The Return Of Collaborative Filtering

from the wasn't-so-long-ago... dept

It really wasn't so long ago that FireFly was one of the hot new companies, working on a collaborative filtering engine that would tell you what kinds of books, music or movies you would like. Of course, that fad died down, when people discovered that it was a pain to input all the data such systems needed to really work well. So, now, a student in the UK has come up with an interesting system that does some collaborative filtering based on the music you actually listen to, and then helps connect you to others who like similar music online. This, of course, seems like the perfect system to work on top of a file sharing application, but, once again, the music industry is likely to see it as more of a threat than an opportunity.