Friends don’t give the best recommendations
Chris Anderson wrote a post on his Long Tail blog yesterday that talked a bit about how friends don’t make the best long tail recommendations. His point is that the best reviews/recommendations don’t come from friends, but rather from a variety of communities made up of strangers who have demonstrated to him that they are the best place for information in a particular subject area. As he explains:
In a sense, you can think of all your filters as being part of orthogonal trust networks, often with the only common member being yourself. They rarely, if ever, overlap.
Thus, recommendation networks that are made up of friends won’t be as effecient as those made up of strangers gathering for the subject/product itself. What he’s saying is 100% in line with my experience online and how I gather information online.