Monday, May 26, 2008

LibraryThing recommendations!



LibraryThing Recommendations—called "the best feature on the site" by one user—are back and much better than before.

You can find recommendations at the top of your profile page. Or check out mine.

The new recommendations include:
  • A large number of primary recommendations for ever member—usually 1,000—based on a single comprehensive algorithm.
  • Individual recommendation lists for each member's tags.
  • Filtering of recommendations by popular LibraryThing tags.
  • Individual lists of other members' recommendations (member recommendations were added two weeks ago)
  • Up to 500 so-bad-they're-good recommendations, building off the LibraryThing Unsuggester, and called "Your Unsuggester."* We hope "What I shouldn't read" has some meme legs.
  • A "why" feature for each recommendation, laying out what the recommendation was based on.
  • A pony.**
I let the recommendations themselves out early—see the original talk post, with over 140 messages!—and members had mostly positive reactions. Those who don't like them can perhaps be molified by the greater number and ways to filter and angle the recommendations.

Recommendations now change daily—faster if you are below 200 books and keep adding them. The system keeps track of all recommendations and when you received them. In the near future I plan to provide personalized recommendation emails based on new recommendations.

I've created a new Talk thread to discuss the changes, and suggest changes. My thanks to those who participated in the initial thread, influencing development in a number of important ways.


*If Thomas Jefferson is in Hell, I am confident the Devil is torturing him with books from Jefferson's Unsuggester List—heavy on the chick- and tween-lit!
*With apologies to Last.fm.

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15 Comments:

Blogger Michał Paluchowski said...

Very well done guys :) That makes the recommendations much more accessible and thus valuable.

I had some doubts about them initially, since they all seemed to be much alike for my library. However now they much improved and range across all the topics my books cover.

5/27/2008 6:27 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Hm..I don't know. The number one on the list for me is by one of my most detested authors. The second is for a book I already own. And then...within the top 10 are several more by said detested author, and others I wouldn't touch with a barge pole. I'm sure it's helpful for many, but for me right now - a complete miss.

5/27/2008 7:32 AM  
Blogger Link said...

one word: faaaaabulous.

5/27/2008 1:00 PM  
Blogger G R Grove said...

My reactions are much like severn's. About as useful - or un-useful - as Amazon's, except you can improve amazon's. Is there any way we can add "not interested" feedback like you can with amazon to make it more useful? On the first page I saw nothing new to me, and a couple of things I wouldn't fish out of a dumpster. Didn't bother to look farther.

Might be more useful to people just starting to collect books on a topic.

5/27/2008 1:47 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I enjoy reading the recommendations even when they're off the mark. Further, I am surprised by the accuracy of some the recommendations - i.e., books that I have either read in the past but no longer own, books I have yet to catalog, and books on my wishlist. I find it interesting to watch data collection and analysis develop. Some recommenders obviously have no sophistication. Apple's i-Tunes is one such example. Amazon's is not particularly good either. I've occasionally tried an Amazon recommendation with which I wasn't familiar; without fail, I've been disappointed. I think web developments (particularly vis a vis music and literature) are going to allow small publishers to cater to niche markets much better than catch-all big-box organizations can. Thank goodness! The world out there in big-box land is bland and vacuous. The arts definitely need liberating. However, greater accuracy in connecting with niche consumers is necessary for those businesses to survive.

5/27/2008 2:23 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Don't love the recommendations. I agree that if there were a way of tuning the list,, then maybe.

5/27/2008 3:00 PM  
Blogger slickdpdx said...

My book purchases or wishlists are highly influenced by the libraries of my interesting people, my most similar people and by the libraries of people in the same groups I join or watch.

5/27/2008 4:35 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Looks good. I'd like some way to improve the list - just a couple of buttons like "Add to library" (for books I already have) & "Not interested" so I can reduce the list. Similar to the recommendations in Google Reader.

5/27/2008 6:33 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Pretty much right on target...I must say that I am very impressed by the whole setup. Excellent Job!

5/27/2008 10:04 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Aw...I miss the different kinds of recommendation lists. I liked being able to specify I only wanted non-fiction recommendations.

If you are still taking suggestions I agree with the other that said that the ability to filter the list would be invaluable. I'm a children's librarian so read of a lot of kid's lit, but I would like to be able to find recommendations based on my adult or young adult choices without paging through!

Ohh! Could we get a recommendation list that bases recommendations on our lists minus the books with tags we tell it to ignore? (If I tell it to ignore books on my list with the "children" tag, for instance.)

5/28/2008 6:59 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I love the idea, but a bunch of the recommended books are in my library. Could you put an "already in library" box?

5/28/2008 9:52 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Had a quick look at this, but the first page alone mainly contains books that I wouldn't touch with a barge pole. It seems to suffer from the same delusion as Amazon recs - that because I like one single author in a field I will like all the others.

As for the unrecommender - not only does it have a book on the first page that I own, it is one to which I have given five stars!

5/29/2008 1:25 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I love the recommender! A couple suggestions:

- it would be really helpful if there were an option to show only one book from a recommended author (or collapse the list by author). this is one of the things that annoys me on the amazon recommender as well and makes it much less useful - i wind up getting recommendations for a million books by the same few authors

- I would love to have an "Add to library" button as many of the recommendations are books I have but haven't added to my librarything yet

thanks for continuing to make librarything a better and better site.

5/29/2008 11:57 AM  
Blogger Melissa said...

Very nice and long recommendations. I would want to add to the libraryThing recommendations list, Return to Middle Kingdom, by Yuan-tsung Chen. A non-fiction book on Chinese history through the early half of the 20th century. A remarkable story of adventure, political intrigue and family life.

6/12/2008 8:51 PM  
Blogger Johan said...

It would be great if you could serve daily fresh recommendations as feeds. Are there perhaps already recommendations feeds? I have looked around but haven't found any...

7/11/2008 12:23 PM  

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