Tattoos & Recommendation Engines

Recently, Pinterest started sending me a lot of tattoo recommendations - here’s the latest:This was the second tattoo recommendation email that was sent to me on Saturday alone.  I’ve probably gotten over a hundred from Pinterest over the last several months.If you know me well, you understand that I’m one of the least likely people in the world to ever get a tattoo.  I don’t have anything against tattoos - just that they’re not for me.As you might imagine, I was a bit surprised to start getting these recommendations.  I discovered that one of my early pins, which I posted back in 2010, has been re-pinned over 600 times:From what I can tell, the vast majority of those “re-pins” were to “tattoo ideas” boards.  Hence Pinterest made the intuitive, automated, algorithmic leap to “Rob is interested in tattoos.”When automated recommendations are bad enough, they’ll turn users away from a service.  Especially for me, now that I’m getting tattoo recommendations from Pinterest several times a week now.  The only reason I haven’t turned those notifications off from Pinterest is that I’m amused and interested to follow the natural progression of Pinterest’s future recommendations.On one hand, I guess I could look at this situation and think “here’s a perfect example of where automated recommendation engines don’t work.”  On the other hand, given that this is one of my favorite signs in the world, maybe Pinterest is telling me I should seriously consider my first tattoo.