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Bill Gates-Backed Social Recommendation App Likewise Now Available for iOS and Android (axios.com)
Bill Gates is not giving up on saving the world, but he is helping launch a new social recommendation engine. Likewise, as the iOS and Android app is known, is designed to be a place to get trusted recommendations on everything from restaurants to books, movies and TV shows. From a report: It won't cure polio or fix the U.S. education system, but Likewise could fill a niche helping people keep track of the books and TV shows their friends recommend as well as to discover new places. The free app, which launches today, began as the brainchild of Larry Cohen, a longtime Gates aide who serves as CEO of Gates Ventures. The Microsoft co-founder is funding the Bellevue, Wash.-based company, which has been working for nearly a year and has about 20 employees. "It's not the next Office, but there's a real need here," Cohen told Axios. Cohen is chairman of Likewise, with his onetime Microsoft colleague Ian Morris serving as CEO.
WTF are these people doing?
... my ass.
Yelp contamination anyone?
It will be worse than Amazon recommendations, Rotten Tomatoes, Google Reviews, and all those 5-stars from aunts and uncles.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
advertisement.
Probably With all the problems that come with Yelp, and if not it will eventually when they want to make more money...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Wipe that lame operating system off your hard drive and install GNU plus Linux! With free software, you have freedom!
I can ask my friends, family, and coworkers directly. That's called having a conversation.
Everyone else's opinion is meaningless to me.
The app's name isn't mentioned, not even in original article!
Another playground for astroturfers.
But maybe it's a good thing. If companies gaming the "recommendation system" have to spend more and more money to keep gaming it, maybe they will eventually go bankrupt.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Why does the space seem to bind more tightly than the hyphen or slash in some cases?
This makes no sense.
This reads like it is about a billy who did the act of "Gates-backing" (like barebacking?) onto that poor poor social recommendation, at first ...
It seems...
With 2 buttons, a green and a red one, both say install.
for an electronic condom for my electronics. /s
I wonder how many boatloads of cash the ad revenue to push "recommendations" to the "users" of this app will pay out;
While I agree there's a need for a review/recommendation system that can't be gamed by bad actors, nothing about this one indicates it will be any better than the rest.
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
For people to think for themselves and make their own decisions without consulting Social Media or Machine Learning or their HR department.
...crowd effect: www.pnas.org/content/108/22/9020
Gates *is* an evil man, notwithstanding what authorities report.
When a metric becomes a target, it ceases to be a good metric. -- Goodhart's law. So how's this new app, appy, appetty, app going to solve the problem of people finding ways to game the metrics? Easy, not enough will use it and nobody will care. Need to game metrics in that case.
bots. bots. bots. gaming this is trivial
More like harvesting data from the world.
And when does it take 20 people a year to make a recommendation app? It just came out so they weren't dealing with users or trying to get stores to put signs up for the app.
In the end, it's the same problem as "Who watches the watchmen?". And the same answer: "Ultimately, always: YOU!"
The problem is, that recommendations are relative. And so, saying “User123 says 8/10" means as much as "This is 80%". 80% of what? User123's recommendation's usefulness is proportional to how well you know him. He may say 8, but 8 x 0 is still zero. (This works better, when negative ratings are negative numbers too.)
You could, in theory, have a chain from User123 over his peers to your peers to you. Like a web of trust in PGP. It might work. But it will likely end up like a Chinese whispers game. No trust is 100%, and the partial trusts will accumulate and eat up the usefulness in no time.
So the chain length would naturally self-limit.
But frankly, we just know that there will be some misjudgment in there, and the misjudged one will trust someone really untrustworthy way too much, ruining the whole approach. So we would have to limit that chain of trust to "friends and friends of those friends".
And I'm afraid that most of the time, nobody you or they know, will have a recommendation.
You just might have to risk trying it blindly.
I mean you're already doing that right now, whenever you rely on online recommendations. You just have a false sense of confidence.
But, I just don't really care what anyone else thinks about... anything.
Do you have an app for that?