Hunch API

Hello,

I am building an app as part of a research project for my MBA program at NYU and I am trying to figure out the best way to get recommendations that are based on two people's preferences. The app is a Facebook app that gives recommendations on things to do on a date, based on the Facebook likes of the person you are going on a date with. You can check out the preliminary app at the link below. Currently, I am pulling the Facebook likes from the selected friend who I want date recommendations for, appending the Facebook object ID with fb_ and feeding it into the likes field for the get-recommendations api call. What I would like to do, is get the results that best fit both the user and the selected date's preferences. The two options for this that I have identified are:

1) Call get recommendations for both the user and the date's Facebook likes and compare and filter the results. The problem with this is that the result sets can be very big and pulling just a subset can miss any overlaps. Its also inefficient.

2) Just append the user's likes to the selected friend's likes and then call get recommendations for the combined list of like preferences. The problem with this is that is wont actually be that accurate because the list of preferences wont reflect either the user's or the dates actual preferences.

Is there a better way to do this? Any help is greatly appreciated.

You can check out the app at the following link, but it is very alpha, so make sure that you are signed in to Facebook BEFORE you visit the link and grant it permission to use your location. Your browser also may warn you that there is some insecure content - click "load anyway" (in Chrome at least) and it will reload the app and then it will work fine. I am not sure why this is, Heroku is giving me some issues. The link:

cold-lightning-7055.herokuapp.com

Right now it only gives the places to eat recommendation. I plan on adding more as well as recommended mixtape music (a date must!) complete with spotify links. I am working on a work-around hackish way to recommend "things to talk about" and I have made some good progress here...it is not an out-of-the-box Hunch topic. Thanks for your help and any feedback is greatly appreciated!.

- Jeff W.

Posted at: 12:17AM on Feb. 18, 2012. [ permalink ]