Getting started with your free Developer account

Submitted by Sugestio on 2 February 2011 - 3:33pm

Applications that want to use the recommendation service have a unique account key and a secret key associated with them. This website allows you to create one or more key pairs. Register here to try Sugestio free for thirty days.
 
After logging in, go to My Projects and click on "more details" to get some basic account information. We also keep a log of your service calls. We log requests that return either 202, 400 or 404 HTTP response codes. This way, you can check if all the data made it through okay, and you can review information on failed requests.
 
For free Developer accounts, we offer both personal recommendations and similar item recommendations based on standard collaborative filtering techniques. This algorithm requires only user behaviour (rating data) as input, so it is not really necessary to submit metadata about items or users. (but you may certainly do so, if your application involves rich content!)
 
While your developer account is active, our server will periodically update your recommendations based on the latest consumption data. Collaborative Filtering looks for users that exhibit similar behaviour, and recommends items that the user has not yet discovered. Let's assume that you have submitted the following five star ratings:

  • User A, item 1: 4 stars
  • User A, item 2: 5 stars
  • User A, item 3: 5 stars
  • User B, item 2: 4 stars
  • User B, item 3: 4 stars
  • User B, item 4: 5 stars

Users A and B are quite similar, having both given positive ratings to items 2 and 3. User A also liked item 1, which user B has not yet discovered. The next time recommendations are generated, user B will get item 1 in his list of recommended content. User A will get item 4 in theirs.
 
Do not hesitate to contact us if you have any questions or if you experience any difficulties!