Jessicah Mah: “Recommendations are crap!”

Jessicah Mah is a 17 year old serial entrepreneur and blogger who started her first business at 11 years old and a dedicated server company at the age of 13. She is now a sophomore in college but still loves starting businesses.

Mah expressed a common complaint on the web: We have so much clutter and there is no good to sort through all of it. There is way too much information and our e-mail inbox is cluttered with hundreds of unread or unanswered e-mails. Mah wants her mom’s and boyfriend’s e-mail to be on top instead of the latest spam e-mail.

Relevance is key because whether we like it or not, the web is all about me me me: “It’s all about me, we are all self absorbed and we want the internet to be about us.” Scoble may not agree with her because this morning his keynote focused on the value of his network and the value of his friends.

Friends are key to Mah’s idea of the future of relevancy on the web. Your most most desirable friends are those who share the same interests and search results should model more like a buddy list. Mah admits that this all sounds so simple, giving users relevant data, but the current crappy recommendations show is that it is not. Search and recommendations should focus more on tracking the relations between people in order to provide relevant results.

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Mah showed a great amount of energy on and off stage while we are nearing the end of the conference. However, her talk was somewhat shallow by stating common problems the every day web user is dealing with. What are the solutions and how would these change or impact the web? Hopefully Mah can use her great energy to provide us with some more in depth observations next time. At her age, she has her whole future ahead to start a new business to contribute to a less cluttered web. We are looking forward to it.