From: Dale Thorn <dthorn@gte.net>
Date: Thu, 12 Dec 1996 21:55:56 -0800 (PST)
To: Alexander Chislenko <alexc@firefly.net>
Subject: Re: WEB: Yahoo/Firefly Website recommendation service
In-Reply-To: <3.0.32.19961212115032.00cf51b0@pop.firefly.net>
Message-ID: <32B06FFA.D7B@gte.net>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


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.