Pulse, our Facebook application, quietly went live on Facebook today.

You can add it yourself by first visiting http://pul.se and installing it in your profile. What does it do? Glad you asked, actually. Pulse profiles you and your friends, develops an understanding of the things you’re liable to be interested in, and then begins to recommend things like CDs, downloadable music, and Concerts in your area.

For now it’s focused on music, but soon Pulse will be recommending everything from Movies to Books to Video Games and more. It’s 100% focused on hooking you up with what’s new and what’s happening right now, so you really will have your finger on the “pulse” (oh, pardon our schlockiness) of music (at least as it relates to you) from the moment you sign up.Pulse is a demonstration of our Relevance-focused content matching technology, which is able to match events and emerging data to profiled information with an extremely high degree of accuracy. It’s able to do this because of a complex set of interactions between our five different matching engines. We’re still training these engines for exactly the right levels of efficacy (giving you exactly what you want) and serendipity (suggesting the unexpected) and there’s no better living lab than Facebook.

We think that Pulse might represent a whole new way for the publishers of music and other entertainment media to reach out to their audiences in the online world. Recommendation Engines such as ours are not far off from mimicking the “glory days” of Radio in the 1970s and 1980s, when the music industry swung wildly back and forth and musicians from a diversity of styles and nationalities were able to find huge audiences in North America and Western Europe with comparatively little “selling”.

While it’s common to think that the music industry is just plain dead, the statistics reveal that that’s far from the truth. As Ian C. Rogers has pointed out to the industry in Aspen, though, the bloodbath that everyone has suspected will hit the music business is gathering momentum: the result is layoffs, restructurings, and significant overhead cost reduction.

These effects aren’t necessarily a bad thing. A little revolution can be a good thing from time to time. What it means, as David Byrne says, is that the music business simply needs to re-align itself around a marketing and project development model that more closely matches the new media environment created by the internet and technology in general. Their costs are declining and so, therefore, should their expenses (and their revenues). I think the timing is right to give artists and their promoters the tools to find new audiences, spread their ideas, and engage their existing base of fans meaningfully. On some level that’s what Pulse achieves.

[Note: if you’ve got time Ian Rogers’ entire article is definitely worth the read.]

We’re not *just* a Facebook or “Social Networking Applications” buzzword-compliant company, but this is a really interesting and potentially disruptive demonstration of what happens when you apply relevance-focused matching technologies on a specific, well-conceived application.

We’ll enjoy watching this tool grow and we’ll keep adding features and capabilities as we learn from your suggestions and feedback.. and in the meantime, if Gino Vanelli’s greatest hits gets recommended to you, you’ll have us to thank for it. And you’d better hope that’s a bug.