Where are the gadget recommendation engines?
By James • Sep 10th, 2010 • Category: Industry News
- Photo: Alex Brewer / Flickr
I ‘discovered’ a new band – they’ve been around since 2003, incidentally – recently by using Last FM’s very powerful recommendation engine. I was looking up a musician I liked and wanted something similar, and the social radar built around Last FM pointed me in the right direction – the band is amazing, by the way. This got me thinking – why does a service like this not exist for gadgets?
What would this be, exactly?
Only in the last five years or so, with the rise of the superpower that is Apple, have we seen people’s gadget-buying habits align. That is to say, a person who liked a Mac would likely take well to an iPod and iPhone and so on – and oftentimes owned all three. But this product ‘recommendation’ – if it can even be called that – is for products by one company.
What if we could see a cross-section of recommendations for different devices in different categories built by different companies?
How it would work
Imagine you were a camera lover, who owned a Canon DSLR, like many of us do, with an expensive long-range lens you recently purchased. Based on that, the gadget recommendation engine would detect that you likely enjoy shooting landscapes and not portraits, recommending additional gadgets using that information.
Not only that, much like Amazon’s recommendation engine based on purchases, it could then recommend other gadgets based on the similarities between your gadgets and, say, several other people in the database. The final layer would be a social networking aspect where similar tastes between people you have a deliberate tie with are given preference to those you have with strangers.
Work in this space
Admittedly, it’s not as if this space is completely barren – it’s just not very sophisticated yet. Looking at a service like GDGT, for example, which is known as a ‘social network for your gadgets’, we can easily see how this would be appealing and how the early groundwork has been laid, too. But what we need is improved sophistication. Almost – and I know this is out there – but if GDGT were built atop of Amazon or pulled data from Amazon. That would be truly game changing and, much like this band whose four albums I’ve gone on to retroactively purchase, you may have even more reason to spend your money on expensive, yet esoteric, gear you would not have stumbled across otherwise.
Get to building, developers! This thing would make bank!
