A promising, brightly-colored package wrapped in ribbons, torn open to reveal—socks. Bummer. We’ve given awful gifts, and we’ve received our fair share (The Star Wars Cookbook, really?) Come holiday time, it would be helpful to have some secret insight into what friends and relatives might actually like. Enter GiveEmThis, a new service that makes gift suggestions based on a person’s activities on Facebook and/or Twitter. Connect to Facebook through giveemthis.com, select a friend, enter their Twitter handle, and the service will scrape their interests, status updates, links, events, quotes, and tweets, then spit out gift recs fit for a box. (No, the service won’t suggest putting that thing in a box. The algorithm blocks dirty gifts using a custom filter it calls a “conscience.” We call it good taste.) How well does it work? We gave it a try with a few of our best buds. Some recommendations were spot-on; others will get you unfollowed in real life.

Photos: Venter: Getty Images; all others: Corbis