The race to create a 'smart' Google ! The faces of Reco

If you missed it, Fortune's journalist Jeffrey O'Brien has just  written an interesting article about recommendation  titled : "The race to create a 'smart' Google !"

He presents the recommendation star system : Choice Stream [I dislike their "we picture you in one sec apporach"!], Pandora [it's editor recommandation], Slide [that one is trickier] from apprition order for the pitures.

Here are some extracts :
"We don't just buy products, we bond with them. We have relationships with our things." and No Logo is also a way to define yourself.

There's a sense among the players in the recommendation business - from newcomers like MyStrands and StumbleUpon to titans like Yahoo and Sun - that now is the time to perfect such an algorithm.

The Web, they say, is leaving the era of search and entering one of discovery. What's the difference? Search is what you do when you're looking for something. Discovery is when something wonderful that you didn't know existed, or didn't know how to ask for, finds you.

But there is no go-to discovery engine - yet. Building a personalized discovery mechanism will mean tapping into all the manners of expression, categorization, and opinions that exist on the Web today.
It's no easy feat, but if a company can pull it off and make the formula portable [= Movable Playlist & Library] so it works on your mobile phone - well, such a tool could change not just marketing, but all of commerce.

Personalized recommendations," says Brent Smith, Amazon's director of personalization, "are at the heart of why online shopping offers so much promise." So far, the company has struggled to deliver on that promise. Its system favors popular, obvious items and tends to come off less like a trusted shopkeeper than a pushy salesman

Levchin is careful to say he's rolling out features slowly and will only go as far as his users will allow. But he sees what many others claim to see: Most consumers seem perfectly willing to trade preference data for insight. "What's fueling this is the desire for self-expression," he says.

[Identity my dear Levchin, you need to be puzzling]