I've been spending a lot of time on Amazon and Half.com recently, both updating my wishlist for my upcoming birthday and trolling for bargain deals on books. Anyone who has spent any amount of time dealing with either site's Recommendation process knows that they must have monkeys working the system.
I just want to acknowledge that Amazon does have a much more user friendly Recommendations section than Half.com. Half.com doesn't give me a "I'm not interested" option, I can only add something to my wishlist or mark that I already own it. And because I used my account to buy a book for my mom to give to somebody else, Half.com now thinks I'm a Dan Brown fan. Dan Brown wrote The DaVinci Code, in case you were wondering why being thought of as a Dan Brown fan would not be helpful in compiling my Recommendations list. They could really use an option like Amazon has to "fix this."
However, there is one thing Amazon could do to make my shopping even better. They could really use a "You've already recommended this to me in a slightly different format." After I've already marked that I own all seven separate seasons of Gilmore Girls, it's not really helpful if you recommend all seven seasons, the first six seasons, the first five seasons, the first four seasons, and the first three seasons as sets. And I already put How To Be Good by Nick Hornby on my wishlist, so I don't really need you to recommend the same book with a different cover. I'm not a collector. I'm also not a soccer fan, so just because I added Fever Pitch (again by Horby) to my wishlist, that doesn't mean I want to read every other book ever written about English football.
2 comments:
I agree. Amazon often sends me recommendations that are "collector's editions" of things I already own. Also, because Hitchhiker's Guide is so highly rated it thinks I love SciFi--and not just in books but in films and tv series as well.
Of course, sorting out that mess does burn up a lot of hours of my life that would otherwise be spent watching reruns of 'without a trace'. So it has it's uses.
Dude! I've been getting into the reruns of Without a Trace on TNT! I love that it's one of the few shows with actual tension as to whether or not the person will be found alive or not. Once I'm done with ER I might see if I can get dvds of without a trace from the library.
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