Movie recommendations, what in the heck are they thinking...
So I've been using NetFlix for a few months now and they give me the options to rate movies from a scale of 1 to 5 or as I would put it within 5 degrees of freedom since they don't allow partial or floating point recommendations which could give me up to 10 degrees for half stars or 50 degrees for tenths of a star. I'm up to rating about 320 movies right now, which isn't bad, but this is only a partial subset of all the movies that I've seen. Already the system starts to break down. Let me enumerate:
1. It doesn't recommend any more action movies, even though there are lots of either haven't rated and/or haven't seen. At least recommend something.
2. It doesn't generally recommend movies based on actors. This is just stupid. If I did a simple IMDB cross section of the movies I've rated I'd get thousands of hits of movies that I'd probably like based on the actors in them.
3. It doesn't really notice the trends I set up of renting movies. I try to stay away from movies that were created pre 1995 or so because they lack quality in most cases. There are some exceptions, but probably 90% of the movies I've watched in the last 6 months have been 2000 or later.
This is just a subset of gripes. It seems to me that many sites now-a-days are trying to make suggestions based on things I've purchased, but all of the systems are dumber than a ton of bricks. Amazon is one instance where I simply get gobs of unrelated recommendations because it keeps using things people “Also bought” as a subset. Don't they realize most guys buying a computer book for themselves have to get some chick novel for their wives to quantify the $50 hit on the credit card (note this is a simple example, and I'm not trying to be sexist in any way).
Well, I'm done with all of the rating systems that seem to be popping up. In the case of the NetFlix, I'm using a custom application that pulls the rated movies out of NetFlix and holds them to cross-index with the IMDB flat files. I could probably just use the IMDB website (and I think they have webservices as well), to do my cross-indexing, but I like the speed and flexibility of looking up a ton of information about every movie ever created without needing web access. As for Amazon, I might just have to write something to consume their site as well and put everything into a nice WinForms GUI so I can rate both movies and books. A quick plug-in with Hollywood.com to get the skinny on the latest movies and I think I'll have a winner.
Well, just a personal gripe, that turns into a personalized recommendations application. Wonder how many other people have wasted a good day on something similar. If you have let me know. I'm curious what types of inconveniences convince people to write code simply to augment their own personal satisfaction of the world around them.