It's all good, I think I need to stop hanging out on YC today. I have to catch up to Matt on this Cocoa Programming book, and then I've got a final project to prep for, and finally a meeting tomorrow with the company to talk about some marketing stuff.
Clearly YC is not where I should be right now :)
In fact, there was one graduate student who was in our campus last semester was doing research in this area. He did a very good job on this. And, he won the first ACM machine learning prize for the paper. If you are interested in this area, you can actually go to the library and find out the paper. Now, I think he is now working in the Microsoft Research Team(the usual career path in our campus).
I actually did a tiny recommendation engine using one of the collaborative filtering algorithm - slope one predictor last two days. It will be up on the web very soon. I am having problems updating my server because rubygems.org is down!