Amazon like Ecommerce site and Recommendation system

Question

I am planning to implement a basic recommendation system that uses Facebook Connect or similar social networking site API's to connect a user's profile, do an analysis based on tags and use the results to generate item recommendations on my e-commerce site (works similar to Amazon).

I do believe I need to divide parts into such:

1. Fetching social networking data via API's.(Indeed user allows this)

2. Analyze these data and generate tokes.

3. By using information tokens, do item recommendations on my e-commerce site.

EG: I am a fan of "The Strokes" band on my Facebook account, system analyzes this and recommends me "The Strokes Live" CD.

For any part(fetching data, doing recommendation based on tags...), what algorithm and method would you recommend/ is used?

Answer 1

Good practical books on these kind of algorithms are:

• Collective Intelligence in Action, Satnam Alag, Manning, 2008, ISBN 1933988312
• Algorithms of the Intelligent Web, Haralambos Marmanis, Manning 2009, ISBN 1933988665
• Programming Collective Intelligence: Building Smart Web 2.0 Applications, Toby Segaran, O'Reilly Media 2007, ISBN 0596529325

Answer 2

Being on your place I would definitely had a look at the algorithms and articles published during the Netflix contest. See forum and the sites of the best teams.