The rec­om­men­da­tions sec­tor has a new arrival with the launch of Snoox, the online ser­vice that gath­ers advice from close friends.

Cre­ative busi­ness devel­op­ment asso­ciates, chief tech­nol­o­gy offi­cers and prod­uct man­agers will find the unique slant offered by Snoox intrigu­ing. Rather than Googling rat­ings for a prod­uct, vaca­tion or restau­rant, say, from an army of strangers, the new start­up con­fines your feed­back to your clos­est and most trust­ed friends.

As its founder Guy Poreh puts it, “We all have our go-to friends who we ask for advice in real life, which was the inspi­ra­tion behind Snoox.  You would no soon­er stand in the mid­dle of a sub­way car and ask a group of strangers for a rec­om­men­da­tion for the best Ital­ian restau­rant in Man­hat­tan, expect­ing a response that you can trust.  Instead, the most influ­en­tial rec­om­men­da­tions come from our real friends.”

LiveS­tar meets Pinterest

Snoox is, loose­ly speak­ing, a fusion between rec­om­men­da­tions ser­vices like Stamped and LiveS­tar with Pin­ter­est, plac­ing the most rel­e­vant advice on a web page. But there’s a dif­fer­ence, too.  Users are invit­ed to write rec­om­men­da­tions only for ser­vices or prod­ucts they have direct­ly and per­son­al­ly expe­ri­enced.  On join­ing Snoox, they sim­ply con­nect their Face­book accounts, where­upon the site pulls up all the pages they’ve liked to cre­ate a list of objects or places they might feel like rec­om­mend­ing to their friends.

The result is a pro­file page shim­mer­ing with live­ly con­tent, with rec­om­men­da­tions and thumb­nails grouped into “dis­plays” which resem­ble Pinterest’s boards.  The site prompts users to include a “to buy” link (a “Get it now” but­ton) if pos­si­ble but they’re equal­ly free to include links of their own and spec­i­fy whether it’s to a store, a video, or sim­ply more infor­ma­tion.  The click-to-buy links auto­mat­i­cal­ly gen­er­at­ed by Snoox inte­grate with rep­utable sites like Ama­zon, Grub­Hub and Best Buy.

The plea­sures of per­son­al recommendations

And Snoox is extra­or­di­nar­i­ly nim­ble in find­ing those images, prod­uct descrip­tions and links, a task it per­forms with impres­sive speed.  It doesn’t take that long to build live­ly pages like Restau­rants, Hotels, Food, and so on, and add bespoke rec­om­men­da­tions under each umbrella.

For the present, Snoox is avail­able on Face­book and the web only, but Poreh says that addi­tion­al plat­forms are in the pipeline.