The Filter, the media recommendation engine that we covered last April, has opened its doors to the public. The Peter Gabriel-backed company offers an entertainment start page that provides recommendations on movies, music, and online video (it is mostly focused on perfecting its music recommendations for the time being).
In the following video Peter Gabriel explains why we need sites like The Filter to reduce the overwhelming abundance of information available online down to a manageable level.
$8.5 million in funding, wow. That must buy allot of filtering ‘algorithms’.
Gabriel’s physical appearance would indicate some serious drinking — isn’t a bulbous nose a slight giveaway?
Peter Gabriel looks like the priest in the Fifth Element…
Sorry, that’s the only thing I could think of when looking at this post.
server down
Sounds like he’s describing Last.FM
He is lying - his eyes go right-down corner…
In my tiny experiments it doesn’t compare well to Last.fm, Finetune or Imeem, mostly because its encumbered with the old media need to flog you as much stuff as possible, so even though I have The Killers (the album), The Filter wants me to buy it again, unless of course I’m happy listening to 30 second snippets of everything.
May be I need an account to listen to full tracks?
And, my god, is it slow!
Sounds interesting but it’s way too slow to be of any use at the moment.
Dave - He’s British, we drink, get over it
Okay, tried to sign-up but the first step stopped me in my tracks. It asks for three genres of music you like, but I like only two of those genres. Who picks those? Most aren’t even relevant to my culture. What about the others I like? Whoops.
Hi Jay,
We’re sorry about the useless genres. At the moment we use the AMG catalogue to power our database, covering things like the genres that artists/movies sit in and the artist biographies etc. This really isn’t good enough for our needs as a longtail discovery service and creating usable, niche genres is something we’re working very hard on at the moment. It’s still a beta product, after all.
Sorry about the speed of it all… even Twitter is loading faster than The Filter at the moment!
oh yeah, i forgot, i need gabriel and his cohorts to tell me what’s good…thanks. i’ll pass.
server down… Service Unavailable
$8.5m to crash their servers on launch day?
FAIL.
I think the operative term to Peter Gabriel is ‘Go Fuck Yourself’.
I’ll try this out, but right now, there is no web service other than Pandora.com that can actually recommend music I’ve not heard of before on my own. Last.fm et al can only seem to tell me about music I’m already aware of. The clear difference is in their methods, with last.fm using the “neighbor” model (people who like what you like also like…) and Pandora actually employing a lot of DJs to catalog sound. They call it the music genome and its brilliant. Until computer algorithms are good enough to actually analyze the sound files and not just people’s listening habits, foraging new frontiers is going to be very hard for them.