I always get my best new music from friends who give me their suggestions, which is why I love the ability to browse another user's shared files; if they have one thing I like, it's pretty likely they'll have some other good stuff. I was thinking that this process of getting recommendations and discovering new media could be automated a bit. I've already figured out a way it might work.

Each user rates the files he/she is sharing. As you browse other user's files, you can mark them as having good taste in music (or any media). When you're ready, you tell the program to automatically d/l a certain number (or time amount) of music, based on the people's recommendations (their ratings) whose music you like.

An example:

I'm looking through Bob's collection and I really like what he's got on there. He's got a crazy eclectic taste, and a lot of things I've never heard of. I give Bob a rating based on how much I like his taste (1-10). When I'm interested in listening to new music, I run a script to download an hour of music. It looks through the people whose taste I trust and picks some songs they rate highly, and voila, I have top picks from people whose music collection I respect.

It could be expanded to find stuff similar to what you've rated highly, but this might be more difficult to do!

Any Feedback?

--Andy