Filtering the Internet - What's Next?

As of this writing, The Filter has very little advertising (mostly an attempt to get people to sign up). This is probably because the site is still in its infancy and hasn't garnered enough traffic, but because the site is able to target users of specific tastes, there's no doubt that advertisers are intrigued. Roberts does say, though, that the updated versions of the site will always give users the ability to opt out of any personalization that is filtering taste specific ads. A nice gesture, especially for a site that's designed to recommend products for its users to buy.

While I'm sure advertising is an important step that The Filter's top brass want to take, their first order of business will be to augment the site. For instance, right now The Filter doesn't provide complete song tracks to its users. “We have focused our time and resources on developing algorithms and on making sense of people's tastes. In terms of consuming the recommendations, we have a thirty-second clip deal which enables people to get a taste of the track and then we have partnerships in place for people to click through and buy,” Roberts explains.

Pandora is probably the benchmark in terms of a music recommendation service that plays songs (full tracks) similar to the user's favorites. Created by the Music Genome Project, Pandora also allows users to purchase songs or albums on Amazon or iTunes.

Then there's the social factor that I mentioned in the previous section. Roberts says users will soon be able to import data from friends on Facebook and MySpace. Something similar to the “mini-feed” could also be used by users to track the their friends' latest discoveries.

Now matter how they use it, by combining all aspects of collaborative filtering, The Filter has the chance to offer the best media recommendations of any e-commerce site. And since most people's purchases come by way of recommendations, if users feel they are getting better service, The Filter has the potential to overtake some of the Internet's biggest players.