perfect info, yes, it's a way of discovering things that bore no relationship to what you had already seen, except that your cohort also liked them.
You triggered me to remember additional elements of my idea. the 80's saw the arrival of the CD-ROM, and I thought "Consumer Reports can't publish a detailed chart of everybody's taste, but I'll bet their movie voting database would fit on a CD-ROM, and a piece of statistical software could figure out what movies each person would like." But I didn't think people would pay enough for the service to get a new CD-ROM in the mail every month, and if it didn't stay up to date with the latest VHS releases :) it wouldn't be useful, and Consumers Union was such a ... purist/hairshirt type organization how could anybody even work with them.
You triggered me to remember additional elements of my idea. the 80's saw the arrival of the CD-ROM, and I thought "Consumer Reports can't publish a detailed chart of everybody's taste, but I'll bet their movie voting database would fit on a CD-ROM, and a piece of statistical software could figure out what movies each person would like." But I didn't think people would pay enough for the service to get a new CD-ROM in the mail every month, and if it didn't stay up to date with the latest VHS releases :) it wouldn't be useful, and Consumers Union was such a ... purist/hairshirt type organization how could anybody even work with them.