Re: WEB: Yahoo/Firefly Website recommendation service
Chris Hind (chind@juno.com)
Mon, 09 Dec 1996 22:58:46 -0800
> Firefly Network Inc. has just launched a public beta of our website
>recommendation service on My Yahoo! This service is the result of a
>partnership between Yahoo! Inc. and Firefly Network, Inc. in application
>of Automated Collaborative Filtering (ACF) technology to the Web.
> It allows users to find Websites that they are most likely to find of
>interest, to find like-minded people, and otherwise help the user navigate
>the vast domain of sites and people in an intelligent and personalized way.
>The recommendation system draws its intelligence from users' ratings.
>At this point, the database is still small, so you may not get
>recommendations in all categories and the ones you get may not be optimal.
>However, as the system collects more ratings and learns more about your
>personal preferences, you will notice better and better performance.
>Your ratings will be included into the initial rating database and will
>help shape experience of many people who will come to the system after you,
>so please be considerate rating sites.
Aha! I told you loss of privacy is inevitable! Cameras in public places,
search tools based on collective intelligence creating databases of
concentrated information on a user allowing the creation of a highly
accurate psychological profile. This technology is good but we must make a
few sacrifices. I've signed up. Check it out yerself. It'll have news
stories, webpages, ads, etc aimed directly at you eventually and
information will be so much that your looking for and interested in it will
be irresistable to take your eyes off the webpage for fear of missing
something. The ultimate web addiction! I'll love watching it happen! All
they need to do is how to add a plugin or activex program into your browser
so that it will track webpages you view and increase the database info to
allow the searchtool to pull up more interesting information.