

Recommendations engine DirectedEdge opens up to developers - drm237
http://venturebeat.com/2010/01/06/recommendations-engine-directededge-opens-up-to-developers/

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mattyb
<http://developer.directededge.com/article/Main_Page>

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jacquesm
Really nice to seem directed edge is 'language agnostic' and has provided a
lot of pre-cooked interfaces for their API. PHP, Ruby, Python and Java ready
to go.

It wouldn't be a big deal for people competent enough to use the API in the
first place to cook something up but it will definitely help speed up adoption
and cut down on debugging time.

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paraschopra
It is definitely a big deal to write scalable, fast and a good recommendation
engine. Item level collaborative filtering is easy to write - but anything
beyond that will require significant effort.

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jacquesm
> It is definitely a big deal to write scalable, fast and a good
> recommendation engine.

I know, I've invested $30K US in to a dutch company that does this for one
special interest field. It took them quite a bit of time to get it working
perfectly. One very big reason why I'm so impressed with Directed Edge. And
why I think they'll make it big.

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paraschopra
Yup, providing easy to use API for developers to do recommendations can be a
breakthrough. But I believe DirectedEdge has a ton of sales job to do in terms
of convincing developers to take it up. They would need case studies and
whitepapers where they demonstrate how plugging in their engine increased
revenues by X% and engagement by Y and what ROI can they expect.

Nothing sells like numbers!

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wheels
Just for clarification, we've of course been open to developers in the past,
what's new here is that we've created a free developer's plan:

<http://www.directededge.com/signup-developer.html>

And of course all of the stuff about Shopify integration, which we're really
excited about:

[http://apps.shopify.com/shopify_applications/e7d74dd9b5d86c9...](http://apps.shopify.com/shopify_applications/e7d74dd9b5d86c9cd9478738abf621bb)

More on that here (which I just posted separately, since that's mostly a
separate story):

[http://blog.directededge.com/2010/01/06/directed-edge-
shopif...](http://blog.directededge.com/2010/01/06/directed-edge-shopify-
easy/)

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dualogy
Really awesome stuff and I can't wait to start playing with it. Minor tiny bug
report for that second link. Maybe it's just my Safari but where it says:

"Price $9.00 USD per month* Website Directed Edge ExpressRex"

\-- the link is broken, it starts with <http://> 3x before the domain name.

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wheels
Grml, yeah, that's a Shopify bug that I already mentioned to them. Every time
you edit the template it adds another <http://> in front of the URL, so they
pile up if you forget to remove them with every edit. Just edited it again to
remove that.

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xal
Such a dumb bug, It's fixed now. Sorry about that.

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hussong
No worries and thanks for the quick fix!

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ggchappell
What I'd like to see is sites like HN using tools like this. So that rather
than see some kind of popular consensus about what makes a "good" posting, I
see (or have the option of seeing) the kind of thing that _I_ want to see.

EDIT: And if done right, it could render questions like this one irrelevant:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1035206>

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zitterbewegung
I was thinking of making a clone of hn to do this it wouldn't be that
difficult. Possibly a patch to hn.

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ggchappell
Do it, definitely.

About "wouldn't be that difficult": no, not given a good and appropriate
recommendation engine. However, is there one? For example, in context, we're
talking about DirectedEdge. It seems to be aimed primarily at product
recommendations, not link recommendations. And I'm not sure these are really
even the same problem.

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zitterbewegung
According to my reading of the documentation I think the recommendation engine
operates on the data set that you specify regardless of the content. It
operates on link graphs and group recommendations not the data itself.
Basically, the data that is represented is invariant. The operations it does
is like a group based recommendation service.

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vaksel
I think you guys should have links to some of your customers on your sales
page, so that new customers can see how this actually works on other
sites(without having to visualize how they'd implement it on their own site)

Something like "________ is using DirectedEdge to recommend _____, "after
installing DirectedEdge our sales went up 15%!!!omgWTFBBQ!" - CEO of ______

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tdoggette
I have an idea that I've been planning. It's got a lot of little pieces, and
one by one, I've discovered that someone else is already making them. It's
pretty great living in the future.

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abossy
Congrats guys! Very cool!

I'd like to sign up for a trial, but I have to provide my credit card
information first. That's awfully annoying. Is there any chance of removing
that requirement?

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hussong
I'm afraid there isn't, but the card is only authorized upon signup though and
you will only be billed after 30 days.

You could also sign-up for a non-commercial developer plan, Adam. It doesn't
require cc info: <http://www.directededge.com/signup-developer.html>

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patrickmclaren
Just a quick, unrelated question wheels...

How many of you are there at DirectedEdge? I read that the article said
'cofounder' so I assume there is at least one other?

Great work btw!

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wheels
[http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=3893767&id=1388630...](http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=3893767&id=138863041240)

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wallflower
Like how your logo implies a complex network is not just a 2D graph, it has a
3rd intangible dimension.

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hussong
Thanks, we are in fact very happy with our logo and how it all came together:
<http://blog.directededge.com/2009/08/10/the-logo-story/>

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momoro
Who owns data that companies expose to directededge?

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momoro
On second thought, this may be a non-issue, since a huge dataset that is just
product0-29389283923 and customer0-29389238923 is probably not that useful
without product names.

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hussong
That's right, while the product info may be in the clear, we do not collect
personally identifiable information from our customers' end users.

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modoc
Awesome news! Congrats Scott!

