Comments on: Why Gravity’s Interest Graph Effort is Un-Interesting

By: Christopher

Christopher — Mon, 06 Dec 2010 10:00:20 +0000

The problem you are seeing is prevalent in most systems that utilize your “interest graph”, that is they don’t go beyond bag-of-word models. There’s much more that needs (and is) being done to sniff out your “actual interest graph” vs. “an interest graph based on a bunch of words”.

Christopher. :)

By: Michael Larsen

Michael Larsen — Tue, 30 Nov 2010 13:38:27 +0000

A new startup in the “interest” space is http://miio.com .

There its users EXPLICITLY indicate their interests.

Miio provides a search tool that lets you search and find other members and groups with similar interests:

http://miio.com/b#description

By: Schilder

Schilder — Fri, 26 Nov 2010 10:53:11 +0000

Agreed! I use the internet to find things I don´t already know about. New things!

By: @tkanet

@tkanet — Sat, 20 Nov 2010 18:17:11 +0000

What if the best way to get users true interests dynamically within the right context…is just to get them tell it directly and explicitly !

Twitter is a form of personalized web…iI explicitly follow people of interest and at the moment they start to spam me …i just unfollow. That is dynamic.

Search engines use explicitly input keywords to define your interest…without even knowing users address, age, and all sort of big data used previously by marketers.

I mean “big data” is probably the best answer to this problem. And even it was…over 90% of people interests are not share online but in their heads.

Just a service that directly triggers my needs in very specific areas (not all), very subtly ….instead of mining it from external sources.

By: Maganbhai Bharawad

Maganbhai Bharawad — Sat, 20 Nov 2010 16:42:43 +0000

|| The idea of an interest graph is something that was initially championed by Hunch, which instead of doing natural-language processing, decided to start with a combination of machine learning and statistical learning. This sentence is as vague as it can be. Anyone who deals with web content or information streams these days performs what is called statistical natural language processing which includes machine learning which is statistical predominantly in the post-Chomskyian era.

By: Alicia

Alicia — Fri, 19 Nov 2010 19:11:35 +0000

“a personalized web experience”

I don’t WANT a personalized web experience. I come to the internet to learn about other things not to stay in my cozy cocoon. I actually don’t know anybody who wants a ‘personalized experience’ following them all over the web and I work in tech (software developer since 1977, own tech business with highly tech engineering customers, worked on data presentation and user interfaces since the 70s). I mix with techs and have tech-aware kids (they grew up with computers and geeks) who have tech-aware friends. The kids are tuned out. It’s all ‘so what’. Sometimes I feel this place is an echo chamber.

By: Verkehrsspiegel

Verkehrsspiegel — Fri, 19 Nov 2010 11:56:52 +0000

Great! I´ve been waiting for years for someone who tells me what I am interested in… ;-)

By: av

av — Fri, 19 Nov 2010 07:25:59 +0000

Hi Om:

With Path & this post, you are back to writing the incisive blog that has always made GigaOm compelling. As other readers said, its not whether you are going to be proved wrong. Its that you are putting a clear, logical critique of an idea.

I disagree with your simplistic list though. The scale of data is no more a problem because of Hadoop, AWS and other big data infrastructure. But a unique algorithm – a la PageRank – is the problem. Somewhere, there is a PhD student who will start a thesis, abandon the PhD and build the next TwitterRank. PageRank exploited a seemingly simple metric of a web page’s popularity rank. Somebody will have to come up with a similar metric for the social and real time graphs.

By: Ouriel Ohayon

Ouriel Ohayon — Fri, 19 Nov 2010 06:31:49 +0000

i think it would be more valuable as an ad targeting infrastructure rather than an end consumer service + if mostly focused on link analysis rather than text, i think the accuracy would be much stronger.

By: Rohan Jayasekera

Rohan Jayasekera — Fri, 19 Nov 2010 04:41:52 +0000

What struck me most about my Twinterest results was that the things that I was criticizing or joking about were considered just as important as the things that I spoke of positively. Sentiment analysis would have been helpful in trimming the list of 1439 interests down to something more representative. As you say, the content needs to be analyzed.