Media Discovery Versus Search
19.10.07Filed Under: Perspective, blippr
Jeremy Liew has some good thoughts (as usual) about a topic very close to our hearts: discovery versus search. Within his post, he hypothesizes that “discovery works best when the cost of being wrong is very low… but some other forms of content (e.g. music, audiobooks, novels, movies, video games) can take you a little longer to tell if you like them or not.”
I agree whole heartedly. Movie geek that I am, it’s difficult finding flicks that I haven’t heard of already and am interested in viewing. Netflix does a pretty good job, but it’s not nearly what it could be. I’m sure Amazon’s recommendation algorithms work well, but there’s no apparent value I would gain by partcipating, or if there is, they don’t elucidate it to their users. Or take music discovery for example. I never listen to the radio and I don’t have enough time to spend hours discovering new bands and songs that I like via iTunes. If I had to choose one place for music discovery, I would probably go with iLike, but even that is limited in the sense that it’s only for music, and doesn’t encompass all of my media interests. And as Erick Schonfeld of TechCrunch wrote just yesterday:
I ran into Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, who is offering a $1 million prize to anyone who can improve his movie recommendations, and he expressed some skepticism about how useful any statistical approach can be. Hastings has found that even within just the category of movies, knowing what horror films someone likes tells you nothing about what dramas they might like. So making statistical correlations across products would be even more difficult.
So what’s the solution?
We believe the solution relies upon human relationships… the social graph, as so many are calling it now following the lead of Mark Zuckerberg. As we’ve reiterated, we believe there’s an inherent trust you associate with any comment coming from another person, especially someone you know personally. So, while the fact may be that Jeremy accurately writes “the cost of being wrong is higher” with discovery, discovery is still possible and just as imperative for the individuals he calls ”Time Poor” as is search. Consider this recent stat alone: according to DoubleClick in January 2007, 92% of males and 95% of females say that a friend’s recommendation is the most influential factor when buying a product or service. Or ask yourself, even: would you rather be informed by a number-crunching computer, or by your best friend?
Unlike an algorithm-based discovery model, however, there’s a huge barrier to a “social discovery” model being effective: to know what your friends like and recommend to you requires their participation. And let’s be honest in that most review sites make user-participation difficult. There’s far too much friction—lengthy sign up forms, email verification, difficult navigation, unclear actions, rating systems that make you think too much, and so on.
We’ve been thinking a lot about this topic lately because we’re trying to overcome these typical barriers with our soon-to-beta blippr. While our application will have to stand the test of time, like any other, and somewhat break the mold of how it’s been done in the past, we’re striving to remove the unnecessary difficulty involved in user participation, increase the value of partcipation, and in general, make people’s media discovery process as transparent, frictionless, valuable, and entertaining as possible. We’ll save the surprises for when we launch, but we ourselves look forward to using the service. To discovering.
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Hello, I fell blessed that I found your post while searching for netflix sign in. I agree with you on the subject Media Discovery Versus Search. I was just thinking about this matter last Friday.
August 8th, 2008 at 6:48 pm