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Usability expert, Jakob Nielsen has finally reviewed the iPad and offered his perspective of the magical tablet’s usability.

Although he immediately acknowledges that “from an interaction design perspective, an iPad user interface shouldn’t be a scaled-up iPhone UI,” Nielsen compares its functionality to the iPhone and talks about what focus groups are saying.

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Perspectives on iPad Usability: No Need for Scaled-up iPhone

Google’s Gmail Labshas just rolled out a useful, but mildly creepy feature that gives you suggestions on who you should e-mail based on previous conversations. So, if you’ve had threads going with a group of people, it will recommend some of those folks once you’ve added at least two addresses in the recipients field. Best part is, they don’t even have to be in a group of contacts you’ve created in Gmail’s contacts manager.

I got this to work to an almost uncanny level. It handles things like family members without a hitch, but where it gets useful is in pulling up people you’ve recently been corresponding with and giving you a one-click link that adds them to the message. Short of organizing these people to a group (in which you may need to add or delete someone on a per-message basis), or doing a reply-all on an old message, this is a really fast way to get another thread started with the same group.

Now all Gmail needs is a quick way to take these contacts and add them to a sending group without leaving the message, something that can only be done in Gmail’s contact manager.

Gmail can now figure out if you're trying to start up another conversation thread with people you've recently been talking to, saving you some time on starting a new message thread, or simply using a reply all on an old one.

(Credit: Google)

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Gmail now knows who you want to e-mail

There aren’t many new companies launching at this year’s Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, which runs Tuesday through Friday. One of the few that are is Lunch.com, which strives to get a little more juice out of user-generated publishing.

Here’s the premise of Lunch: You can review anything you want, from a TV show to a restaurant to a food product to a household appliance. I guess it aims to be, sort of, a Wikipedia for opinions. Founder J.R. Johnson, who started building the site after he sold previous creations VirtualTourist.com and OneTime.com to Expedia, said that Lunch started filling up its private beta by reaching out to frequent Amazon reviewers and received a very positive response.

You’re also encouraged to network with other members and filter reviews through its “Similarity Network” function, an algorithm for finding like-minded users and matching them to one another. To ramp up Lunch’s assessment of your preferences, you can play “speed-rating” games called Exhilarate, which are structured much like Netflix’s recommendation feature.

Quite honestly, I have a hard time seeing people turn to a general reviews site when there are already well-established sites for reviews of businesses, books, movies, and the lot–not to mention a plethora of “social shopping” sites for consumer products. I feel like Lunch could’ve gained a lot more traction if it had made its debut two or three years ago, when user-generated content was a lot more noteworthy. But maybe that’s just me.

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Lunch.com brings yet another reviews site to the table

I like b-sides is a new service from the maker of the now-defunct DiggSuggest. The idea is simple: you go to the Web site and upload the metadata from your iTunes library (in an XML file), and the site tells you songs that you might like, based on the bands it knows you do.

I tried this out with a small library of about 4GB and it gave me a good sampling of tracks. All of them come from Amazon’s MP3 store, and can be previewed in a small player that sits on the side. There are also links that will take you to each song’s download page, giving i like b-sides affiliate credit in the process.

The tool’s secret sauce is in a small feature off to the side that calls out “cool tracks you have and are probably ignoring.” These are tracks deemed popular that simply have low play counts. This same section also tells you how much of your library has independent artists, and how many songs you’ve bothered to rate. I’d love to see both of these go a little deeper.

While there’s no built-in social element with friends or following, you can share the tool’s recommendations with others. Each library gets a permalink to do this, and you or your friends can come back and “shuffle” to bring in new results (you can try this here). The bigger library you have, the more diverse of a selection you’ll get, so revisiting the site as you acquire new music will get you even more recommendations.

Related: Mufin lets you discover new music with science

Once you've uploaded your iTunes library information, the tool will sort through it and give you recommendations of less popular tracks it thinks you might dig.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

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‘I like b-sides’ recommends music you’re ignoring

I stumbled upon a useful site earlier today that’s worth sharing. Called SimilarWeb, this small Firefox (and soon Internet Explorer) add-on sits on the side of your browser and pulls up sites that are similar to the one you’re currently on.

It works remarkably well–at least with major sites. For example, visiting YouTube brings up a long list of other video hosts. The same went for social news sites like Digg, Reddit, and Delicious. You can scroll through these and open them up in new tabs, or pick from one of the tags SimilarWeb believes to be related to that page. This will pull up an entirely new list of places it thinks you should visit.

What makes the service shine is that users can re-arrange the lists and submit new sites that are not yet in SimilarWeb’s index. There are thumbs up and down buttons which can raise or lower a site’s standing on the list. Down-voting any site will actually remove it from the list. As a result, if users continue to vote the list gets more accurate.

SimilarWeb tells you sites that are like the one you're on.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

There is a notable downside to using this extension: your browsing performance will take a hit. For some reason it needs to load its own results before it loads the actual page, which in my case meant waiting an extra few seconds when visiting a new site. That might be a deal killer for some, although it can easily be avoided by learning the keyboard shortcut that dismisses it from running in the sidebar. You can also pull up the results from a drop down menu next to your browser’s address bar.

SimilarWeb would make a good companion for the now toolbar-free StumbleUpon, which actually learns from your browsing habits to give you pages it thinks you’ll like. Combined with this you’d get another avenue of exploration.

Here’s an explanatory video from the site’s about page. Worth noting is that you don’t need to have your volume on.

SimilarWeb 3 from Similar on Vimeo.

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SimilarWeb shows you sites like the one you’re on