Thursday, June 12, 2008

digg is developing their own /recommended page

The Guardian's Zoe Margolis tracked down Kevin Rose before a Diggnation meetup for a quick interview. In it, he reveals some interesting work digg is doing for their next release:


We're creating algorithms that take a look at what you've dug and compare it to other people, inside the system, in real time. We have this working on our staging servers right now - it's not something that we've launched publicly - but essentially, when you Digg an item you're agreeing with that item and all those other people who dug it. So let's say you're Digg number 4,000 on something: who are those other 3,999 people you agreed with? What we're doing with the math behind the scenes is we're saying 'OK, you agree with all these other people, what else are they finding out there that you might like? That you might also find interesting? So we're working on ways to surface those stories - to find quality content before it becomes popular - but also introduce you to new people based on what you've been Digging."
We've been tweaking our recommendations page for over the last two years and come to realize that serving real-time accurate recommendations is not a trivial task, so I'm quite curious to see what KR and co. have come up with.

Granted, their development team is more than an order of magnitude larger than ours -- they've got the brain quantity to pull off something cool.