Effective product recommendation using the real-time web

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 highly personalized commentary in real-time. Today, Twitter is undoubtedly the king of the RTW. It boasts 190 million users and generates in the region of 65m tweets per day. This RTW data is far from the structured data (movie ratings, product features, etc.) that is familiar to recommender systems research but it is useful to consider its applicability to recommendation scenarios. In this paper we consider harnessing the real-time opinions of users, expressed through the Twitter-like short textual reviews available on the Blippr service (www.blippr.com). In particular we describe how users and products can be represented from the terms used in their associated reviews and describe experiments to highlight the recommendation potential of this RTW data-source and approach.