Slashdot Mirror
An App to Boil Down Online User Reviews
An anonymous reader writes "Is this a glimpse at the future of the Semantic Web? A new startup named Pluribo has developed a technology that can auto-summarize user reviews on the internet. It is a Firefox extension that can take a webpage filled with reviews and condense it down into a couple of sentences. Currently, it just works with Amazon electronics, but the potential seems incredible. Ars Technica took an in-depth look."
Somebody fix this so it work's on /. Maybe then I'll RTFA.
I for one welcome our hot grits pouring overlords.
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of Al Gores in Soviet Russia releasing Duke Nukem Forever, you insensitive clod!
In Korea, only old Natalie Portman must be new here.
All your Linux are belong to us Sharks with frickin' laser beams attached to our heads.
1)Stephen King is dead
2)BSD is dying
3)Profit!
There. Fixed that for you.
This is a serious reflection of our current times, where people's eyes gloss over if the concept at hand is not condensed into a convenient sound-byte.
I suppose you could call it the bleeding edge where complacency meets the loss of freedom and the fall of darkness where critical thought once stood.
Now there is enough probable demand to launch a startup designed to remove what minimal labor people are interested in dedicating to the quality of even their leisure time.
I'm sure many fantasize about strangling people this lazy/complacent, but honestly if they're unconscious enough not to care about their own toys, do they really possess a "life" for you to take from them?
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
This sounds like the opposite of how to get useful information out of reviews, and more like the "consumer products" equivalent to the automatic resume scanner.
You know the resume scanners I'm talking about -- the ones that circular-file the candidate who took three years off work to get his Ph.D. in cognitive science (and whose thesis is a perfect fit for your business plan), preferring, instead, the guy who listed "20 years PROLOG, PL/1, BASIC, C, 10 years C++, 5 years Java, MCSE, A+", because obviously the second guy triggers more buzzwords. Because the HR drone won't understand any of the resumes, he/she just picks whichever one the scanner selects, and that's typically the one with the fewest career gaps and the most buzzwords. ("But that other Ph.D guy only has one or two languages, this guy has six! And that Ph.D guy's been out of work for three years, so obviously nobody would hire him!")
Ten reviews reading "Works. Fast, cheap, lightweight" and three reviews reading "Doesn't work" don't tell me anything, other than that the product might have reliability issues.
One review reading "Didn't work the first time. The manual doesn't mention that you have to make sure the jumper is in the correct position first, and then it works. I own an XYZ-123 and this new product was at least as fast, but at about half the price. Weighs about a pound." tells me everything I need to know -- that the three people who claimed it didn't work almost certainly didn't know how to configure it correctly, and that the first seven reviewers never had a problem because they weren't part of the edge case.