“Machines helping humans help humans”

How’s that for a geeky title that may sound like it has nothing to do with “where shall I go on my next vacation?” But that is exactly the philosophy Wanderlust Society has adopted in its mission to help our Society take better trips.

The title quoted above is from former fellow Amazon Personalization team colleague and friend, Greg Linden. Greg was a legend on the Amazon Personalization team as the inventor of the collaborative filtering based recommendations algorithm. Over the weekend I read an article in The Guardian, “In the age of the algorithm, the human gatekeeper is back.” The article iterated to me what Wanderlust Society is striving to do. Every location and suggestion is entered into Wanderlust Society by a human. We did not buy a catalogue of ideas and dump it in to our system and then hope our algorithm can then determine if the place is somewhere you would want to go. Our theory is there is already too much information out there to sift through. Let the trusted humans do the discovering of The Best places to go, then once we have a critical mass of data, the algorithms step in to make appropriate recommendations for you.

Spotify is an example of how this can work beautifully for a great listening experience. Once Spotify users hand create playlists Spotify can then identify other users with similar tastes and make personalized music recommendations.

We recently completed Phase 1 of creating Wanderlust Society. We are the “playlist creation” stage — but for us that is “itinerary creation stage.” Soon we will layer on the recommended itineraries from the Society to make your trip planning easier, faster and more enjoyable with recommendations from real people you can trust.