Today, the best ever social network I know, and in which is more addictive than I originally thought added a new feature called "personalized recommendations" I first was happy to hear this, but just after reading their blog entry and testing out the feature I was a little bit despointed.
Why? Let me explain this in a the clearest way I can. There's NO algorithm, and there will NEVER be any algorithm that can know what ME I like or what I hate without explicitely asking ME. Simple and very clear. diving in my recent interraction on their website, or worse, just looking at my friends activity is not "best" it's something other, somthing that I'll call "popular".
Believe me guys, popularity easily gets perversed and corrupted, by the human nature first and by the tools. Having Scoble promoting Zobzee is an example. That's why a per user profiling is the best strategy a program should adopt. Because if you respect me -the user- enough you should stop the babysitting and start asking me :)
Heck, with the users base, the means, the smart folks working on FriendFeed, why don't you guys adopt things like data portability, and apml especially?
