How To Improve Your Recommendations
January 1, 2007
SocialFeed recommends news and blogs for you from RSS feeds. The recommendations are made from feeds that your neighbors find interesting. Recommendations are prioritized according to how important the SocialFeed system thinks they are to you. A recommendation’s priority is also based on how many of your neighbors are interested in the same story and how similar these neighbors are to you. In the SocialFeed system these neighbors are called recommendation contributors. If you want to improve the recommendations, you need to find better contributors. There are two ways to do this:
The first way is to let SocialFeed find better or more similar neighbors for you. In order to find better neighbors, SocialFeed must more precisely understand your preferences. You can improve your preferences and profile in the following ways:
1. In the Search & Manage Sources menu, select categories you like using the Directory & Search tab, subscribe to sources you want to read using the Manage Subscription tab, and register feeds using the Add RSS tab.
2. In the Settings menu, select languages and locations.
3. Read whatever you like. Save or post a comment. Forward articles you want to share with your friends. SocialFeed tracks all these activities and uses them to find users similar to you.
The second way to improve your recommendations is to use feedback. This allows you to control your recommendations directly. When you see a story recommended to you under the Recommended tab, you will also see an “I Don’t Like This” button
By clicking this button, the level of similarity between you and the neighbor who recommend the story is decreased. The next time SocialFeed gives you a new recommendation, contributions from this user are given less importance.
These are the two ways to receive better recommendations in SocialFeed.
