On Amazon you can get recommendations based on items you own and rated. I constantly keep updating my account. It has such a large comsumer base that you never know what might come up. Some pretty good things have been recommended to me. Does anyone else use this feature of Amazon? Discover anything good?
I use it quite a bit. My wish list is pretty huge. I get recommendations based on stuff I buy and stuff I want. Netflix has a similar system where they recommend movies based on your ratings. At least half of my queue is made up of movies that have been recommended by Netflix. It’s a great way to discover stuff I’ve never heard of. I love Amazon… and Netflix.
I use it quite a bit, mostly for music recommendations.
I use it a lot too. It’s a great time-waster. "Yes, yes, no, no, no, own it, no, yes, not in a million years, yes, maybe, own it, no. My recommendations are usually pretty well-selected for me, although every now and then it throws me a weird one.
It’s the weird ones that I enjoy.
Waaaaay back in the day, Amazon recommended one of my favorite books, Hard-Boiled at the End of the World by Haruki Murakami.
Since then, sadly enough, I haven’t gotten anything good out of them, though. I keep looking, but since then nothing has really grabbed me. Isn’t that weird? Maybe I’ve just gotten too picky. I always have at least five books that I know I want to read on my wishlist, so I guess I’m not as open to random suggestions.
I don’t buy music from Amazon, so it’s mostly just book selections. The vast majority of the time they recommend stuff to me I already own, or have already read, or have heard about already and won’t buy because I don’t care for the author. Very few surprises.
Never found them to be very useful, due to two particular failings:
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It goes for easy suggestions that I could figure out myself. I know I like Douglass Adams. I prefer things that are similar from other authors, not every weird combination of his books that has ever been sold. Very tough to get it to branch out like this, in fiction especially.
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Random popular stuff, because I bought something popular. Buying “The Incredibles” will get you random other things in the top 10 (like “Ray”), just because a lot of people buy two different popular things.
I’ve used the recommendations mostly for books and music. Comes in handy when I’m looking at a genre of music, or books on the same subject. I also used the recommendation to buy a DVD of Lucia Y El Sexo. Interesting Spanish film. I’ve watched it twice. The first time I almost ‘got it’. The second time was with a friend, and there were conversation interruptions. I’ll need to see it again. It has an interesting ‘loop thing’ going on.
Most definitely. I’ve found several bands I enjoy IMMENSELY through the amazon.com suggestions. A lot of time they’re not exactly what I would like but pretty frequently there are really good suggestions for bands I wouldn’t have found otherwise.
I practically never visit my recommendations page, because I was always somewhat perturbed by Amazon recommending Harry Potter and LoTR to me over and over again, as I have never purchased anything remotely fantastical from the site, and dislike both of those things immensely.
What I do follow through sometimes are the 'customers who bought [insert what you’ve just bought] also bought… ’ suggestions, as mentioned above, and have found some interesting stuff that way.
I find the music suggestions to be pretty reliable. I too update things however I can and waste a lot of time going through the suggestions. The first time I really looked through them I owned half of what was recommended. I still download to preview before buying, but I usually like what they recommend. In fact, Amazon and my boyfirend are the only sources I truly trust to recommend music to me.
I discovered Terry Pratchett, back before he’d become huge in the states, through an Amazon recommendation.
I have used it when buying gifts. I found a specific book we wanted to get for my fiancee’s father and it suggested another book we ended up buying. He ended up liking the suggested book better than the one we originally looked for.
I’ve never used it for myself simply because I don’t usually buy stuff like that from the internet. I prefer to wander the aisles of book stores - preferably used-book stores.
I don’t use the Amazon recommendations nearly as much as the Listmania! and So You Want To… guides. I find that I can browse through those pretty endlessly and get a lot better recommendations, now that I get the system. I avoid things like “So You Want To Be the Biggest Douglas Adams Fan?” because, as SmackFu suggested, it just tends to be a listing of every variation by that author and tend toward “Best British Books of 2003,” which is going to be a more varied list but has some definition (publishing date, author’s nationality).
I mainly use this feature, however, to pick out books at my local library and have only made the infrequent Amazon.com purchase. Sorry, Amazon guys.
I browse both the recommended items and the listmania lists. 
Very bad for people with short attention spans and the ‘Gosh - I never knew that existed but now I must have it!’ gene…