Joel sent me a link to this Wired article on the new zune recommendation data visualization, which looks quite nice (although there seems to be a strange ghosted male face up in the upper-left corner….rikrolled???). Joel is on a recommendation engine bender after tech.ed where he demod one he’d written in F#. I saw him checking out the prices for ram on MSY so he can go to 8GB at home and remove his dependency on SQL Server. The article mentions an equivalent recommendation feature in iTunes named the “Genius”. This isn’t like a code-name or anything, it actually says that in the title bar and context menu. Can anyone spell ‘hubris’?
Too bad zune has such a low market penetration that their sexy new visualization won’t give iTunes the smackdown it deserves.
Update: it seems the “genius” may have hosed itself quite nicely without any outside assistance.