Goombah: music recommendation system

Goombah could become a really cool piece of software.

It connects to your iTunes Library, gets your Playcount for each song and compares this to others in the Goombah-Community: Voila, you get your recommendations for songs which you don't have but others with a similar taste hear a lot.

The system just opened to a Beta test, so there aren't that much users online, but still, the recommendations for me aren't that bad:

• Red Hot Chili Peppers - Californication
• Eminem - Sing For The Moment
• Red Hot Chili Peppers - Easily
• Audioslave - Like a Stone
• Eminem - White America
• Radiohead - Paranoid Android
• Moby - Porcelain
• Radiohead - Karma Police
• Eminem - Drips
• Eminem - Business
• ...

I don't know exactly how Eminem made it into the list, I have no Eminem song in my Library and I can't think of any of my songs to be similar to his music, but anyway...Red Hot Chili Peppers isn't that bad, Radiohead is also quite good and I just listened to Audioslave, this is my kind of music, too.

OK, the recommendations are somehow "mainstream", you won't find the ultimate underdog band no one ever heard of, but still...let's wait for the users (that means you) and the recommendations are going to be better.

The software does a good job in hiding what it's doing. In the FAQ, you can read that it uses BitTorrent for exchanging information with other users, which is a nice use of the technology in my opinion, but besides a warning to open some ports in your firewall and the initial connect at the very first time you run it you can't see it connecting or using the net. There isn't even a way to choose different Neighbors (the people whose libraries are used for your recommendations) or to recalculate the Library.

For example, I got a recommendation for Coldplay - A Rush Of Blood To The Head. I was a little bit confused, since I own the album, and then I saw that iTunes named it "Rush Of Blood To The Head". I added the "A". OK, so how can I tell Goombah to rescan my library? I didn't find a way.

Now, a few hours later, the recommendations for Coldplay are gone, it must have found the change. Still, it's a pitty you can't trigger the update on your own.

So, I will keep running the software, at least since I provide the biggest Library in the Neighborhood (7.068 songs and counting...), the second one has something about 2.800. Besides, I am waiting for better recommendations...so start using it!