by other users? If the latter I'm not sure that I can see this site working for me.

You're the person who abandoned goodreads right? This site is really not a good alternative. You can still list your books but the community here is less book oriented. Recommendations are based solely on what other users have liked. I like this site but for other uses. It's no where near goodreads.

Listal doesn't have an integrated recommendation system. The closet thing Listal has is... you can go to another members profile page look at the "Recommended" column and click on 'view' for any one of categories listed, movies, tv, music, books, games or dvds. This will bring up all the items a person has rated three stars or more.

I do actually use that feature quite often because I just get bored with my own taste in music and films and can always find something in one of my friends ratings that sounds interesting.

You can click on the tab "My Stuff" then books and see:
"Similar members based on Book ratings"
This can give you a good place to start looking for people with similar tastes.

The one feature that I do find "very" handy is that after adding a few friends when you visit an items page it will show you the average rating of an item based on your friends... which in my case is always quite different then the rating of Listal as a whole. I find that I trust the average sore of my friends then any other rating system.... unless the item has only one vote.

As far as always seeing a 'compatibility' score listed on a members profile page. That only happens after you have added them as a friend.

Hope that helps

Thanks for the comments.

For some reason the "Similar members" thing still isn't working for me (games and films - Tom is working on setting up a GoodReads book importer so I'm playing around with the others for the time being while I explore the site). The other ways to add friends I've tried (MSN Live and LinkedIn import) aren't working for me either. Not sure if I'm doing something wrong or it just takes time to function properly?

Odd that the compatibility score only works after adding as a friend - I was assuming it was set up to see if you had taste in common and establish common ground which seems a little redundant if they're already your friend! Sounds like I still have a lot to learn about this site...

Ha, of course... the "Similar members" isn't going to work until you have rated enough items and then I believe a system update happens(???). A rather regular system update to update those compatibility scores.

Ya, it is odd that it doesn't work when you aren't friends but you can (or will be able to once your ratings are imported) be able to search for all the members with a compatibility score similar to yours:

www.listal.com/members/view/1/?sortby=percentage-movies-desc

Ah, and as far as the add friends features I know those have been buggy for some time. There is a big push for a full update of Listal in the next few weeks that should cover most of the bugs and add more features.

Someone might have a better idea of why those aren't working then I do...

Thanks Jaytoast,

I figured that there'd be some kind of minimum threshold. Hopefully I passed it a few days ago so I'll just have to sit back and wait for the system update to happen.

Nice to know that there are some updates planned. It's obvious to me, joining now with experience from GoodReads and from Grouvee (as well as looking in some detail at other similar social networks in the last couple of weeks), that Listal has a lot of potential that can be made manifest with the addition of new features. Lists are fun for some people but so much more can be done with the data here than that.