There is a service that I wish someone -- Amazon is an obvious candidate -- would provide to me, and I wonder how realistic it is. (It seems like it should be easy given the data, and they've surely got the data.)
Here's an example: I've bought three CDs from a particular artist. I really like two of them, and I don't care for the third. She has more CDs. Which (if any) am I likely to like? If I could find ratings for those CDs from people who liked the two I liked and didn't like the one I didn't like, that would be informative. Overall ratings of those products are irrelevant, because I don't know anything the raters. Reviews can be more informative but, again, I don't know how the reviewers' tastes match my own and most reviews are not well-written. User-submitted "if you like this buy that" links can be helpful but are under-used; they're also not annotated. Knowing that people also bought them isn't helpful; I bought the one I didn't like, too. I want to tap into the actual ratings (not purchase history) from a subset of raters -- the ones who match my own profile. Ratings are more reliable than the other options available because Amazon uses them to push things at you, so you're motivated to get them right.
I'm casting this in terms of Amazon because they're doing part of the problem already, but in theory this could be done by anyone who can mine the data.
Is anyone providing a service like this (with a large-enough user base to be relevant)? Does any Amazonian reading this want to run with it? :-)
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