Thanks very much for doing those side-by-side comparisons. I am not a fan of any of the bands you entered, but, to my ill-informed eye, the recommendations don't seem too bad. Which ones were off the mark?
And thanks for the heads-up on the XSS exploit. Will need to sanitise my URLs more thoroughly.
Postal Service: Indie pop; you did fine, but not better than the majors.
Eric B and Rakim: seminal NYC hip hop; guessing classic hip hop is a blind spot in your data set.
Fleetwood Mac: mainstream classic AOR; Vetiver? An indie folk band? The Beach Boys are similar only as contemporaries --- also, not a very useful recommendation, since there are 3 different Beach Boys your recommendation could be keying on, two of them execrable.
Sepultura: insider-y mainstream metal; you did fine, I guess, but not better than the majors.
In two cases your recommendations are bad, and in two cases they're just not excellent. But if any online music retailer will do this for me, why would I use your service? To listen to some of the music online?
You should consider:
* Allowing people to upload their entire iTunes library files so you can analyze them and make targeted recommendations to stuff they already own.
* Allowing people to vote on the recommendations, or doing something "social" (gag) to let people adopt recommendations or biases from tastemakers who care about this stuff.
* Link to or repurpose content from Wikipedia to give more background for the artists you're displaying.
It still seems like this app is really just 10% of what Last.fm or Pandora already does.
Thank for you the clarification on where the recommendations fell down.
I have resisted letting people upload their record collection because I want to focus on making the site work well when I don't know anything about the user.
Letting users spy on the recommendations of people they admire or feel they are similar to is in the works. Once I get enough users, I plan to have a thing that says, "Hi Jill, your taste is similar to Bill. Would you like to be updated on his recommendations?"
I already pull in the band descriptions from Wikipedia.
Thanks again for the detailed feedback - it's really useful.
Thanks very much for doing those side-by-side comparisons. I am not a fan of any of the bands you entered, but, to my ill-informed eye, the recommendations don't seem too bad. Which ones were off the mark?
And thanks for the heads-up on the XSS exploit. Will need to sanitise my URLs more thoroughly.
Thanks very much for your feedback.