BusinessWeek recently published an article on 8 Tech Trends for 2006. Interestingly, a trend seems to be Yahoo!’s Social Circle - essentially, how Yahoo! is gobbling up social search players (Delicious, Flickr, and possibly YouTube) and adding their information to beef up their web search service.

I totally agree with Y!’s vision - software, bots, and algorithms can only do so much. The main advantage of web crawlers is that it scales easily (it’s easier to add machines than people). However, it doesn’t understand folksonomy (e.g. culture) and, because of this, is limited. So there it is - the second wave of search driven mainly by participation from users.

As I read through this article, this line stood out:

“Someone seeking “Mexican restaurants,” for instance, would arguably be better served by results reflecting preferences of people in the same neighborhood.”

Wow - this is exactly what we’re doing with Rrove! Using the “Wisdom of Crowds” and returning localized results (e.g. recommendations) that help individuals. Reading this article makes me more confident that we’re building something that’s useful to people. I think the trick is to get the users that will make Rrove work.

Today is a special day for us - we’re officially in beta! In other words, we have everthing stable (Yey!). It’s been lots of work engineering work in the last couple of months, but Atomu managed to hack at it.

Rrove saves your locations for you - this is what we do best. Add our Rrove buttons to your bookmarks toolbar and head to your favorite map service (we support Google Maps, Y! Maps, MapQuest, and MSN Maps). After doing a location search or getting driving directions, hit the ‘Rrove This’ button to save it to your account.

That’s it; you’re done! If you need to track back the places you’ve visited, simply hit the ‘My Rrove’ button. You’ll be taken to your account immediately.

Remember: while we are humming smoothly right now, we might experience some outages here and there. Please bear with us. And if you have any suggestions and recommendation, send us an email through feedback@Rrove.com!

Over the holidays, we’ve been hammering out more slick features for Rrove and we’re glad to let you know that we’re almost ready to launch a beta service. We’d like to thank you again for trying out our service, and sending suggestions our way.

Our front page - www.rrove.com - is live and visible to everyone. In fact, anyone can start register and start using Rrove right now! We’ve kept design to a minimum, explaining the more important messages of saving locations and discovering new places.

Here’s a short-list of cool new things you can do on Rrove.

a) Search: Yup, its running. We’ve got some 1500+ locations in our database (more to come!), and you can easily find these great SF Bay Area spots using the search bar on the top page. You can also click on ‘Tags’ to see the type of places that are in Rrove.

b) Manage Locations: We have ‘edit’ and ‘delete’ running so you can manage the information you’ve put into your locations. Each location also has its own page that summarizes all the reviews made by our users.

c) My Community: Add members you know to your community list and keep track of the interesting places they’ve been to. Use this to get recommendations on restaurants or to find free wifi spots.

That’s just some of the things we’ve been doing. Please keep using Rrove, and start inviting trusted friends to sign-up for the service. Remember, you can always send suggestions and comments via feedback@rrove.com. Thanks!

Remember - you’ve got to have the Rrove buttons to use the service. You can add them to your browser through this link.