Microsoft Closing Firefly

Next week Microsoft will shut down Firefly. For those who don't know, Firefly was responsible in large part for popularizing collaborative filtering, something online retailers such as Amazon and CDNow are now also utilizing. It's a shame to see it go. Microsoft has apparently taken the code and is using it for the soon-to-be-launched Microsoft Passport site which lets people give information once and buy merchandise from vendors without needing to type it in again.

Comments

Been following FireFly ever since it was a maggot

[Black Perl]

In the beginning, FireFly was a research project at the MIT media lab. And FireFly was good.

At the time, it existed only as a music recommendation program. (It was called something else at the time, I forget what). You rated artists you like and hate, and based on your ratings and others' ratings, it would give you the "top 5 artists you'd probably like". The more artists you rated, the more accurate the results. And it was always right, at least for me. It introduced me to a LOT of music I would have otherwise probably never heard (or even heard of). Of course in the early days a larger percentage of the users were into non-mainstream music (like I am).

Then, they got some venture capital funding or something and created a company/web site called FireFly. It started to go a little more mainstream, and they started adding virtual community features to the site. All of which distracted from their primary strength, the music recommendation system. And they made changes to it as well, adding more of a random element to its' recommendations. Instead of giving you the calculated top five, it would give you five "recommendations" that would change every time you visited. At this point I started losing interest... the recommendations were not always spot-on.

Later they decided they wanted to sell this collaborative filtering technology to others. They shutdown the FireFly site & they turned over the music recommendation system and its database to Launch.com. Firefly started catering to the marketers with its technology. At this point I completely lost interest in the company. And I didn't like what Launch did to the recommendation system.

So now I hear M$ has bought and squashed FireFly. Yawn.