Posts: 11,553 Location: San Francisco
Wed 26 Jul, 2006 1:53 pm
A brand-new Book Suggestion feature has been added that picks personalized suggestions by comparing the items on your reading list and your wish list to the activity of other myArmoury.com members and customers of Amazon.com.
The calculations are fairly complex and the results are often surprising. I found many books suggested to me that I would have never found.
For each suggestion, the system shows the reasoning behind why each selection was made. Connections to other books already on your lists are shown. Many titles jumped out that I had not really considered until the connections were shown to me.
Only items that you don't already own are suggested to you. You can choose to hide items already found on your wish list or have them listed in case you'd like to get an idea of just how on-target your wish list items really are. Any item suggested can be removed from further suggestions simply by marking it as excluded.
The more items your lists contain, the more suggestions you get and the better suited they are to you and your personal tastes. I have many items on my lists (over 240), and this gives me over 800 book suggestions!
How does this work?
The system uses
social networking technology to compare data found in other member's lists sharing common titles to you. The reading and wish lists define what is of interest to each member. By looking at these lists as a
whole, we start to get a look into each person's tastes and are able to contrast them with our own. Commonalities manifest themselves into recommendations. We can grade these commonalities based on how "separated" they are from us and let this grade weigh how relevant any resulting suggestions may be.
The data is based on people and their interests. Because of the eclectic interests of others, the results aren't always going to be spot-on to your tastes. Or are they? This is the interesting part: Social networking allows us to broaden our interests by exposing us to the complexities of others of like-mind.