On the real-time web as a source of recommendation knowledge

The so-called real-time web (RTW) is a web of opinions, comments, and personal viewpoints, often expressed in the form of short, 140-character text messages providing abbreviated and personalized commentary in real-time. Twitter is undoubtedly the king of the RTW. It boasts 100+ million users and generates in the region of 50m tweets per day. This RTW data is far from the structured data (ratings, product features, etc.) familiar to recommender systems research, but it is useful to consider its applicability to recommendation scenarios. In this short paper we describe an experiment to look at harnessing the real-time opinions of movie fans, expressed through the Twitter-like short textual reviews available on the Blippr service (www.blippr.com). In particular we describe how users and movies can be represented from the terms used in their associated reviews and describe a number of experiments to highlight the recommendation potential of this RTW data-source and approach.