Why Social Software Makes for Poor Recommendations

Another interesting question that came up at the Nokia workshop was whether social software networks, such as Friendster, would prove to be a good source of recommendations to filter the Tail. At first blush it makes sense that they would. After all, whose recommendations would you trust more than those of your friends? But the truth, parodoxically enough, is that strangers typically do an even better job.

In other words, the assumption that there's a correlation between the people I like and the products I like is a flawed one. To use an analogy, Bill Joy, the co-founder of Sun Microsystems, famously uttered this truism (now known as Joy's Law): "No matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else." The same might be said of recommendations. No matter who you are, someone you don't know has found the coolest stuff. (Via The Long Tail)