Finally, after no less than 3 years of having first asked them for it, it’s happened. Amazon.com started offering RSS feeds for your Public Reviews.
This is the Amazon.com page of my Public Reviews, and this is the corresponding RSS feed.
While it took a while, I will still say thanks to Amazon for making it happen. I will look for a way to integrate this to the blog.
I received an invite today to join a new community by Amazon. It’s called Askville and it’s pretty much the same thing as Ask Yahoo!: a place where you can go to, in order to get your “questions” answered.
Am I alone, or does Amazon seem a little slow moving lately? I was happy when I recently saw them implement comments as a new feature in their reviews (something that was loooooong overdue) but in general they seem to be a couple of steps behind the other large sites.
Granted that they are not the same thing as Google or Yahoo! but I admit I just don’t see them the same way I used to before… and it doesn’t seem I am alone: this blogger is analyzing Amazon’s stock performance and he feels they are a little overvalued as well.
So, bottom line: don’t get me wrong, because I still love them (I continue to be a committed Amazon.com reviewer and customer) but they are starting to feel more and more like a retailer… which is probably all they are, after all. 
When I read things like this I get really excited! It makes it even MORE exciting to be working in this field “in this day and age”.
I honestly think Amazon.com has a better chance of getting something like this accomplished. The reason is that their user base (and user database, as a result) is much larger. Therefore, they can pull better recommendations, if they simply go beyond the obvious: “people that liked this MOVIE typically liked this other MOVIE”. They can pull elements from different media. Example: if someone owns/ranked high a Philip K. Dick novel, there’s a good chance the Science Fiction recommendations (whether among movies or books) would be a hit… even if the person hadn’t seen 2001 or Star Trek.
What other parameters you think would be useful in building a succesful recommendation to a user?
Maybe the title is not all that exciting to click on, I agree. But I recommend you check out this site. This guy has a number of Flash-based pages, all of which follow a mosaic theme (if you partly close your eyes, you can spot the “background” image for the theme). When you mouse over any of the mosaics of the image, each of them is the cover of a book (in the case of the page I am referring to, Art Books), which pops up providing you with a larger version of the cover, book details and a link back to Amazon.com to buy it.
There was an insane amount of work put into this. Truly admirable!
Isn’t it interesting? With all the technology in the world, still images are something that is very hard for a computer to describe. A computer can’t tell an image of a bird from an image of an airplane (so to speak).
So tech companies have resorted to programs (and I am not talking about software programs) to have individuals label (or tag, if you may) images in an effort to get this process under way without having to spend an arm and a leg. Amazon did it a while back with their Amazon Mechanical Turk program, having people mark photos of storefronts as corresponding to the right business in towns across the U.S. Now Google is doing the same thing with theie Google Image Labeler program, applying the concept to their image search.
This should make image search results better in the long run. However (I just gave the image labeler a shot), I am now scratching my head over something… Amazon gave you credit (a few cents each time) for labeling. Google is giving you “points” (I got 300 points) for doing this. It’s not clear, though, what those points are good for. It seems they’re pretty good for Google! 
I said if Amazon ever started offering groceries, I’d give it a shot… so I will!
Today was an interesting day. It’s not like it was a surprise at all, but announcements about things under way and things to happen popped up all of a sudden. On one side, Apple continues to expand their media offerings on their iTunes store, including more and more TV shows and movies. Today, for instance, I found out they added Dora The Explorer to their lineup of videos (I guess cool news for parents…) But on the same day word broke out about the new Google Video Store, going beyong their video.google.com space, which until now only offered user-submitted videos. With video as an open front where they are going up against Apple (and Pixar ironically being responsible for over 10% of the sales over iTunes), there was word about a possible Google Tunes Music Store.
As if this news wasn’t enough (it was enough for me), there word also broke about Amazon.com’s formal commitment to compete against all of the above (and Netflix, watch out!) offering downloadable movies starting in April. Perhaps a latecomer to this “party”, but nonetheless a very important force to keep an eye on, considering their penetration of the online shopping segment and the intelligence they’ve gathered over the years that now allows them to give right-on recommendations for other entertainment options when you visit one of their product pages.
Who will win? Who will loose? If you ask me, there will be some consolidation in this field, and the winners will end up being those who remain flexible and mindful of the important things for consumers. I put my money on Apple, Google and Amazon. Netflix, I am a bit worried about, because I don’t see them (yet) breaking away from their current DVD-based model, and stuck there competing against Blockbuster.
Well, we got to the 1,100 review mark, and now we’re at #81 in the Amazon.com reviewer’s rankings. I am happy.
The review in question corresponded to “The Quick and Dirty Guide to Pilates“, which I happened to receive over mail, to review it, and found it to be quite impressive. Check it out. Who knows? You may find it useful!
Get a life, you!
On a side note, I wanted to do an anti-SPAM campaign in Amazon. I have been seeing someone who really needs to get a job and a life, going in consistently every so many reviews I write and posting a negative vote on each one of them.
If you are reading this, just wanted to let you know that I reported you to Amazon. You will be spotted…
In the meantime, all of you are invited to come over and check out my reviews. If you feel they’re worth voting for: express your opinion (positive of negative, doesn’t matter), but have it be your opinion, and not like this person who just comes by and throws only negative votes, as if by diminishing other Top 100 reviewers s/he will go higher up in the ranks…
Some lateral implications of the new Amazon search engine, A9.com.
It is clear to me the concept, beyond just integrating online and “offline” (book) searches, is bound toward decoupling the existing search mechanism from the parent site (Amazon.com) to make it available without having to go through them, for the purposes of enhancing search tools “outside” giving searchers the ability to search “inside books” with the added value (for Amazon) of allowing users to have all the intelligence that Amazon has developed over the years to also be able to return relevant product results, which ultimately enhances their bottom line.
Thoughts?