Likes & Launch
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TechCrunch published an article yesterday about the challenges of personalization and why no one has been able to innovate beyond what Amazon did 10 years ago. Leena Rao makes a good effort in trying to understand the challenges, mentioning the need for intent-based data, making sense of social, and privacy concerns. All are true. But the framework with which she’s approaching the problem is wrong.
The right way to look at this is by splitting the world of products into two: products that age and products that don’t.
- Books retain value over time. A book you wanted to read last year is something you’d still consider buying today (hence, the existence of airport bookstores). Same goes for movies, which is why Netflix beat Blockbuster.
- Fashion items (shoes, clothing, accessories) do not. Softlines (the retail term for fashion items) are extremely seasonal; items go out of style within months and unsold ones end up on the discount rack.
You’ll notice that successful personalization tech is tightly focused around items in the first category. Books, music, video, kitchen appliances, gardening equipment, (to a lesser extent) electronics - all things that Amazon’s recommendation algorithms are good at. (I would know, I was the product manager for that team). That’s because these products have a long enough shelf life to reach a critical mass of purchase data. You need dense datasets to do personalization right.
Where does personalization suck? The second category. To make it even more difficult, items in this category tend to be ones that you can look at and within half a second decide if you like it or not. They are visual, tactile, sensual. They are also highly individual - a watch that I love is also something you might hate, even if we share the same taste in movies. Hell, I might even love one watch but hate another that almost looks exactly the same. People shop in this category by gut feel and emotion, not by attempting to maximize a list of requirements and system specs. The result is a very sparse dataset with items going out of style too fast for the algorithms to become useful. What you end up with is least common denominator recs (like white socks and undershirts) that completely lack joy and delight.
The solution, like Leena points at, is social, although she gets it slightly wrong. I’ll follow up this post with my thoughts on how social can really make personalization work.
Very much agreed. Locations can split the two. Just because you went to a restaurant a year ago didn’t mean that you liked it. If you like hot dogs at 2 in the morning, it doesn’t mean you want to eat them for dinner. There is a balance between an expiring good and a permanent one. We’ve had a huge focus on personalization for local at gtrot. We find that social helps create stronger signals and looking at places you’ve been help surface similar places but it still isn’t perfect. Taking into account the what’s happening now is also part of it.
Advice of John Steinbeck to his son in love.
At gtrot, we’re working to build the best city discovery tool on the web. In order to make it the best, we constantly ask feedback from our customers online, in person and across the web. 28 days ago was no exception. We asked the incredibly tech-savvy and generous community at Hacker News to…
Feedback - in action.
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Giveaway Rules:
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Tonight, the rapper drilled his audience of 6 million followers on a new dream called Donda. From what I could narrow down, it’s more or less a creative group comprised of 22 divisions, everyone from video game developers to nutritionists to car designers. The goal? Well, that’s not as clear, but it sounds more or less like a think tank. Or an agency of some sort. “…To dream of, create, advertise and produce products driven equally by emotional want and utilitarian need.. To marry our wants and needs.”
Sounds awesome, like a Warhol factory of idea people. Whether it will ever come to fruition, will it work? That’s up to Kanye West.
Say what you want, but the man is a genius. I think that’s more than evident now. Call him “crazy,” I mean, the dude probably is. Because all geniuses are out-of-their-mind, stark ravingly mad. Their ideas are bigger than the everyday Joe – their followers see it as inspiration, their detractors call it lunacy. And when I see Kanye spilling freethought all over his Twitter stream, I see it as both. And I want whatever he’s having. I want some of that creative juice he’s dranking. I want to dream out loud like Kanye West and start a Donda and change the community around me, the government that owns me, the world that surrounds me. The only difference between he and I — he and us – is that he has the money, prestige, and support to actually do it.
But should that stop me, or should it stop you? You have just as much opportunity as he does because, you see, Opportunity is free. Sure he drives a chopped-up Maybach and uses anorexic supermodels for belts, but that Opportunity he seizes? That’s priceless. Up for grabs. You just gotta take it.
Kanye West is one individual who doesn’t see borders, he sees horizons. No problems, only solutions. Imagine if you weren’t hindered by fear, what people would say about you, how you were gonna make your car payments. Wonder what it would be like to live in a world where all you felt, tasted, and heard was Opportunity. They’d probably call you crazy.
”—I agree. Dream out loud.
(via keepsdiary)
Must read! Fake Grimlock take on how to win in 2012.