Recommendation engines, such as the ones used by Netflix and Amazon.com, already recommend really random choices. Except in the simplest cases (you bought a nail gun, you might want some nails), current recommendation engines stink at figuring out what I want. Trouble is, the recommendations are interesting so few times that I don't even look at them any more.
I'll bet these researchers actually used to work for Amazon.com creating their recommendation engine, but got fired. Not knowing what else to do, they wrote a paper to describe what they did!
The premise of the commentary doesn't make sense to me. E-mail signatures have been accepted by most businesses for years now, for everything from vacation rentals to mortgage applications.
Recently, in the process of signing a contract on a home purchase, we were forced to use a fax machine because no scanner was immediately available. The entire document later had to be re-sent by e-mail because the fax copy wasn't legible enough.
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Recommendation engines, such as the ones used by Netflix and Amazon.com, already recommend really random choices. Except in the simplest cases (you bought a nail gun, you might want some nails), current recommendation engines stink at figuring out what I want. Trouble is, the recommendations are interesting so few times that I don't even look at them any more. I'll bet these researchers actually used to work for Amazon.com creating their recommendation engine, but got fired. Not knowing what else to do, they wrote a paper to describe what they did!
The premise of the commentary doesn't make sense to me. E-mail signatures have been accepted by most businesses for years now, for everything from vacation rentals to mortgage applications. Recently, in the process of signing a contract on a home purchase, we were forced to use a fax machine because no scanner was immediately available. The entire document later had to be re-sent by e-mail because the fax copy wasn't legible enough.