Scott Adams's advice:
The worst type of gift is anything in the home décor category. You have a 1% chance of picking something the recipient considers a perfect fit for the house. If the recipient puts your hideous gift on the mantle, it will serve as a year-round reminder of your bad gift-giving skills and your even worse sense of taste.
Walmart launched a Facebook application called Shopycat that uses an algorithm to help folks pick out a good gift:
Since gifting is a practice humans naturally struggle with, maybe algorithms can do a better job. After using Shopycat, Harinarayan learned his wife was a fan of “Game of Thrones,” the TV series on HBO. She has posted several times on Facebook about the show, but he hadn’t noticed. “Facebook is so transient and things flow by. Here’s a way to aggregate it all and put it in one place,” he said.
Rob Horning keeps his enthusiasm at bay:
[I]n an algorithmically airless world of perfect emotional efficiency, where every gift given is the right one and the risk of social faux pas are eliminated, I’m not sure what will be left of the holiday spirit, which seems to hinge ultimately on a generous amount of familial forgiveness.
The Dish 