Fuddland

About a year ago, I was praising Amazon’s “Recommendations” engine for finding me several excellent musicians, and today I was selected to be one of a hundred people chosen to preview LOVEFiLM’s own version of this idea.

Every time you rent a DVD from LOVEFiLM, you’re asked to give it a rating from 1 [unwatchable] to 7 [loved it]. It used to be out of 5, but recently they switched to out-of-7, presumably using the highly complex mathematical technique of rounding to adjust the old scores.

Now it’s become apparent what these ratings are used for: along with other factors [such as “people who rented this disc also rented these…”], a list of recommendations is generated for you to make easy selections of DVDs you might not have thought of or come across otherwise.

Somehow, the engine feels more “natural” than Amazon’s; if you choose to just add a rating to one or more of the recommendations, the list gets more refined to your tastes. If you choose the [clumsily-worded, I wonder if it’s a typo?] option “Don’t recommendation this again”, you get three choices:

1. Seen it already: rate it and it’s removed from the list.

2. Don’t like this type of thing: disc is removed and related discs are not recommended.

3. Just don’t like this one: only this disc is removed, recommendations unaffected.

See, I knew there was a reason to fastidiously rate each movie I rented. Seems like I need to do a bit of refining though: for some baffling reason it’s recommended “125 Great Everton Premiership Goals”! I clicked the “Why was this recommended?” link, which is supposed to list the discs that I’ve already rated which produced this match, but it came up with no matches — I’ve rented nothing that even mentions football. No matter though, just a quick click on option 2 of the three choices above and I shouldn’t see any more of its ilk in my list again.

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Update: It was a typo!

#1

mrtn | 2004 / 10 / 11 – 13:53

hate to be predictable, but there’s another obvious typo in your post:

“125 great everton premiership goals” - yeh, right…

(flame-proof suit on)

#2

Daisy | 2004 / 10 / 12 – 19:12

*snigger*

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