Here are my notes from the session:
Beyond Search: Social and Personal Ways of Finding Information
April 11, 2006 – PARC, Palo Alto – Neil Hunt, Netflix; David Porter, Live365; Tom Conrad, Pandora; Kevin Rose, Digg; Joshua Schachter, del.icio.us; Rashmi Sinha, Moderator
Rashmi gave a really nice intro, using del.icio.us tags! (see links below, I will be sure to steal this sometime soon). She also presented a 3-way theoretical framework for discussing the "beyond search space"
- Input from individual (implicit, explicit, level of expertise, what is the motivation?, has to be really simple)
- How to keep them motivated?- Input across people (trust, transparency)
- Present info to users
Speakers plus Rashmi's del.icio.us intros
- Neil Hunt – Netflix
- David Porter – live365
- Tom Conrad – Pandora
- Joshua Schacter – del.icio.us
- Kevin Rose – digg
Neil Hunt – NetFlix- http://www.netflix.com
– A Brit! Yay.
– Online/postal movie rental
– 60000 titles, all but p0rn
– 50 iterations and tests on the ratings stars
– Reached 1 billion ratings a month ago
– 100 movies a year arrive with large marketing budget, 4-500 movies a month have no budget
– Challenge: how do you hook in a brand new movie? Need 1000 users at least
– Challenge: balancing nicheness versus popularity (stepping down the long tail)
– Focus on the Long Tail (Chris Anderson), demand creation (Blockbuster is demand fulfillment)
– 3 types of connections
– 1. "Official" Recommendations on your homepage
– 2. decision support: ratings from other users
– 3. friends: u2u – watch the same movies which your friends watched
– spam: not an issue, as people have to pay 20/month! also filter on curve (flag if too many ratings)
2. David Porter – Live365 – http://live365.com
– largest independent internet radio network – Question: are people using Pandora now? (-;
– 5th after MS, Yahoo, AOL, ClearChannel
– web1.0 and proud of it!
– anyone can use it to create their own radio station based on the MP3s they have downloaded
– Charge broadcasters to broadcast (with ads/without ads)
– Sell audio ads, placed within stream
– 2 types of recommendation
– 1. DJs (10000 of them)
– 2. recommendations based on similar presets
– Find stations via playlist search, browse genre, favorites
– last.fm: When asked about last.fm, admits that a user (-;
3. Tom Conrad – Pandora (Music Genome Project) – http://pandora.com
–
– Music Genome Project -> 40 musicians analyze fundamental nature of music ("unfundable approach!")
– Uses objective classification method – musicological basis, breathiness of vociaal, timbre, rhythm
– 4 distinct genomes: pop/country (200 attributes), hiphop/electronica (400 attributes), jazz (400 attributes), latin
– Early focus was recommender system -> licensed by AOL, Warner
– Then moved onto mass market – focus on low overhead, people who don't want to spend sunny saturday afternoons
– last.fm: Supporting a kid who is doing pandora/last.fm mashup
– problem with last.fm: all roads lead to radiohead
4. Joshua Schacter – del.icio.us – http://del.icio.us
– how do you spell delicious? y a h o o
– a way to remember bookmarks
– previous project: single-user, 2001
– 15000 readers for just my daily bookmarks
– todo: check out <bundled tags>
– browses by URL constructs
– http://del.icio.us/popular/x
– http://del.icio.us/tags/x
5. Kevin Rose – digg – http://digg.com
– stories submitted by the masses
– but unlike slashdot, rated by masses
– digg = individual vote for a story, and also bookmarked in your profile -> rss feed
– can see friends who dug story, my friends' activities (recommendations)
– http://digg.com/diggall/cloud
– http://digg.com/spy – see digg's live submissions
– Can bury diggs if you don't agree
– The dream: add recommendations -> find me other people into debian linux and oolong tea
===
Discussion
Input from individual
– GIGO? Garbage in, garbage out (-> Wisdom of Crowds, guessing number of beans in a jar)
– Interesting vs. True
– Danger of false stories, follow-up refutations of bad stories on digg (e.g. Oracle buying JBoss)
– implicit, explicit
– level of expertise
– what is the motivation?
– has to be really easy, make as implicit as possible
– Approaches
pandora – focus on expert
netflix – seeded by expert
digg/del.icio.us – masses
– producer/consumer split
Input across people
– aspects of trust
– transparency: where ratings come from?
– different facets: rating, rater, trust ratings, rating the raters
– easy in ebay: trust is transaction-based, aggregate
– del.icio.us not convinced that trust is important
Exploitation
1. People design movies to match expectations
2. DoJ subpoena …
Most services seem to issue feeds via RSS
Present info to users
– Too many services? We'll all get confused, but kids master it all
Business Models
– digg: serve enough pages you can survive off ads, same with myspace
– netflix: massive benefits of database, cf. huge broadvast tv ad (very inefficient)
– pandora: advertising, subscriptions, purchasing tx, hard to make money in music
– live365: cost penny/hour to play in terms of royalty per user, $10 CPM
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I stumbled across your blog today and am looking forward to reading the past posts!
This post resonated so loudly with me I have though similar things more than once.