I sat in a talk the other day by the folks from Yahoo! Music, as they presented their process for developing their Yahoo! Music Videos Facebook application. The application allows users to browse their music video catalog, share favorites, and send dedications to friends. Beyond that, it provides music recommendations based on your profile and (more interestingly) on your friends’ profiles. More interesting still - they find that the more friends you have, the more your music recommendations begin to suck.
Ok, so “suck” is a relative term. What does it mean? My interpretation is that the larger the group is, the more likely that the least common denominator among them is…Sheryl Crow. Taking this further, a smaller network of friends, or perhaps a subnetwork of friends who you’ve deemed worthy of providing you recommendations, would work better than providing recommendations based on a mass of people.
I wrote about the increasing irrelevance of large social networks in my aptly titled post, Why Facebook Will Die. I think it’s interesting though, that as your network grows, not only does it become less relevant to you, but the things you can do with it, i.e., using it to get recommendations, becomes harder as well.
August 24th, 2007 at 1:25 pm
A real life example: go on vacation with 2 of your closest friends. Next time go with 19 of your closest “friends.” Completely different experiences.
August 24th, 2007 at 1:30 pm
hey sarah,
yeah, i suppose “suck” is a relative term. i think what it implies is that the larger your group of friends or contacts are the more homogenized tastes become. this is basically the model for why there is top 40, music that essentially satisfies the majority of people.
as a way of refinement for this, it would make sense for the person receiving the recommendations to have greater control over what’s coming to them. for example, i love you as a friend, but your obsession with barry manilow is really not improving my music experience.
another way to think about this would be to say here are some people with similar music tastes to you that you might like to meet or be influenced by. perhaps there’s an ability to adjust the similarity/obscurity of those connections to allow for discovery of new music. this might solve having larger social networks that don’t necessarily make the information presented irrelevant.
August 24th, 2007 at 3:35 pm
Alex - great analogy!
August 24th, 2007 at 3:39 pm
Jeff - Good point…I could see something that allows you to see recommendations from friends similar to you, which would be great for things like music and movies and books.