31 January 2005

How do computers know so much about us? [via]

Seeing how we all like to classify and rate movies, records, TV shows, etc., why not take advantage of it to do something with the information? It’s not that new, and I think I already read about it earlier, but it’s the first time I try: rate every movie you’ve seen and movielens gives you a list of recommendations, simply by looking through the database for people with similar tastes. So obvious, so simple, so unbiased (and I chose that one site because the interface is rather well designed, although it’s a bit slow at times).

As a bonus, you can publish a bunch of lists: here are all the movies I rated (also available in RSS format, but sorted by rating rather than date, so it’s quite useless), and here are the system’s recommendations, which tend to look good. And, if you have a social life, the site can also combine predictions for several people and recommend a title that everyone will enjoy for movie nights.