[assiotis]

There is no reason why time of the day, temperature outside, whether Obama made a joke or not, etc can't all be features for a classifier to learn.

I love the idea of an algorithm anticipating my next move and I'd argue that for the vast majority of people you can find repeating patterns that are almost always relevant. These patterns will not be simple or obvious and as you currently pointed out, the lack of data is what is holding most innovation behind. I feel that companies that own the data like Amazon will have a lot to gain if they do a Netflix-style competition to improve their recommendations engine.

[crasshopper]

assiotis, have you tried giving a bazillion data points to an SVM? One needs a sensible kernel as well.