Can The Internet Really Recommend Books And Movies?
from the how-good-is-it? dept
For many years companies have been trying to come up with better systems to help recommend what books, music, and movies you might like to buy. In the early days of the "commercial" internet there were collaborative filtering systems like FireFly, which never really got very far. More recently, firms have started to use human recommenders to augment automated suggestions. So, despite all the failed attempts at good recommendation engines, some people are still working on the perfect recommendation system. One researcher made a very interesting point, that recommendations from computerized systems are often for something "unexpected" by the users - but recommendations from friends are often more "reminders" for things that people already thought they wanted. This is something I hadn't heard before, but which makes sense. So, the real question, then, is which is more valuable? Sometimes I'm glad when a friend "reminds" me to buy a book I've been thinking about for a while, since it gives me another push to make sure I actually buy it. If a computerized system comes up with a recommendation out of the blue, I may not be at all interested (unless something about it really catches my eye). As the article points out, if this unknown recommendation doesn't make any sense - or is clearly a "sales pitch" it's just going to turn off shoppers from being interested.
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I was working with a company a few years ago that had software that made reccomendations based on an analysis of the music you liked. Not song title and artist, but beats per minute, tone, bass, innstumentation, etc. The demo was very impressive, but I was never 100% convinved that the demo was not fixed. They were just starting up in late 2000 - and never could land the VC they needed to commericalize the software.
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Recommendation Systems
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Re: Recommendation Systems
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Re: Recommendation Systems
For a much better example of a recommender system, take a look at http://www.movielens.org/
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nice job
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