The new Twitter links, however, are a whole new story. If an Amazon Associates member takes the time to re-write the text into their own words, there's virtually no way to know by looking at the post that the Twitter update is actually an ad.

Is Amazon Spamming Twitter?

In the past, several legitimate companies have diluted the Twitter stream with promotions and contests encouraging Twitter users to "tweet to win" so to speak, by pasting in some sort of marketing message into the "What are you doing?" box or by appending a promotional hashtag to their everyday messages. But unlike these company-run Twitter promotions, there's not a hashtag to use or any specific wording that has to be tweeted in order to participate in the Amazon Affiliate program. All anyone has to do is tweet links along with the message of their choosing.

Because Amazon's marketplace is extensive in terms of the products it sells, there's a wide variety of things which can be promoted. No matter what a Twitterer's particular interest is: music, politics, technology, etc., there's bound to be hundreds of things that could be mentioned in their Twitter stream without the posts appearing to be an ad. In fact, there's a good possibility that they would have been talking about these products anyway throughout the course of the day...they just couldn't have made any money off of them until now.

Hidden Advertisements

The problem with this sort of "hidden" advertising, though, is exactly that: it's hidden. This is the internet's version of "product placement" - subtle advertising in plain sight yet never clearly identified as such. Was your favorite TV star using a Macbook? Was he drinking a Coke? Already commonplace in Hollywood, these almost subliminal advertising messages permeate our consciousness every time we turn on the TV. Now that same sort of hidden ad will soon show up in the Twitter streams of your favorite tweeters.

Soon they'll start promoting a great book they just read, a DVD they liked, or one of a million other things pulled out of Amazon's vast inventory. None of it will sound out of place given the types of informal conversations that take place on Twitter every day. You won't even know that they're advertising to you until you click through on the link and find yourself on an Amazon.com webpage - and even then, you may not be sure. Was that a referral or were they genuinely just linking to the Amazon website to be helpful?

Will the FTC Step In?

Another question this raises, at least here in the U.S., is whether or not the FTC will get involved. Having recently taken steps to make sure that bloggers were properly disclosing freebies or payments received by companies whose products were being reviewed on their sites, one has to wonder if they'll now be tempted to monitor the undisclosed advertising that's about to explode on Twitter.

Amazon could have avoided the potential threat of government involvement (not to mention the accusations that they're "spamming Twitter") by generating their links using their own proprietary URL-shortening system, something like amzn.com or amz.com for example. That would clearly identify the tweets' purpose. But instead, they opted to make their links with the URL shortener bit.ly, the one that Twitter itself uses by default. This makes the Amazon links indistinguishable at a glance from any other shortened link posted to Twitter. There's no way to tell if a tweet is an ad unless the Twitter user left Amazon's auto-generated text in place. Of course, no one is going to use that text except the laziest of Twitter spammers - people you're probably already avoiding.

Tell Amazon What You Think with #AMZNSOT

Today, many Twitter users are coming out against this new type of Twitter-fueled advertising, registering their complaints via tweets marked with the #AMZNSOT hashtag, the official tag used to give Amazon feedback about the system. These users are already branding this new effort "spam," saying things like: "Amazon now gives you cash for spamming on Twitter? Oh, swell," as Twitter user TwitBin says. "Does this just mean more Twitter spam as people try to make money?" asks NickHerbert. But there are just as many Twitter users saying nice things about the new system too, calling it "cool," "awesome," "sweet," and even claiming it "rocks."

You can give Amazon your two cents as well by updating Twitter with your thoughts and including the #AMZNSOT hashtag along with your message.

Whether you think the new Amazon Twitter integration is good or bad, there's no doubt that it will be a major game changer for Twitter. As it blurs the lines between conversation and ads, people seem to think that Amazon has either created something of genius or has ruined Twitter as we know it. Few seem to be undecided when it comes to their feelings about this issue. The question is now: which side will end up being in the majority?

Amazon already has a similar speedy checkout system known as "1-Click." When activated, customers can associate payment methods with a frequently used shipping address, such as a home address, to quickly complete purchases without having to fill out their name, address, and credit card details.

Although not designed to replace 1-Click, the new PayPhrase system is even easier to use and more flexible. Using this system, shoppers don't have to be signed in to the site with an Amazon account as is necessary with 1-Click. That saves an extra step and could lead to more impulse buys as there's no "cooling down" time, however brief, between seeing something you want to purchase and then finalizing the transaction.

The PayPhrase system also allows for the creation of multiple PayPhrases and PINs so you can associate different addresses and methods of payment with each other. For example, you could additionally have a corporate credit card tied to your office address or a pre-paid credit card your children use tied to your home address. 1-Click checkout, on the other hand, only allows for the combination of one address and one method of payment.

The PayPhrase technology will go live across all of Amazon.com as well as on several third-party sites that use "Checkout by Amazon," a service that lets other retailers checkout customers by using their personal and payment information saved on Amazon's servers. At this time, DKNY, Jockey, Patagonia, Buy.com, J&R, and Car-Toys have announced they will add the PayPhrase system on their sites, too.

Is PayPhrase the Future of Mobile Transactions?

Clearly, the new PayPhrase technology has been designed to make online checkout easier, but could there be more to it than that? Earlier this month, the company launched a mobile payments service which allows mobile application developers to integrate Amazon's checkout system into their mobile software and mobile websites. The mobile payments system also allows for the integration of the 1-Click checkout process, so there's no reason to doubt that the PayPhrase technology will now also be added to the payments platform as well.

With PayPhrase, the process of making an online purchase takes far less steps than any other checkout system today. Even PayPal forces you to sign in, choose payment methods, and complete your transaction before being redirected back to the retailer's website. While a few extra steps aren't a big deal on the web, when you're on a mobile phone, every delay makes it that much harder thanks to slower internet connection speeds, tiny keyboards, and, more often than not, a lack of time to get involved in any long process. If you can't checkout in a minute or so, it's generally not even worth bothering until you're back at home on your broadband-connected PC. But with PayPhrase, you can checkout incredibly fast - only two steps are required: one to enter your special phrase and another to enter your PIN. Although Amazon hasn't made any formal announcements about integrating PayPhrase into their mobile platform just yet, they must have had it in mind when they designed this technology.

The project's lofty goal is to essentially create an open web of books where anyone can publish their books and make their content available via search.

Although still in the early days of development and potentially taking years to complete, the BookServer project will allow search engines to index books from all over the web. What that means for an end user is that you could type a title into a search engine and the engine would return results listing everywhere you could get that book in digital format including online bookstores, libraries, or a direct method from the publisher itself. Depending on your needs, you could borrow the book or purchase it and then download it to your digital device.

While the project isn't exactly a direct effort to take down Amazon's online bookstore or Google's upcoming online eBook store called Google Editions, it will provider book publishers and online libraries with the means to more effectively compete with those companies. By allowing publishers to set their own pricing and manage the distribution of their books, they will be able to take back control from Amazon and Google who would rather dictate those terms for them.

An Open Marketplace for eBooks

A secondary goal of BookServer's open system is to fight back against the proprietary marketplaces, such as Amazon's Kindle Store, where books are only sold in a copyright-protected format (.AZW) that only works on the company's eReader device, the Kindle. Elsewhere, some book sellers use other proprietary formats, others use the open ePub format, and still others distribute books as Adobe PDFs. For consumers, this multitude of choices only leads to confusion. People don't know what formats their particular device can read or where to get them. It brings to mind the similar issues consumers have had with digitally distributed music. To this day, many are still confused about whether their iTunes purchased music can play on other devices or whether tunes purchased from other online MP3 stores will play on their iPods.

While Google promises its Google Editions store will allow anyone to access digital books as long as they have a web browser and internet access, it's still unknown at this time how the company plans to make the digital content available offline. Will it require the use of special web browser plugins to do so? Until Google reveals more about the technical details, it is not possible to know how truly open their online store will be. And even if their store is 100% open, they are still a company whose ultimate goal is to profit from their work of digitizing books. BookServer's goal, on the other hand, is to provide universal access to book data made available in open formats.

Today, a few booksellers have partnered with the BookServer system including Feedbooks, O'Reilly, Adobe, and the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) project.

Customers using the new Mobile Payments Service (MPS) will first sign-in using an Amazon MPS-enabled phone or mobile application. After this initial authentication process, they'll then be able to make all future purchases from that device without having to sign in again. This includes the 1-Click checkout functionality. 

As the MPS website shows, it only takes four steps for a mobile shopper to complete their purchase using the new technology. First, the customer clicks on the "Pay with Amazon" button which directs them to a mobile site hosted by Amazon Payments. From there, the customer can pick which payment method they want to use from the options they already have on file with Amazon. After the payment is authorized, the customer is then automatically redirected back to the original mobile website where they can then be offered the download they just purchased.

For Developers: No Extra Work Required

Developers and merchants already using the company's Amazon Payments service on their websites won't need to do any additional development work - the service will automatically detect when customers are shopping from a mobile device and will switch over to the new mobile optimized payment interface.

In other words, that means that developers can continue to use Amazon FPS (flexible payment service) APIs they've already been using to build their applications and they don't need to go back and re-code anything to make the apps mobile-compatible.

One of the first companies to launch the Amazon MPS is Handmark, a mobile content store where customers can shop for games and applications across a number of platforms including Android, Blackberry, iPhone, Palm OS, Windows Mobile, Symbian, and Java devices. The company will integrate the technology within its online store and its on-device channels.

Developers interested in integrating this technology into their mobile applications can learn how to do so via the Amazon MPS website. 

"Monitoring cloud assets, scaling capacity automatically, and balancing traffic efficiently have been among the most requested Amazon EC2 features from our customers," said Peter DeSantis, General Manager of Amazon EC2. "Together, these capabilities provide customers more control of their AWS resources and enable them to architect for even better performance, resilience and cost savings."

CloudWatch gives Amazon customers visibility into resource use, operational performance, and overall demand patterns, including metrics such as CPU use, disk reads and writes, and network traffic. Auto Scaling ensures EC2 usage increases during traffic spikes to maintain performance and decreases during lulls to reduce costs, making it particularly appropriate for apps with frequent use fluctuations. Elastic Load Balancing allows for fault tolerance in applications, detects unhealthy instances within a pool, and reroutes traffic to healthy instances until the unhealthy instances have been restored.

Amazon hopes these features will improve application performance, lower costs, and make life easier for developers and entrepreneurs. Amazon CloudWatch and Elastic Load Balancing are available on a pay-as-you-go basis, and Auto Scaling is enabled by Amazon CloudWatch and carries no additional fees. Features are currently available in the U.S. and should be available in the EU shortly.

Conflict with Apple?

A lot of the discussion around the new iPhone optimized Kindle store currently focuses on the fact that Apple, with the upcoming iPhone 3.0 OS update, will make it easy for developers to charge for transactions from within a specific app. Obviously, eBooks would be one of the many areas where developers could not only make good use of this capability, but where Apple could also get a nice 30% cut from every transaction. By going through the web, Amazon can bypass Apple completely.

What About Stanza?

What will be more interesting to see, though, is if Amazon will also start to integrate some of the technology it acquired when it bought Stanza last month. Stanza already featured the ability to browse books without ever having to leave the app, though the final transactions were also handled on the sellers' websites. Before the acquisition, Stanza had also been working with Adobe to create a standard for online book catalogs, based on Stanza's own specifications, and we hope that the Stanza team will continue this work under Amazon and maybe the next version of the Kindle app will integrate some of this work.

Textbooks

As we predicted earlier this week, Amazon is aiming this device at the educational market and has reached deals with three major textbook publishers: Pearson, Wiley, and Cengage Learning.

Newspapers

Amazon also announced that the New York Times, Boston Globe, and Washington Post have signed deals with Amazon and that these papers will begin trials with reduced prices for Kindle DX users who agree to long-term subscription commitments later this summer. It looks like these discounts will only be available to users who live in areas where printed versions of these papers are not readily available.

During today's event, the New York Times' chairman, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., argued that the new Kindle finally offers "the same satisfying experience as the reading of a printed newspaper." It remains to be seen, though, if newspaper readers are indeed clamoring for a device that simply copies the experience of reading a traditional, dead-tree newspaper. It is also important to note that Sulzberger called the new deal with Amazon an "experiment," and the success of this experiment will surely also depend on how much of a discount on the Kindle the papers are willing to give to their readers.

Not a Game-Changer

Judging from what we have seen so far, we don't think that the Kindle DX will be a major game-changer in the eTextbook market or for the newspaper business. Besides the bigger screen, there is nothing really new in the Kindle DX, though having a native PDF reader will surely be useful to a lot of users.

The newspapers' discount offer seems a bit timid, to say the least (though we still don't have all the details yet). And we still have serious doubts that the Kindle is the ideal device for reading textbooks (though we have to admit that some of our readers are more enthusiastic about a large-screen Kindle for eTextbooks than we are).

Reading Textbooks is Different from Reading a Novel

Reading textbooks is a very different activity from reading a regular book. Students, hopefully, don't just read the text, but actively take notes, highlight sections, and annotate their texts. While the Kindle offers some of these functions, the absence of a touchscreen makes for a rather clunky experience.

In addition, students who use notetaking software would probably also want to be able to copy-and-paste text and images from their eBooks to their favorite software (Microsoft has been pushing its OneNote application heavily on college campuses, for example). Kindle eBooks also won't allow users to print any part of the text.

With a dedicated hardware device like the Kindle, students lose all of these abilities and gain relatively little compared to using the laptops they already own. Of course, the Kindle is a great eBook reader, and its screen makes reading a lot easier. But for the purpose of studying, it will remain to be seen if Amazon can find ways around some of the disadvantages a dedicated eBook reader would have over a good desktop application that students could use on their laptops.

Let Us Know What You Think

Let us know what you think of the Kindle as a dedicated textbook reader in the comments, especially if you are currently a college student or instructor.

CC-licensed image used courtesy of Flickr user Chrysaora.

In some respects, though, the new Kindle (which will, after all, see its debut at a college) is probably geared more towards the textbook market than the newspaper business. For textbook publishers, electronic (and DRMed) editions aren't so much about convenience for students, but about cutting out the used-book market where a lot of students get their books and where the publisher gets absolutely nothing. In 2005, the market for used textbooks in the U.S. was valued at about $1.6 billion which was about a third of the total market for educational and professional books.

As Larry Dignan points out in detail, if Amazon could sell electronic versions of these textbooks for cheaper than a college bookstore, it could cut the incentive for students to buy used books, even as it cuts out the option to sell new copies back to the bookstore at the end of the semester.

Newspaper

As for saving newspapers, hopefully, the papers that are said to be launch partners for the new Kindle, including the New York Times, will realize that they can't just recreate an electronic copy of their morning papers and hope that it will be successful. After all, the main reason why newspapers have lost their must-read status is that most of what's printed in the morning is already old news.

For a newspaper on Kindle to be successful, the Kindle version of the paper would have to be updated continuously throughout the day, just like the paper's web site. However, the fact that papers are clamoring for a larger version of Kindle so that it would be easier to replicate the feel and layout of their dead-tree editions makes it likely that the large-screen Kindle, if it turns out to be real, will see the same subscription model for newspapers where a new copy of the paper will be downloaded automatically once a day.

CC-licensed image used courtesy of Flickr user Amanda Munoz.

To us, this looks like a great way to introduce students to cloud computing, and, as far as we are concerned, the more students get access to this technology, the better. We also like Amazon's idea to grant researchers access to its services, as this can mean significant cost reductions for many academic projects, which, given the current economic climate, can only be a good thing as well - and, of course, it will also introduce these researchers to the potential of cloud computing.

The way MapReduce works is a fairly straightforward concept: You take a problem that requires working with a giant (and we're talking massive - sometimes petabytes) dataset, distribute working with the dataset over thousands of separate processes (called mapping) and then taking the thousands of results you get back and reducing those results into a single master result. For certain tasks, MapReduce can vastly improve the efficiency of these types of tasks, and adding more computing power gives you a linear improvement in speed.

Yahoo! has been using its own version of Hadoop for a while now. And even before this offering, larger Amazon Cloud Computing customers have already begun to use Hadoop in EC2. This is from Wikipedia's article on Hadoop:

As an example The New York Times used 100 Amazon EC2 instances and a Hadoop application to process 4TB of raw image TIFF data (stored in S3) into 1.1 million finished PDFs in the space of 24 hours at a computation cost of about $240 (not including bandwidth).

As Amazon says on its blog, "After a while [developers] tend to report that they begin to think in terms of the new style, and then see more and more applications for it." Which we believe means that MapReduce is the new, big hammer, and as developers start looking around, every dataset starts looking like a nail. This is good news for Amazon as it only stands to profit.

Forty year old British technology platform Talis (background) announced this week that it now offers free, perpetual storage and keyless API access to semantically marked-up large data sets. The offering is called the Talis Connected Commons and it's the kind of thing that anyone with a geekish imagination can get excited about.

If the current web economy is being rocked by easy publishing systems that make the people formerly known as "consumers" capable of publishing and socializing around content of their own creation - then the next step of internet evolution may come in the form of automated systems able to process meaning and patterns out of large amounts of user-created and other information. When structured, free and available programmatically in bulk - that data is like a big pot of gold for developers.

While Amazon offers free access to data sets, transport of the data is still paid for by users. The Talis Connected Commons also offers an API by default (a SPARQl end point, in particular) and is focused specifically on semantic data. The system is made for public sharing - two variations of Creative Commons licenses are supported for the data stored there. Talis is requesting that data set owners email a short description of their content to the company for approval and inclusion on the site.

In other words, there's no gold in the pot yet. Talis is more than well established and this offering is aimed at such a sweet spot that the only way the Connected Commons won't be filled with good data is if the company totally drops the ball. We don't expect that to happen.

The Plot

This project is in the same vein as Nova Spivak's forthcoming ontology authoring and hosting service, the vision of open source microblogging as the future of business intelligence and more.

There's a chain of events that news like this helps fill out. First, massive bodies of data are created or gathered, books are scanned, census data is collected, and patients donate their anonymous aggregate medical data to science. Next, the data is semantically analyzed and marked up (through any number of different semantic processing engines). Then, the data is stored and an API is made available (this is where the Talis Connected Commons comes in). Finally, developers build applications that leverage the smart data offered up through the platform, data visualizers find new stories to tell in images built from the marked up data and new relationships between people, organizations and concepts have the mist cleared away from them through systematic analysis of various permutations of previously unavailable structured data.

Amazon Public Datasets include things like human genomic data, US census data, and data parsed from Wikipedia. What will the Talis Connected Commons provide a home and API for? We look forward to finding out.

All the Features You Expect, But No Built-In Store

After you have installed the app, a new option to send books (or free sample chapters) to your iPhone will appear in the Kindle store. Sadly, you can't browse the Kindle store through the iPhone app itself, which is really a shame, but we wouldn't be surprised if Amazon made this an option in a later version. For now, you have to use Amazon's website to buy books and that, of course, only works if you are in the U.S.

The actual app features most of the options you would expect from an eBook reader. You can change the font size, bookmark pages, and jump directly to different chapters. One major feature that is missing from this app, however, is the ability to add notes to your books.

If you own a Kindle 1 or 2, then the app will also sync your bookmarks and notes between your Kindle and iPhone/iPod touch.

The Authors Guild, by the way, has nothing to fear from the Kindle iPhone app, as Amazon did not add any text-to-speech functionality to the program.

There is nothing revolutionary about the application itself, but overall, it works well and, maybe most importantly, the text is highly legible. Of course, a lot of iPhone eBook applications already exist - and some of them, like Bookworm, Readdle, or Stanza are very good (and, unlike Amazon's app support open standards), but none of these can match the selection of texts available in Amazon's Kindle store - and this is where Amazon's app really shines.

In the past, we wondered if the iPhone might just turn out to be the ultimate eBook reader (even though Steve Jobs famously proclaimed that Apple isn't interested in the eBook market because nobody reads anymore). While Amazon is adamant that this app is only a complement to the Kindle, we can't help but think that Amazon is hedging its bets with this app. After all, it's still very early in the development cycle of both eBook readers and smartphones, and for now, it is anything but clear which devices users will prefer in the end.

We're talking about an annotated collection of all publicly available DNA sequences, including the Human Genome, huge amounts of chemistry data, machine readable encyclopedic entries about millions of different topics and an entire dump of Wikipedia. US Census data, data from the US Department of Transportation and more. It's all accessible by web applications in no time at all. What do you think this is going to change?

This includes data from:

• The Bureau of Transportation Statistics.


• DBPedia Knowledge Base - which "currently describes more than 2.6 million things including 213,000 people, 328,000 places, 57,000 music albums, 36,000 films, and 20,000 companies." All in handy semantic markup.


• The Freebase Data Dump - the giant collaboratively build semantic database on a wide variety of topics, data that high profile startup Metaweb has spent millions of dollars assembling.


• The entire English section of Wikipedia, dumped into a machine readable format.


• A number of large genetic and scientific databases.

We counted all the databases up and it passed 1 TB of available data. The company says that accessing this data is "trivial" for developers.

What are developers going to do with this data? We can't wait to find out. The prospect of mashing up, cross referencing and user interfacing with this amount of data is nearly unfathomable. Really. This data will be leveraged by all kinds of different web applications, for a long time.

You've read, or can imagine, the impact that the first Public Libraries had on human culture. Now imagine the opening up of not just this, but other libraries of data, so huge that economies of scale blast the project off beyond any analogy that could be drawn with our everyday experience or historical memories. It won't just be Amazon that offers up this kind of data - it will be relatively commonplace soon, we imagine.

It will be like a network of libraries - for robots. Robots that go to the library frequently, read very fast and make serious use of what they've learned.

Congratulations, Amazon, on passing 1 TB of public data made available. May all our robots of the future please live in peace.

In a world of online fraud and flaky customer service, the prospect of having Amazon handle payment collection for apps sounds great to us.

A number of companies have been beta testing Amazon DevPay, from cloud monitoring service Hyperic to photo sales app SmugMug.

DevPay charges 30 cents per transaction plus %3 of costs to customers beyond the cost of the Amazon Web Services charged to developers.