Comments on: You Aren’t Who You Hang Out With

By: Mike D.

Mike D. — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 22:26:05 +0000

Kyle: I really wish Criticker wasn’t so poorly executed. Asking me to rate a film 0-100 is already too taxing. I’d be more likely to rate 100 or more films if I could just say “Dislike, Meh, Like”. Even A through F would be better. 0-100 requires way too much thought and way too much fear that you didn’t answer the question accurately.

By: Kyle

Kyle — Sun, 12 Feb 2012 22:50:39 +0000

According to LifeHacker (http://lifehacker.com/5884202/five-best-movie-recommendation-services), it looks like Criticker (http://www.criticker.com/) is what you’re looking for.

I just saw this, so I have no idea how good it works, but I figured it’s worth trying out.

By: Josh

Josh — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 20:50:55 +0000

Christian, Netflix removed it because they will always make the wrong decision on what features to keep and what to remove. I’m only kind of joking.

By: Christian Watson

Christian Watson — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 18:40:10 +0000

Netflix used to do exactly this with their movies reviews which they removed for some reason.

When you would read a movie’s reviews there was a percentage that showed how similar the reviewer’s tastes were to yours based on the movies they had previously reviewed. I found it very useful.

By: Trevor Turk — Links for 12-9-2011

Trevor Turk — Links for 12-9-2011 — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 22:39:28 +0000

[…] You Aren’t Who You Hang Out With | Mike Industries […]

By: Mike D.

Mike D. — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 17:10:39 +0000

Dan: You’re totally right! That’s exactly what Napster did! Find some rando who likes the same stuff you do, and then look at the rest of their stuff. That seemed to work pretty well… interesting that things have moved away from that.

By: Dan

Dan — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 04:24:40 +0000

Funny, but I used to use the early music sharing programs the same way…

I’d search for a song, get back a bunch of hits of people who had the song, and some of the programs would allow me to click on the user name and see their entire list of songs.

It was really exciting b/c I made the assumption that b/c they liked some of the same stuff I liked, I should take a look at other music that they liked. I discovered a lot of great music that way that I never would have otherwise…

And then the music stopped…

By: Dave Messina

Dave Messina — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 22:30:52 +0000

iCheckMovies.com does a pretty damn good job of matching you up with your phantom friends for movies. They call them “neighbors”.

And then they give you lots of different ways to slice up the data: movies you’ve both seen, movies they have seen and you have not, movies you have seen and they have not…

By: Jeff Croft

Jeff Croft — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 05:15:09 +0000

Pearson Correlation FTW.

By: Jason

Jason — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 04:40:30 +0000

Perhaps run some semantic analysis to gauge your friends queue compared to yours to find out which “friend” could be a phantom friend and start there as well as tapping into other feeds. This is similar to the DJ’ing at blip.fm. You follow DJ’s that have similar taste in music not just my friends.

Some of this could also be initiated by a 25 movie “hot or not” quiz. Lots of concepts in here.

By: Mike D.

Mike D. — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 22:56:28 +0000

Mike: More importantly, does anything mistake you for the great Mike Doughty?

Patrick: Regarding the 40-60% thing, isn’t that the case if you are talking about someone’s overall tastes though? My thing is that I don’t want to ever talk about overall tastes. I want to talk about specific tastes. Like taste in movies, for instance. I feel like there are people in the world who have almost 100% the same taste in movies as I do. The problem is when you try to match those same people to other aspects of my life, like eating.

Peng: Thanks. Going to give Criticker a try!

Brade: Totally. Very polarizingly awesome movie. :)

By: Brade

Brade — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 22:26:06 +0000

Malibu’s Most Wanted is an excellent way to whittle down your list of matches–there are only 4 top critics on RT who think it is “fresh.” Good luck!

By: Calvin Tang

Calvin Tang — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 21:42:20 +0000

You know you like my taste in movies. What was the last one we saw, Contagion? That was serviceable!

By: Peng Zhong

Peng Zhong — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 21:31:59 +0000

I’ve been using Criticker to help me find movies I may like. What the algorithm essentially does is compare your taste to similar users and then averages their ratings for movies you haven’t seen to generate a score/likelihood that you’ll enjoy seeing it.

It’s not a perfect system. Seeding your initial ratings database can take a while (depending on how thorough you want to be). Composite scores can be completely off at times (it’s very difficult to find someone with exactly the same taste as you).

I’ve stumbled across quite a few gems I never would have otherwise, though.

By: Patrick Algrim

Patrick Algrim — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 21:29:19 +0000

Awesome notes Mike. I completely agree with your phantom friending examples. In fact, building through them as we speak. I think it’s important to allow people you do and do not know to help your curate. Most importantly not limiting the people who don’t have the same tastes as you if the technology is making that correlation. Often if the technology assumes it, we’ve found it’s not always correct.

The process of deciding if someone has similar tastes as you is often not 100% yes or 100% no, it’s a mixed bag and lies somewhere between the 40% to 60% mark. So we’ve declared; you decide based on your ask not system level before it reaches you. Ideally this scenario of others without your tastes coordinating with your ask could let you develop taste and not let it stay stagnant. But this is still a theory.