

Facebook Launches Recommendation Engine - Anon84
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebook_unveils_one_of_the_historys_most_powerful.php?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+readwriteweb+%28ReadWriteWeb%29

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ben1040
_"Facebook is using some seriously magical secret sauce to figure out who your
friends might be, then what you might like based on your shared demographics,
before asking you anything more than your email, name and age. That's pretty
amazing."_

Did this part bother anyone else as much as it bothered me?

If you're not a Facebook user, then you obviously have not agreed to
Facebook's terms of use, and have not given Facebook permission to use your
info (e.g. email address).

I would have figured this would preclude them from keeping your email address
when friends hand it over and using it as a key for datamining stuff about you
even if you've never signed up for their service.

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Jun8
"None the less, I'm not sure there's ever been a platform in history that knew
so much about people, monitored publisher effectiveness so closely and made
subscription so easy for such an incredible number of people."

So he doesn't mean powerful in the sense that it's the best recommendation
algorithm, just that it has a lot of data. If having data in your domain is of
course a necessary condition in developing a good recommendation engine. But
if it were sufficient Netflix wouldn't have to shell out $1M to outsource the
task.

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c1sc0
You don't merely need a lot of data, you need the right kind of data: if e.g.
You have lots of users but only a few transactions per user to base your
predictions on you won't get very far. There are a lot more likes in
facebook's system than transactions in netflix's

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mkramlich
I like the phrase "One of [the] History's" -- it is as if recommendation
engines have existed for thousands of years! Don't they go back no more than a
decade or two?

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ryanclemson
I would expect that most Facebook users won't friend random people just
because of shared interests. The public nature of Twitter is more strongly
suited at finding people with similar interests. Suppose I want to find
somebody with an interest in the Android operating system. On twitter, I can
search for Android and see who's tweets look most intriguing.

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naner
This reads like a press release.

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marshallk
Like the part at the end where I said "it sucks this is happening under a
proprietary platform with absurd privacy policies"?

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codingthewheel
Uh... and you think that ridiculously misleading title is anything other than
a press release? The "it sucks" comment was thrown in as an afterthought.

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marshallk
How is the title misleading? I don't think it is, and neither do a bunch of
other readers who've commented, tweeted, etc.

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codingthewheel
Right.

"Facebook unveils one of history's most powerful recommendation engines"

This article is an attempt to garner eyeballs by making a loud statement full
of dramatic words ("unveil", "history", "powerful") at a time when Facebook
vs. Google is considered a hot topic. Nothing more.

This article is a supposedly impartial discussion from one of the web's
(supposedly) informed sources that _consists of nothing but value judgments_.
This article, though it rambles mightily, manages to say almost nothing about
Facebook privacy issues, nor does the author seem to be aware that the few
"recommendation engines" that exist share one thing in common: they all suck,
they don't inspire users, and nobody has figured how to change this. Including
Facebook.

So when I say it's "misleading", what I mean is that what the title promises,
the content doesn't deliver. The headline reads (no offense to the author)
like a high school newspaper editor's first attempt at a headline that
"grabs".

That's all I really meant.

[Lengthy rant edited into oblivion.]

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jaytee_clone
Actually, the future is recommendation via brain composition. Or better yet,
direct brain stimulus that makes you think anything is a good recommendation.

Facebook is the future? I hope we are a bit more imaginative and ambitious.

