In the unofficial top-ten list of a good user experience gone wrong is the variant of: “Yeah, but Amazon is stupid because I bought a children’s puzzle once two years ago, and they keep recommending children’s puzzles to me. I’m never gonna buy another one, but they keep asking me about them!”
The second most common algorithm, if you will
Amazon uses algorithms (Wikipedia, Wolfram) to process what you do while on their site and then predict, anticipate, or guess what you would do next. But, this is created by humans and subject to human error*. And, as I understand it, they adjust, adapt, revise, and tweak the algorithm over time.
(*) This is what I mean by the “heuristic nature” of algorithms. While this algorithm is an enviable personalization tool and/or recommendation engine, it clearly produces spurious and annoying results. Heuristics (Wikipedia article) are “rules of thumb”, as opposed to mathematical equations which we optimize.
A flavor-of-the-month heuristic
This flavor-of-the-month is brought to you by Twitter-meets-marketing. Rather, it’s brought to you by people who blindly pursue a broad idea in a way that wastes their time more than it wastes others.
Today, I twice tweeted about “diet”, more specifically, tweeted about planning our family diet for the week ahead:
http://twitter.com/jayamorgan/status/18801092461
http://twitter.com/jayamorgan/status/18800989687
And, what to my wondering eyes should appear, but spurious and annoying new followers who focus on diets and dieting. After two tweets in which I mention diet, fools rush in.
- What do they do if it’s another six months before I tweet about diet?
- What do they do if I don’t tweet about diet again ever?
- What do they do if I don’t follow them back?
- Did they check to see if I were connected to other people they follow? other people who discuss diet regularly?
Admittedly, I am connected to people who discuss food-related topics – more specifically, people who discuss natural and local foods. But, that’s clearly not about diets or dieting. And, my history of tweets rarely (if ever) mention diets.
This isn’t the first time a rare keyword like “diet” has set off a flurry of spurious new followers. And, I hear about this from other twitterers.
I presume these people use search-based tools to monitor tweets using keywords of interest to them. I wonder how this will play out. Will they stop the idiocy of following anyone who tweets their keywords? (After all, it’s common that these people are following upwards of 10k people, which is an absurd number of people to follow with anything resembling attentiveness or care.) Who is making tools for these fools? I presume that just as their are horrible websites and poor technology everywhere to be found, that there are tools enabling the bad habit of following a person after they tweet your keyword once.
