Lack of updates

I probably don't have any readers for this blog, as I haven't announced it anywhere (well, maybe the Facebook notes auto-import thingie counts as an announce?), so there is no-one waiting for my updates on this blog. Its been well over a month now, and I try to sum it up now.

Lets start with the Facebook. Since I joined it, I spent half a day finding my friends (more or less successfully) and configuring the glittery apps the place is full of. As anyone who uses Facebook knows, the apps seem to be "the salt" of Facebook, and they are true. I wouldn't be using Facebook nearly as much if there wasn't any.

However, there already is too many apps; the same functionalities exist in many similar apps and some users finding one apps before the other, they spread that one to their friends and they pass it to their friends and so on. Eventually you get invited to the "same app" hiding in different skin a gazillion time by different friends. And oh boy, is that annoying!

Well, in my book Facebook gets a B- for a good try. We'll see what other sites the future brings.

Another thing I've spent a bit of my time is the Netflix Prize competition. In short, they are offering one million dollars to first team to improve their movie recommendation system accuracy by 10%. It has been running for a year now and team closest to the prize has achieved about 8.5% improvement.

Realistically, I don't believe I can beat even that, but I'm using the competition as a framework for my Artificial Intelligence software project at the university. Getting study credits for something I have personal interest is a great thing! Another interesting thing about the competition is that you get an "authentic" dataset, with 18000 movie titles, 500000 users and 100 million ratings. That is hard to get by and registering to the competition only to download the dataset is worth it.

Thats all for now, more updates later!