We have written here extensively about emerging Amazon Web Services, as well as the latest consumer facing innovations at the world's largest online retailer. Amazon has consistently delivered exciting technologies, particularly in the last few years. The Web Services play, for example, first caused some puzzlement on Wall Street - but they've since upgraded the Amazon stock.
In another recent post we discussed recommendation engines and spent time dissecting Amazon's recommendation techniques. There is little doubt that Amazon's recommendation system is the foundation of Amazon's consumer strategy. Their front page is nothing but a showcase of these different recommendation algorithms: buy things you just clicked on, buy things other people who clicked on this bought, etc.
In this post we look at Amazon's attempt to take their recommendation system on the road - into the blogosphere. Most people refer to this as widgetizing content, but in typical Amazon fashion they are calling it something different - "linking options". It is part of the Amazon Associates offering. Specifically what we discuss below is "Omakase Links" [Ed: where does Amazon come up with these names?!], where "you can allow Amazon to recommend products to your site visitors".
When CoRank launched in March it was a social news ranking site (like Digg) that filtered news based on your sources -- people whose opinion you value. Or, as CoRank founder Rogelio Bernal Andreo told us, it was "yet another boring bookmarking site." Today, the site relaunched with a new focus: allowing users to create their own, branded social news and bookmarking site based on CoRank's technology using a set of simple online tools.
Rogelio, who is also the founder of eGrupos, one of the largest Spanish-speaking social networks on the web, said that a trial run of the new CoRank on the Spanish version revealed some demand for this type of build-your-own-digg service (Rumoreame is an example of a customized CoRank running on the Spanish language version that is getting some use).
Last week, I attended the Internet Identity Workshop. Doc Searls, one of the organizers of the conference, ran multiple sessions on a concept he has been developing with others in his role as a fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center, called Vendor Relation Management (or VRM.) The concept behind VRM is to "provide customers with tools for engaging with vendors in ways that work for both parties."
According to Doc, he originally starting thinking about the idea after a conversation with his wife discussing why she couldn't "take her shopping cart with her across different sites." While at first this seems like an odd request, because we're used to thinking about the site driving the transaction, interestingly when the transaction drives the site it becomes a provocative question. This is why VRM is often characterized as conceptually the inverse of CRM systems.
Today in San Francisco social networking site Facebook officially announced their much talked about open platform, for companies wanting to hook into the Facebook network. There's plenty of blog coverage of this event, so in this post I hope to synthesize it all and explore what it means...
Today Facebook launched "The Platform", a system enabling 3rd party companies to integrate their services inside of Facebook user pages. The platform will go-live later tonight. About 70 companies have apps set up already (more on those below). As explained in an excellent FAQ by one of Facebook's 3rd party partners, SplashCast Media, this platform goes beyond the ability to post media from outside into Facebook and it goes beyond the previous Facebook API (a read-only Application Programming Interface (API) released on August 15th, 2006, and at the time also called The Platform). With the new platform, outside companies are now being allowed to deploy advanced functionality inside the Facebook site.
Google News and Techmeme are two services that I use extensively every day. They are also two services whose technology is way over my head and are both eminently impressive. But Google News could, in my opinion, learn a lot from Techmeme, which has no rival when it comes to tech buzz aggregation. And Techmeme could learn a few things from Google, too.
It should probably be noted that Google News and Techmeme have very different aims. Google News aggregates news from across a broad spectrum of categories, mostly from mainstream sources. Techmeme, on the other hand, highlights buzzworthy news from a focused niche (technology), mostly from blogs. But they are very similar beasts. They both aggregate news very well and algorithmically decide what are the top breaking stories of the day.
As we reported, CBS' new online strategy is to court web 2.0 sites and allow their content to spread virally across social media sites. The CBS Audience Network initiative already includes deals with AOL, Microsoft, CNET Networks, Comcast, Joost, Bebo, Brightcove, Netvibes, Sling Media, Veoh, and Amazon, Apple and Yahoo. Today, CBS is adding to that list with another batch of partnerships with web 2.0 media companies. Notably, widget providers MuseStorm, Clearspring, and Goowy Media (makers of yourminis), and slideshow creation services RockYou! and Slide.
"We now want to empower our audience to be creative and deepen their experience with our content by allowing them to share and embed CBS-provided clips to their blogs, wikis, widgets, community sites and whatever else gets thrown our way," said CBS Interactive president Quincy Smith.
Today Facebook is going to formally announce its plans to become an open platform. We know that the platform will allow companies to offer their products and services to Facebook users, but the details haven't yet been 'exposed'. So all of us bloggers are waiting for the news to be announced today, on the edges of our seats. In the meantime, I wanted to remind you of Alex Iskold's article this week about Facebook - which I thought was intriguing. Alex posited that Facebook is ultimately aiming for an IPO, which would make it the first big Web company to go the IPO route for a long time. Web 2.0 has turned out to be more about M&A (mergers and acquisitions) than IPO (Initial Public Offering), but of course IPOs were all the rage in the Dot Com era.
The OpenCoffee Club is "a place for people who love startups to hang out and meet" according to their recently launched social site on Ning.com. From Cork to Capetown, Seattle to Sydney, and Paris to Palo Alto, people are getting together on a weekly basis to discuss all things startup and to meet and pitch their ideas to VCs. For an idea that only kicked off last February, it is beginning to take the world of web entrepreneurs by storm.
The OpenCoffee Club started as an attempt to establish recognized, open and regular meeting places where entrepreneurs can meet with investors in a totally informal setting. It is the brain child of Saul Klein, a venture partner at Index Ventures and a VP of Skype who is based in London. The goal of OpenCoffee, Saul told me, was "to create something that can be replicated anywhere else at little or no cost ... where entrepreneurs can meet and know people might be around for them to talk with."
Written by Nitin Karandikar
At the Searchology press conference last week, Google announced a slew of new features that are getting integrated into their main search engine. The key focus was on a new feature called Universal Search. Google's Marissa Mayer explained this feature as follows on the Official Google blog:
"... [this is] the first step in the evolution toward universal search. Today, we're making that first step available on google.com by launching the new architecture and using it to blend content from Images, Maps, Books, Video, and News into our web results."
Here's what a sample search would look like, using this feature. In this case, searching for the term "hydrofoil" displays images embedded in the results (technically, the new feature is that the images could be anywhere on the page, rather than only at the top; but I'm not sure it makes all that much difference to an end user):
Over on our new network blog, last100, Steve O'Hear has covered two interesting developments in the 'digital home' space. Firstly Steve posted that there has been quite a bit of development activity around AppleTV - but not by Apple itself, rather by hackers. Wrote Steve:
"...[the hackers] have been hard at work building plug-ins and workarounds to add lots of new functionality. In fact, so much progress has been made, you'd be forgiven for thinking that Apple purposely left the door unlocked, perhaps to learn from these early adopters about what future direction the product should take."
Steve reviews an RSS reader for AppleTV, Sports Scores (a simple plug-in to display sports results), an Internet Radio plug-in, a YouTube plug-in, and more.
