It took me a couple of days of making calls to track down the
owners of firefly.com. It turned out
that the site was a joint venture by MIT and the Harvard Business School. Under the direction of MIT Media LabAssociate Professor Pattie Maes, several of her most promising students began
building the infrastructure for what eventually became firefly.com. I ended up on the phone with one of those
students. He never would give me his
name, which I thought was pretty strange.
"Just call me 'Howard', okay?" he told me after I'd
pushed the issue as far as could be reasonably considered just this side of
rude.
"So, you played around on the site?" the guy who
called himself "Howard" asked me.
"I did! I had a
ball too."
"Tell me," he asked.
"I asked it to let me rate jazz artists and it started
me with all of the guys I would have figured a questionnaire on jazz might
include. Monk, Miles, Trane, Ella, and
you know...all of the rest."
"Was it easy for you to navigate?"
"Absolutely. The
1-7 rating system was fun too."
"You know why, don't you?"
Well, I absolutely didn't know the answer to that question,
but I knew enough to keep my mouth shut, in the hope that he'd tell me.
"1-5 and 1-10 rating systems are what people expect, so
anything that shakes that up is unusual and it forces people to think about
their choices in a different way. Also,
the number 7 holds meanings for lots of people."
"The Seven Deadly Sins, seven days of the week, The
Seven Samurai..."
"Sure."
"Okay Michael, so you get that. Now dig this.
We found that people like to rate music because it lets them reflect on
the things they already know and like.
But you probably saw that there's a button that you can click on that
will allow you to learn about the roots of a given musician, or even other
musicians who have been influenced by him.
People who select this option don't realize it at the time, but when
they do that, we’re taking advantage of the individual preferences that we're
gathering from them. While they're
learning about musicians they may not know much about, our system is learning
more about the music that they might be interested in, music that they may not
even be aware exists. Eventually, the
system asks you if you'd like it to make some suggestions for you, based on
what it's learned about you."
"I saw that," I replied. "It recommended that I buy some
recordings by a trumpet player named Nicholas Payton."
Payton was far from well known in 1995. He'd played in drummer Elvin Jones' band and
had also performed with pianist Marcus Roberts after Roberts had finished
playing with trumpeter Wynton Marsalis.
Payton had cut a record under his own name in '94, but it would be three
more years before he would make a big splash by winning a Grammy for his
excellent work with trumpet legend Doc Cheatham, just before Cheatham died in
1997. But firefly had recommended that I
go buy Payton's earliest release, "From This Moment", which I did.
"I loved the disc that the site recommended."
"Cool. So what
did you do next?"
"I went back and rated more music and asked for more
recommendations."
"Glad you dig!" the guy said happily.
"I just want to know one more
thing, ‘Howard’."
"Sure."
"Where's the money?"
"What do you mean?"
"The money, 'Howard'. Where does the money come from to support all
of this? You folks have created a site
that collects and dispenses an incredible amount of data. That's not a cheap little enterprise to
maintain. Where do you get the money to
keep this thing going?"
"Howard" was
sphinxlike. I couldn't even hear him
breathing.
"Look," I insisted,
"I see that you have a fulfillment page that links to a small retailer of
CDs and that they'll ship the product out to the user. But man, even if you were getting 15%, which
I bet you're not, it still couldn't add up to much cash at all.”
I asked him again, "Come on,
where's the money?"
The next episode of SlipNot will be published on June 30th.
If you'd like to read SlipNot in its entirety, GO
HERE.
No comments:
Post a Comment