I recommend you stop recommending things

Somebody tell me why we need so many recommendation websites. But first, publish your answer, we will submit it for peer review from a bunch of strangers with nebulous credentials and give it a rating out of 5 stars. I’ll only pay attention to answers over 4 stars and with a response rate at 150% the average for all submissions. Or, I could answer the question myself. We don’t need so many recommendation websites. Here is why:

1)   We can easily get the opinion of people we actually know, or whose credentials we can discover. Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare and the rest of the social media pack let our contacts weigh in on where we are looking to go or what we are looking to buy. If you like and trust these people enough to be friends with them and to let them into your social web life (to let them see those tagged pictures of you from college you’ve been stubbornly refusing to take down, citing some progressive moral obligation to transparency and obsessive meta identity. It’s not employment kryptonite, Dad; it’s the future!), you should trust your friends enough that you can be sure they won’t send you to a sushi place prone to customer food poisoning.

2)   We can reach experts easily now. One of those dirty little secrets of web success is that everybody is reachable if you frame your message correctly (a discussion for later). Experts can be reached, sometimes with relative ease. If I want to get a sushi recommendation, I can ask a food critic, or a food blogger, or just somebody who loves to eat. With a few short minutes of Google wizardry, and Twitter searching, you can find a few people to target and most likely you will hear back relatively quickly. It’s in the best interest of everybody in a position of expertise to be responsive online, and for the most part, people are savvy enough to act accordingly.

3)   If you don’t have a particular expert in mind, or don’t want to put yourself out there by contacting anybody, there are communities of experts or enthusiasts for just about anything. And most of them have websites and discussion boards which can be used as research material. To borrow from the marketing department at Apple, “There’s a nerd for that.”

4)   Even better, a lot of these nerd/expert communes already have a rating or recommendation function built into their websites. At the very least, the flame wars on their message boards form some sort of hierarchy of hatred.

5)   If you are looking for a more immediate recommendation, while sacrificing expertise, there are already broad, all-encompassing websites; Yelp and Amazon come to mind. The Internet has broad, sloppy data down pat.

6)   Sometimes, it’s okay not to crowd source. Go somewhere on a whim, and enjoy yourself, food poisoning and all.

Music by mood

All we have to say is this.. how great would it be to have some sort of recommendation technology sort your music by mood on your phone, based on your mood? Pretty darned great we say. Look out for it, it’s coming soon. We have seen it. – JLH