Look out, recommendation engines are hot again. In 1996 it was all about Firefly, then Amazon, followed by Netflix and now a whole new crop of players are emerging, from Attention Trust to Pandora, who's leader I saw speak at MIT a few weeks ago. Great story how they got from the Music Genome Project to Pandora.
In the dating space, we have eHarmony on one end of the spectrum (it's the algorithm, baby), to Engage (people matching people) on the other.
There is plenty of room in the middle for various recommendation systems based on favorite brands, bands and clothing. I always have friends list brands in their personal ads. As the driver of a heavily-modified Passat (watch out BMW 325 drivers!), I'm pretty sure I'm not going to want to date an Escalade driver but I would buy a Prius driver a coffee to see if we are a good fit.
PayPal co-founder Max Levchin “is using what he learned at PayPal, not to root out fraud but to create the best recommender system he can imagine, one that will cover the entire Web, pulling content of all kinds - music, movies, gadgets, blogs, news stories, cars, one-night stands, you name it - filtering it according to individual preference and delivering it to the desktop.”
If Slide is at all familiar, it's as a knockoff of Flickr, the photo-sharing site. Users upload photos, which are displayed on a running ticker or Slide Show, and subscribe to one another's feeds. But photos are just a way to get Slide users communicating, establishing relationships, Levchin explains.
The site is beginning to introduce new content into Slide Shows. It culls news feeds from around the Web and gathers real-time information from, say, eBay auctions or Match.com profiles. It drops all of this information onto user desktops and then watches to see how they react.
Pulling Match profile photos? That's going to go over well in Texas. Word is that Riya is talking to various dating sites as well. Will Slide be the first to launch photo-based matching and ask permission from dating sites later?
The idea of watching a scrolling list of products and identifying what I find appealing is somewhat nauseating. Surfing a photostream which is continually refined based on the hive mind and my preferences is much more appealing. I didn't see any Match.com import feature on Slide, perhaps this is to come in the future. For now, we'll have to keep tweaking search parameters on dating sites to find each other.
Technorati Tags: collaborative+filtering, recommendation, slide
