They know what you're thinking!

November 20, 2006 11:15 AM

Sites that know what you want before you do The web is transforming from a paradigm of self-orchestrated searching to a world in which your shopping cart is full before you login.
posted by AVandalay (43 comments total)

Services that recommend products based on your deliberate participation: good.

Systems that track surfers across the web with sneaky tricks and synthesize based on entries about people in corporate databases, without consent: bad.

The article mixes these up, and regarding the underlying tech, rambles vaguely based on one or the other or both. Both are already being tried of course.
posted by jam_pony at 11:35 AM on November 20, 2006

Loves: "Borat," The New Pornographers
Would love: A week in South Padre Island

Good lord. Like I'd be caught dead at a college-aged Texas destination.
posted by mathowie at 11:37 AM on November 20, 2006

The sites that are best at this are porn sites. I go to one, and there they are: pictures of naked women.

It's like they're reading my mind or something.
posted by mr_crash_davis at 11:44 AM on November 20, 2006 [2 favorites]

Ooh, more cyberhubris. I'd buy this a little more if my experiences with them didn't prove (to me) at least that they're usually waaaay off.
posted by jonmc at 12:10 PM on November 20, 2006

And if you don't subscribe to this sort of materialism - if you don't define yourself by the clothes on your back or the neighborhood you live in - well, that's just another brand of expression.

I know what all the marketing people are thinking right now too, "Oh, you know what Bill's doing, he's going for that anti-marketing dollar. That's a good market, he's very smart."
posted by imperium at 12:12 PM on November 20, 2006

Think they could do my work for me while I Web surf, too, so I could pay for all the nifty stuff they put in my shopping cart?
posted by twsf at 12:14 PM on November 20, 2006

I thought it was trying to recommend which movies to illegally download: what torrent? I was disappointed to find out the real site was one "r" short.
posted by GuyZero at 12:15 PM on November 20, 2006

I'm a self-facilitating media node.
posted by slimepuppy at 12:17 PM on November 20, 2006

I tried out slide - I don't really get it? It seems like an annoying flickr-bot.
posted by AVandalay at 12:29 PM on November 20, 2006

Well, it's always fun finding out about new projects at work from a an article that shows up on MetaFilter.
posted by mkb at 12:31 PM on November 20, 2006

Thanks GuyZero, I had the same idea. whattorent.com turned out to be the first recommendation site I've seen that does not require installing software or anything beyond a standard browser. Its recommendations were better than others have reported with other sites too - though not as good as I could do reading reviews in the local weekly.
posted by jam_pony at 12:37 PM on November 20, 2006

I don't know about this. From my experience, the average person (myself included) needs to spend less time out of their cultural comfort zone, not more.
posted by Iridic at 12:41 PM on November 20, 2006

Hasn't the Internet always known what you are thinking?
posted by JWright at 1:20 PM on November 20, 2006

whattorent.com

My first thought: they misspelled torrent.
posted by smackfu at 1:22 PM on November 20, 2006

Oops, I didn't read too good and repeated what was already said.
posted by smackfu at 1:22 PM on November 20, 2006

"If a girl says she likes 'The Big Lebowski,' instantly, I think 'stoner.' " That's Matthew Kuhlke speaking. We're sitting at a table full of grilled meat and jug sodas on a late-summer weeknight in midtown Atlanta. "She hangs out with a bunch of guys. She dates them a little bit, but she really just likes the attention"...The pair of unattached, hormonal twentysomethings also have a knack for turning conversations toward dating. "If all a girl likes are romantic comedies," Geitgey adds, "I'd be worried that she's going to be co-dependent, emotionally needy."

That's quite a spectacle of passive-aggressive misogyny right there. Get it? Girls are stupid, one-dimensional and predictable, not like these sophisticated man-child hipsters who dress and talk like they just got kicked out of some pop-punk band.

I bet you all can't wait until google sells your search histories and surfing habits to these guys, so they can tell you what you should like.
posted by Pastabagel at 1:39 PM on November 20, 2006

Well, everyone is stupid and one-predictable up to a certain limit, wouldn't you agree? The power of the stereotype. These two probably just pay more attention to girls, being guys.
posted by Laugh_track at 2:13 PM on November 20, 2006

Thanks JWright for those. The card trick I am autistic enough to see through, but how the psychic jar could be sure that Rangers won't win the league I do not know. I believe it, though.
posted by imperium at 2:35 PM on November 20, 2006

Oops, I didn't read too good and repeated what was already said.

You should rent Groundhog Day.
posted by LionIndex at 2:55 PM on November 20, 2006

Oops, I didn't read too good and repeated what was already said.

You should rent Twelve Monkeys.
posted by furtive at 3:06 PM on November 20, 2006

Oops, I didn't read too good and repeated what was already said.

You should rent Sophie's Choice.
posted by BobFrapples at 3:59 PM on November 20, 2006

Stoner? Me?! Hah!
posted by deborah at 4:47 PM on November 20, 2006

Oops, I didn't read too good and repeated what was already said.

You should rent Run Lola Run.
posted by wander at 5:26 PM on November 20, 2006

So I tried this out at lunchtime, and just now I had my fourteen-year-old daughter try it.

It suggested almost exactly the same movies.

So I had my wife try it out.

Same deal.

"Best In Show" came up first, if anyone else wants to corroborate.
posted by mr_crash_davis at 5:49 PM on November 20, 2006

What Mo Nickels said about news site registrations back in `04 applies here too.
posted by brownpau at 5:53 PM on November 20, 2006

wander: good pun.

whattorent.com wants to know if I know of the actors "Cristopher Walken" and "John C. Reilley", the directors "Martin Scorcese".

And I got Best in Show, too. Sheesh. MovieLens was a lot better. But Amazon Recommendations are hugely more convenient.
posted by dhartung at 7:04 PM on November 20, 2006

Best In Show!
posted by cillit bang at 7:35 PM on November 20, 2006

I've yet to see any of these stupid things even come CLOSE.
posted by HTuttle at 8:08 PM on November 20, 2006

Best in Fucking Show! Which I hadn't heard of, and now that I have I never want to hear of again. Back to the drawing board, methinks.
posted by MetaMonkey at 10:46 PM on November 20, 2006

I love when these recommendation sites make some deep suggestion like "You liked Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, you might like Kill Bill." You think?
posted by smackfu at 10:59 PM on November 20, 2006

I actually thought whattorent was kind of cool and gave decent suggestions. Nothing earth-shattering, but the idea behind it is actually kind of neat, and an example of a simple web project that a small team would build, and probably get a lot of people to use. I love that the web enables that, even if most people find it useless.
posted by cell divide at 11:22 PM on November 20, 2006

But do you guys like Best in Show?
posted by AVandalay at 11:28 PM on November 20, 2006

I also got Best in Show and Run Lola Run! Either our movie preferences are all similar, or the script is completely bogus.
posted by jam_pony at 12:53 AM on November 21, 2006

"If you like X and Y, you'll also like this other piece of crap that we can't sell no matter how hard we try!"
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 2:02 AM on November 21, 2006

I got Best in Show too (though fair enough, I would quite like to see it). There are a couple of weird questions there - I wonder what they are picking up by asking how long it takes you to fall asleep. And the free-text thing about describing your first love - wonder what words they are expecting and how they analyse them.
posted by paduasoy at 3:14 AM on November 21, 2006

The 20 questions they ask you up front are interesting. Who is responsible for your problems with your family, you or your family? And what's wrong with my neon green fanny pack?

My suggestions were not surprising, and thankfully Best In Show was nowhere in sight.

Meh.
posted by intermod at 5:23 AM on November 21, 2006

Oh yeah, re first love ... my guess is that they're just using the AMOUNT of text that you type in their algorithm. Sort of a measure of how chatty you are about emotional topics. My answer: "no way".
posted by intermod at 5:27 AM on November 21, 2006

I'm sort of surprised that Kuhlke and Geitgey started whattorent instead of some match.com or eharmony deal with matching criteria based on the Nick Hornby theory of contemporary mate selection: "What you like is more important that what you are like." That is, you can cope with a partner or friend whose core personality traits are intolerable, but somebody who has read The Bridges of Madison County five times and loves Forrest Gump? Complete dealbreaker.
posted by FelliniBlank at 8:24 AM on November 21, 2006

Reminds me of one of the first book recommendation engines from back in the early 90's. It was largely used by sci-fi fans. You'd rate all the books you'd ever read and then it would recommend Bridge of Birds by Barry Hughart.

(Of course that's because everyone either loves Bridge of Birds or hasn't read it yet.)
posted by straight at 10:56 AM on November 21, 2006

Loves: "Borat," The New Pornographers
Would love: A week in South Padre Island

Good lord. Like I'd be caught dead at a college-aged Texas destination.

Matt, *all* the new pornographers get started in South Padre.
posted by spiderwire at 4:35 PM on November 21, 2006

I just finished up a course on recommender systems and one of the most interesting concepts was the work by John Canny. He proposed a peer-to-peer recommender system that allows users to keep their recommendations private. It would also allow users to bring their preference data with them to other sites (assuming the sites supported the protocol). Of course, there's still no incentive for Amazon or whoever to allow their users to transfer their preference data to a new site.
posted by formless at 5:46 PM on November 21, 2006

Good point, intermod, thanks for that.
posted by paduasoy at 1:21 AM on November 22, 2006

Best in Show.

For the love of God.
posted by flippant at 1:33 AM on November 22, 2006