MemeStreams is the next Google.

Chayes: I think that recommendation systems are going to be as important as search algorithms. In a recent piece of work, we came up with a list of desired properties for a recommendation system, and what we ended up doing was proving mathematically that there is no possible recommendation system that has all these desired properties. So I would have to choose which properties I am willing to give up and design recommendation systems that preserve the properties I want most.

TR: What kinds of properties?

Chayes: There's transitivity. If I trust the recommendation of person B, and person B trusts the recommendation of person C, then I should trust the recommendation of person C.

It could be that at some point somebody could go onto a social network and say, "Here are the properties that I want for my recommendation system," and a different person could go in and say, "Here are the properties that I want," and they could get two different recommendation systems.