Most of us have a handful of trusted people we look to when we need a recommendation – like a new band to check out, a good book to read, or a worthy film to put in our Netflix queue. And we like telling others when we make new discoveries of our own.

Tippify is a new Freebase app that makes it easier to share useful recommendations with others and to keep track of things that have been recommended to you.

Using Tippify is easy. To send a recommendation, just select a category and type in the name of the thing you’re recommending. You can also choose to add a short comment:

When you’re done, hit “Recommend” and your Tippify followers will see it in their streams. You can even connect it to Twitter (and via Twitter, to Facebook) to share your recs with your friends outside of Tippify.

Unlike free text updates, Tippify updates make use of the structured data in Freebase. This means that they are:

• Richer. Because Tippify uses Freebase Suggest, it automatically adds images and other useful metadata to your recommendations.
• Clickable. Each update links to a custom topic page where your friends can go to learn more about the thing you’re recommending.
• Filterable. Looking for a specific type of rec? You can filter your stream to view just music, book, or movie recommendations.
• Connected. Since everyone is using the same Freebase identifiers, you can easily see all of the people who have recommended a particular item.

Tippify also archives your recommendations, creating a nice gallery that you can share with others:

To start receiving recommendations, just find some people who you think have good taste and start following them. You can browse existing users under the “Find People” tab and invite your friends to join via email or Facebook. From that point on, you’ll get a constant stream of new recommendations – on your Tippify home page or via RSS.

We built Tippify because we wanted a service like this, but also to showcase how you can use Freebase data in a more social context. When you link the graph of topics in Freebase to the social graph, you can start to do some really cool things!

Best of all, Tippify was built using Acre, so anyone can reuse the code to add basic social functions (e.g., following, inviting via Facebook, pushing to Twitter) to their own Freebase apps. You can even log in with your existing Freebase account using our new Freebase ID login service.

There is a lot more we’d like to do with Tippify in the coming months, but we’re excited to get it out there and start collecting feedback. Please take a look, share it with your friends, and let us know what you think!