Re: WEB: Yahoo/Firefly Website recommendation service

At 06:52 PM 12/11/96 -0800, Dale Thorn wrote:
>Alexander Chislenko wrote:
>>   Firefly Network Inc. has just launched a public beta of our website
>> recommendation service on My Yahoo!  This service is the result of a
>> partnership between Yahoo! Inc. and Firefly Network, Inc. in application
>> of Automated Collaborative Filtering (ACF) technology to the Web.
>>   It allows users to find interesting websites interest and like-minded
>> people, and otherwise help the user navigate the vast domain of sites
>> and people in an intelligent and personalized way.
>
>I tried Firefly.  What a waste.  Unless your tastes in most things
>entertainment-wise are pretty mundane (music=Pearl Jam, Prince,
>other mainstream drek), they won't be able to find a match at all,
>no matter how much information you give them!
>

  You are talking about our first site, with music and movie recommendations.
I personally rated not-at-all-mainstream movies by Kurosawa and Tarkovsky and
got a similar advice.  Though, I agree, the recommendations are not perfect.
Partly, because the most of the audience are mainstream.  Partly, because
the site <www.ffly.com> runs the first version of our ACF software server.
The website recommendation uses the feature-guided ACF server that I hoped
would solve most of the algorithmic problems we encountered in the music
and movie domains.  I'd be interested to know what you think of it.

 Also: I created a group profile, name: cypherpunk, password: group
that people on this list might use together as a common interest view,
or a joint bookmark list. 


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Alexander Chislenko <sasha1@netcom.com>     www.lucifer.com/~sasha/home.html
Firefly Network, Inc.: <alexc@firefly.net>  www.ffly.com  617-234-5452
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Alexander Chislenko wrote:
> At 06:52 PM 12/11/96 -0800, Dale Thorn wrote:
> >Alexander Chislenko wrote:
> >>   Firefly Network Inc. has just launched a public beta of our website
> >> recommendation service on My Yahoo!  This service is the result of a
> >> partnership between Yahoo! Inc. and Firefly Network, Inc. in application
> >> of Automated Collaborative Filtering (ACF) technology to the Web.[snip]
> The website recommendation uses the feature-guided ACF server that I hoped
> would solve most of the algorithmic problems we encountered in the music
> and movie domains.  I'd be interested to know what you think of it.

Thanks for the reply.  My experience with Firefly #1 has shown that the
people who would most need the service (or need it at all) are the least
likely to benefit from it, which is why I think it's a bad thing, wasting
a lot of valuable time hand-entering data, only to find it doesn't
correlate the more interesting (non-mainstream) data.

I'll try the website service, but my up-front instinct is that it won't
be much better unless the software is a *whole lot* better.