Jessicah Mah: “Recommendations are crap!”
Written on April 4, 2008 – 4:06 pm
Anne Helmond, hard bloggin' scientist
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Jessicah Mah is a 17 year old serial entrepreneur and blogger who started her first business at 11 years old and a dedicated server company at the age of 13. She is now a sophomore in college but still loves starting businesses.
Mah expressed a common complaint on the web: We have so much clutter and there is no good to sort through all of it. There is way too much information and our e-mail inbox is cluttered with hundreds of unread or unanswered e-mails. Mah wants her mom’s and boyfriend’s e-mail to be on top instead of the latest spam e-mail.
Relevance is key because whether we like it or not, the web is all about me me me: “It’s all about me, we are all self absorbed and we want the internet to be about us.” Scoble may not agree with her because this morning his keynote focused on the value of his network and the value of his friends.
Friends are key to Mah’s idea of the future of relevancy on the web. Your most most desirable friends are those who share the same interests and search results should model more like a buddy list. Mah admits that this all sounds so simple, giving users relevant data, but the current crappy recommendations show is that it is not. Search and recommendations should focus more on tracking the relations between people in order to provide relevant results.
Mah showed a great amount of energy on and off stage while we are nearing the end of the conference. However, her talk was somewhat shallow by stating common problems the every day web user is dealing with. What are the solutions and how would these change or impact the web? Hopefully Mah can use her great energy to provide us with some more in depth observations next time. At her age, she has her whole future ahead to start a new business to contribute to a less cluttered web. We are looking forward to it.
Enough for the conference now, this blog must go on The dark side of web 2.0: online bullying, no privacy and crappy ugc? Hate shopping? Try ClayValet.com RSS service Toluu: can they compete with Google Reader? Alcohol2.0 - An overview of the best wine services
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4 Responses to “Jessicah Mah: “Recommendations are crap!””
By jansegers on Apr 4, 2008 | Reply
Credentials are becoming more and more important.
The creation of hierarchy is an necessity, because information is just a next level of data and just is input itself for the level above: a viewpoint.
Structured viewpoints are just input for the construction of a vision.
Visions are just ways of looking to data.
It’s a buttom up / top down organisation as any thing else.
Finding the people that have developped a vision is essential, not all people develop their own independent vision, but everyone adopts a basic vision based on the influences their undergoing.
Top level influencers are key to recognizing good information.
They come and to go, they’re replaced but as a group they’ll always exist.
By jansegers on Apr 4, 2008 | Reply
[Sorry for the many mistakes in my spelling, I'm going to stop commenting around: I'm too tired. Not seeing my own mistakes anymore is a very good indicator of this. ]
By Miles on Apr 5, 2008 | Reply
Today we may view and inundation of emails, friend requests, updates, networks and applications as overwhelming but who is to say that tomorrow’s generation will feel the same way? If people are born and bred with the Twitter’s, Facebook’s and Digg’s in their back pocket maybe the ocean of social madness will seem like ordinary web interaction.
Mah’s proposed solution is one that has been talked about extensively by technologists and bloggers. Adding social context to the various actions we participate in on the web may make our experience far more enjoyable. One thing she didn’t mention in search is the Semantic Web, which would certainly help reduce exposure to clutter.
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