Now that we have the basis of several significant improvements to Mahout’s recommender it seems like we need to go the last step and provide a service. Without this it is left to the user to do a lot of integration making the current next gen somewhat incomplete.
Using the Hadoop mapreduce code you can get all recs for all people using collaborative filtering data or you can use the in-memory single machine recommender if you have a small dataset. The next generation would require Solr or Elasticsearch so why not go the extra step and provide a recommender API on top? At very least it would give users a single machine API they can call, analogous to the in-memory recommender of Mahout 0.9. But it would also be indefinitely scalable. Is anyone interested in discussing this here?
