What is Recommender Service?
Here you can find an overview of the Jive Genius Recommender Service.
The Recommender Service is an engine that collects and analyzes user activity in the community to recommend useful content, people, and places to individual users, and reports trending content and people. The Recommender looks at business relationships, user expertise, and areas of interest based on a user's behavior in the community to suggest relevant content that Jive knows a user has not yet seen. The more users interact on the community, the better their results become in the Recommended for You widget.
- Recommended for You widget
- Trending Content widget
- Trending People widget
- Your Trending and Popular Content results listed on the Activity tab of a user's profile
The Recommender Service obeys all content permissions and will not recommend content that a user doesn't have permission to view. Therefore, users may not see the same Trending Content or Trending People, depending on their content viewing permissions, when they logged in, and when the last Recommender content poll occurred. Recommended for You is dynamic. Its recommendations change based on a user's shifting interests and affinities. The Recommender even responds to changes in the org chart.
For more information about the architecture of the Recommender Service and its relationship to the Activity Engine, see What is the Activity Engine?.
Trending Content and Trending People
The Recommender analyzes content and people over a period of time and uses that data to display the Trending People and Trending Content in the system. The Recommender counts the things users do (such as create content, follow people, and join groups) and, importantly, how users interact with each other's contributions. For example, users liking another user's content, marking answers helpful or correct, and viewing content all count toward the trending status of a user or a piece of content. The Recommender weights the various counts in its equations and creates a list of users and content with the highest trending counts over a given time period. Trending People recognizes and rewards users who are a positive influence on the community.
This information is passed to the Trending Content and Trending People widgets. They are updated every 15 minutes and display 10 entries by default. These settings are not configurable.
Trending Content and Trending People are based on global algorithms; they are not user-specific. However, users may not see the same trending people or content based on their viewing permissions. For example, if a user does not have permission to see trending content items 1-10, they instead see items 11-20 if they have the correct viewing permissions for those items. The Trending People often are the same for all community users, but it can be different depending on when users logged in and when the last Recommender content poll occurred. Besides, a person may be trending because of something they are doing in a secret group. In that case, you would not be able to see why the person is trending by looking at their recent activity.
For all new users, the Recommended for You widget displays a short notice explaining that Jive Genius is working on creating their recommendations. If you are upgrading from a previous version, the Recommender engine processes all existing connections, follows, and other activities of users. This allows it to capture previous activity (default is 30 days before the upgrade), which it then uses to make recommendations.
The number of likes displayed on a discussion listed in Trending Content is the total number of likes on that discussion plus the total number of likes of all the replies to the discussion.