My friends or robots? I choose robots, or strangers.
Robots or ‘friends’? Answer; robots.
Friends or ‘the crowd’? Answer; the crowd.
Using my friends to discover movies, music, books…it’s fine in concept. However, I find the social graph an extremely flawed notion. E.g., I’ve rated nearly 2k movies @ Netflix. Their computers / robots / algorithms know what I will like better than my friends do. The problem with getting the firehose of updates (stream) on Facebook, et al., is that the feed is not contextually relevant. Say what? That is, it’s not segmented to your tastes, it’s scattershot.
I choose highly vetted and organized data vs. the F-book blast of banality. E.g., there are services where I found people with similar taste in music; Last.fm, the late great Imeem, and http://blip.fm/nateal33t I trust their judgement more than I do of my “friends”. Using a social service to cross reference and find me friends based on my musical taste, I can trust this method because it’s relevant data. This is why I love Yelp, nateal33t.yelp.com I have Yelp friends who have steered me to great restaurants, hotels, camping grounds, you name it. I see someone on Yelp who has similar taste to mine in X, I then compare that to what the crowd says. Then my chances of finding a place that I will like are exponentially better than just walking into a place off of the street.
Segmented social media friends by category (music, food, movies…) will deliver better recommendations than my friends will. Better yet, segmented friends by category, crowdsourced finds + robots = win. Think Amazon’s recommendations or Netflix’s recommendations along w/ user reviews = perfect.
The bottom line is that using these tools I expend far less energy searching for stuff. The right stuff will find me effortlessly.
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