Comments on: Networks and tastes

By: Crooked Timber » » Social network systems

Crooked Timber » » Social network systems — Thu, 17 Mar 2005 11:21:35 +0000

[...] t, but I’d be grateful for the information from those in the know, anyway. Following one of Eszter’s posts recently , I signed up to Movielens and have been [...]

By: Tim Oren

Tim Oren — Wed, 09 Feb 2005 19:12:28 +0000

Firefly was acquired by Microsoft, back in 1995. They seem to have buried it. I wasn’t all that impressed at the time, but part of the reason was the lack of coverage of content I cared about. That was in turn due to a lack of training data from people with tastes similar to mine. All of these taste matching algorithms get ‘smarter’ if they have more diverse data from observing peoples’ behavior. Amazon now has over eight years of observations and contributions from a large customer base with incredibly diverse tastes. That’s called competitive advantage.

By: Tom Davies

Tom Davies — Tue, 08 Feb 2005 11:07:31 +0000

A few months ago, Amazon recommended the 9/11 Report to me. I assumed that this was because I’d bought Christopher Hitchens’s ‘A Long Short War’, but I pressed the ‘why did we recommend this’ link. It had been recommended because I’d bought a Warren Zevon album! He did write the only rock song I know of which mentions Saddam Hussein…

By: Peter Levine

Peter Levine — Tue, 08 Feb 2005 01:14:41 +0000

As a tool for mapping the link structure of portions of the Web, I like TouchGraph (http://www.touchgraph.com/index.html) better than orgnet, although both have irritating drawbacks.

By: Andrew Cholakian

Andrew Cholakian — Tue, 08 Feb 2005 01:14:32 +0000

There’s also the excellent http://www.whattorent.com/

By: Leonard Richardson

Leonard Richardson — Mon, 07 Feb 2005 23:11:15 +0000

As luck would have it I just released a recommendation engine for web pages which gives recommendations based on the contents of the weblogs you read and write. Since it treats a web page as a “user” who recommends links, you can use it without getting a lot of real users to give ratings first. simra, thanks for the pointer to Recommendz.

By: Brian

Brian — Mon, 07 Feb 2005 20:53:52 +0000

Des von Bladet: IIRC, firefly came out of MIT. I don’t remember being particularly impressed by it, though.

By: Simra

Simra — Mon, 07 Feb 2005 19:02:31 +0000

D’oh! Sorry for the DP.

By: Simra

Simra — Mon, 07 Feb 2005 18:48:29 +0000

A similar site is http://recommendz.com. That one is based on research by Matt Garden and Greg Dudek. Their FAQ describes a little bit of the science behind collaborative filtering. Disclaimer: Greg Dudek was my PhD supervisor. :-) R

By: Simra

Simra — Mon, 07 Feb 2005 18:47:21 +0000

By: Des von Bladet

Des von Bladet — Mon, 07 Feb 2005 15:38:59 +0000

I definitely remember a social networking service in the cool Jurassic dawn of the Interweb bubble, but Google refuses to confirm my vague memory that it was called “Firefly”. But in any case it sucked quite badly: the decisive advantage of Amazon’s implementation for me is precisely that it isn’t the feature attraction. If it’s useful, it’s a bonus; if it isn’t it’s no great loss. Even at its best, social networking loses out to a really good Amazon list or other annotated thingography, in my experience.

By: John Emerson

John Emerson — Mon, 07 Feb 2005 15:16:14 +0000

Hm, I just used “Google” to mean “search” (in Music Plasma). Talk about a violation of IP rights!

By: x

Mon, 07 Feb 2005 14:06:35 +0000

http://www.musicmobs.com/ http://www.audioscrobbler.com/ Those are based entirely on members preferences. You can find related artists, popularity lists, etc.

By: John Emerson

John Emerson — Mon, 07 Feb 2005 13:36:49 +0000

Google Mozart and you get Raffi, Sesame Street, and Music for Little People. Not kidding.

By: John Emerson

John Emerson — Mon, 07 Feb 2005 13:04:05 +0000

The Music Plasma designer was an ENORMOUS admirer of Warren Zevon.