This is fascinating. I was aware of one half of what the article talks about: me and my co-author broke the anonymity of the netflix data (see http://www.cs.ute

This is fascinating. I was aware of one half of what the article talks about: me and my co-author broke the anonymity of the netflix data (see http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~arvindn/ http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~arvindn/ for paper/press links). Our main insight was that everyone's movie watching behavior is different. The quote "User tastes are infinite shades of grey" in the article just about sums it up perfectly. What's funny is that I keep arguing for using more meta-data with my friends who are participating in the competition. I guess I didn't realize that data mining algorithms actually capture the nuances of user tastes.