A web developer decides to deploy a recommender system to provide a more personalized experience to those who visit his web site and in the process promote more business by exposing more of his product line to his clientele. His options? Develop a recommender system from scratch, use code from open source projects, or depend on third party developers to develop a system for him. Potentially expensive options. Loomia hopes to change all that.
So what is Loomia ? Loomia is a company that provides a set of web services for recommendations and personalization. Web publishers, media sites, and e-commerce retailers can use these web services to provide their users with similar/related items and personalized recommendations. The recommendation system makes use of a mix of collaborative filtering algorithms to provide item-to-item and item-to-user recommendations for media, retail goods, listings, and more. Loomia operates by collecting user preferences, calculating the products or items that the user might like based on these preferences, and send this information back to the website which can then be displayed as the recommended items to the user.
To install Loomia on your site, one has to first sign up with them at loomia.com. The site then provides you with a set of widgets or tools (javascript) which have to be deployed on the all the pages of the website. These widgets are provided by Loomia along with the deployment instructions. Once this is done, the website is hooked up to the recommender service and all the user preferences are fed to it along with the catalog of products/services offered by the site. Obviously, Loomia cannot be customized to better suit the product/service line of your online business. On the other hand, you don’t have to spend a fortune in creating a customized recommender system. Loomia is a service to which anyone can subscribe for a comparatively small fee.
Is it good enough?
Loomia.com lists betterpropaganda.com as one of its “happy customers”. betterpropaganda.com is a site that deals with music from artists who have agreed to put their work on this site and let people listen and download their tracks for absolutely no charge at all.
To learn more about you, betterpropaganda.com requests you to register and create an account with it, so it can keep track of all your searches and the songs you listen to. I did create a dummy account and decided to search for the track “Young folks” by Peter Bjork and John (Swedish indie rock band). The recommended songs were from the same genre and did appeal to my taste. The fact that this site offers very little popular music makes it very difficult to compare it to the more popular music sites like propaganda.com. But the quality of the recommendations was good enough for me, considering the fact that I had never heard of these artist or songs before visiting this site!!!
Loomia insists that it does not store any user data, which should put to rest the concerns of any privacy advocate.
Services like Loomia have now taken recommender systems from the realm of programmers and big businesses with huge R&D budgets and put them into the hands of the everyday Internet user. Loomia also shows the important role that recommender systems play in attracting customers, a role that is now being recognized as an essential component of any online service which aims to be customer centric.
Links:1. Loomia.com
2. betterpropaganda.com
