The Trouble With Recommendations on iTunes, Netflix, Amazon, etc.

OK, Netflix, iTunes, etc: remember that you heard it here first... What's missing from your recommendations and content samples?

Here's the key, folks: FREAKING ASK! All you gotta' do is have a form available if people want to choose to use it, where you input a bunch of your favorites, be they groups, movies, brands, gadgets, soft drinks, WHATEVER! Give the engine something to chew on instead of making it pick stuff out of thin air or based on "averages' or what everyone else is doing, or even based on what you did and bought yesterday. Not to throw that info out, but combine it with the "personal input" and give the machine a fighting chance at being much more relevant. I agree that many of these engines can be irrelevant, and to an extent that's cool because you sometimes see the unexpected, and that's a big part of life, growth and learning. But if you want to know what I like, JUST ASK! Isn't this the idea behind customized search in the firsts place? Then when you want to introduce me to things outside my little world, you'll have a better idea of what I may be interested in instead of basing it solely on what someone else did, or what I did on your site in the course of my visit, or what I bought that may be for me, my wife, Uncle Pete or Little Jimmy.

On a different note: biggest problem with iTunes and it keeps me from buying songs all the time and prompts me to sign off from the site in frustration: the song snippets are too damn short, and they give you only the first part of the song like a machine would instead of someone hand-picking the catchy hook of the song, "the real relation, the underlying theme" - to quote the lyrics of Rush's Neil Peart. You get 30 seconds of inane intro that tells you little of what the song really sounds like at least 70 percent of the time. How can I buy a song when I hear an intro that sounds nothing like the mid-song beat? That's like asking a computer to recommend things to you based on what Louie looked at last time he shop-surfed.