How do you look for books, new music and information? We increasingly seem to discover things via recommendation features on websites and web applications.
It’s nothing new, and I suppose most of us now see recommendation engines as standard features on websites. Ever thought about how much they shorten the buying cycle/purchase funnel?
I think recommendation engines should be plumbed into all retail websites, in many respects they must improve user experience and conversion rates.
Amazon pioneered the commercial use of collaborative filtering way back in 2000, since then things have evolved quite rapidly.
Folksonomy and self-organisation features are on every other social website and web application, enabling all of us to gain faster access to the information we require, along with associative information tagged and saved by others.
The next time you’re on your PC (or Mac) try to take note of how many recommendation engines, and folksonomy driven websites and web applications you use. You’ll be surprised.
I’m seeing some pretty cool visualisations emerging as result of developers getting creative with data extracted via API’s and Pipes, I’m looking forward to seeing more creative stuff this year.
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[...] written about collaborative filtering before, and over the last year I have been watching how Google have been slowly incorporating it into [...]