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OpenSocial: impact on recommenders

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Google and several partners recently launched OpenSocial, an open API for accessing social network information. If you haven’t read about this yet, check out the NY Times article for a primer.

Social networks aren’t the only domain where sharing information between sites is a much-requested feature. Indeed, we’ve all invested significant time in building (perhaps redundant) databases of our preferences in recommendation systems such as Netflix, Amazon, and MovieLens. Wouldn’t it be nice if those ratings would be portable? Then I could sign up for Netflix, and instantly bring my hundreds of movie ratings with me.

Of course, there are a number of issues with ratings portability, such as:

  • What is an entity, and how is it uniquely identified?  (e.g. Is the entire first season of the TV show The Wire a single "tv show entity", or several?)  How is an entity’s category/type determined?
  • How do I communicate my preferences for an entity to the system? Do I use a single 5 star scale, a set of yes/no questions, open text, or something else?
  • Why would any large company wish to share it’s ratings database? (Yes, Netflix and MovieLens have published ratings data sets, but those ratings have been anonymized)

While these are significant issues, I wonder if an open ratings API (built on a platform such as OpenSocial) would clear the path to more ubiquitous recommendations. We could allow MovieLens users to publish their ratings to OpenSocial. Myspace developers could then create a variety of social- or algorithm-driven recommendation systems based on this new source of data. If we were running MovieLens to make money, we’d probably try to build these apps ourselves, and sneak in viral features to bring more new users back to our site.

In the short-run, there are other nice benefits of OpenSocial for small-ish recommendation sites such as MovieLens. For example, could we do away with our "buddy" feature, and just allow users to import their social network from Myspace?

Max

(Note: some newer recommendation companies like Flixter and iLike are OpenSocial "launch partners").

Mechanical Turk for research

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A friend told me about an interesting use for Mechanical Turk.  He says he uses it to get research tasks accomplished that he’d otherwise have to pay hourly employees to take on.  For instance, coding documents for quality can be created as a Mechanical Turk job, and then the documents can be uploaded, and the users started off.  He says that unless you can get your hourly workers for $1/hour, MT is usually cheaper.

John 

Open Source software for pay

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I saw an article on Read/WriteWeb today about cofundus.org, a web site where people can chip in $ to get open source software they’d like developed.  The idea is that a bunch of people chip in money, and then together spec out a pieces of software.  Then programmers offer proposals for developing the software.  The funders vote on a programmer to take on the job.  The programmer the gets paid if the funders agree he’s developed the right software, which must be open source licensed.

So far the $ are pretty small, but it would be interesting to see this idea scale up …

John 

Google adjusts page rankings

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One of the interesting arms races is between google and all the services that seek to increase page rank.  (I found particularly fascinating on this page the comment from a seo ("search engine optimizer") that "Google created this market and now they try to destroy it".)  Basically, lots of people are offering to adjust pagerank scores for web sites for money.  They work in different ways, but one of the easiest is to have farms of link pages, and work hard to get other people to link to your link farm.  Then, anyone who pays to get on one of your link pages gets a nice boost in pagerank. 

It will be interesting to see how this plays out over the long term.  Has anyone seen research that describes the relative strengths and weaknesses of the two positions in this arms race?

 John

 

Economics of online communities

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Twice in the past week I’ve come across descriptions of how online communities are impacting the business world, or, is it how the business world is leveraging online communities.

First there was this interview on the BBC Worldservice of one of the authors of “Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything”, in which, among other ideas, I first heard “prosumer” defined. Prosumer was coined to refer to how some businesses now conceive of the masses as both producers and consumers. That is, expanding their conception of human resources to include the world of online collaborators.

Next was this description in the New York Times Arts section of a BP-EA collaboration. Yes, that’s energy giant British Petroleum teaming up with video game leader Electronic Arts on introducing some 21st century engergy production realities into SimCity. According to a report by Aktiendepot Vergleich, Sims players who enjoy playing games that pay real money will have to consider financial, environmental and public opinion costs of their cities’ energy production strategies. EA gets some expert consultation on the realities of the energy sector and BP gets their real-world logo on virtual wind and solar generation facilities, but what do the rest of us get? An experiment in the affect of online behavior changing real world public opinion and economic behaviors.