Amazon Comes to Twitter
The use cases for Twitter, the IM/blogging hybrid that has taken the blogger world by storm, continues to grow. Tonight I spotted Amazon.com using Twitter to announce Gold Box deals. I found out about this via (what else) Twitter, when bloggersblog pinged it - noting that Amazon has "a long way to go to catch @woot". And sure enough, woot is (at the moment I write this post) announcing a deal on a "Dyson DC14 Full Kit Upright Vacuum", for just $259.99. On closer inspection, it turns out to be "the (now) official Woot twitter bot" for an online e-commerce site called woot.
This is a great example of how instant communication tools like Twitter are being used for commercial means. Basically the Amazon and Woot deals are feeds of offers, pushed out via Twitter. These kind of feeds could also be received in your RSS Reader, or email.
The next step for Amazon and Woot is to allow personalized Twitter feeds - e.g. you could sign up to an Amazon Twitter feed of just music deals (if music is what you want to buy). This would equate the "followers" of Amazon's Twitter feed to leads for the company - very fine grained ones, because Amazon knows what their "followers" want, based on which e-commerce deals they sign up for via Twitter.
I must mention that in my advisory work with nooked, an Irish RSS marketing company, we're working on a concept just like this - which Nooked is calling FeedCommerce. The concept is basically that personalized feeds allow consumers to get great deals and retailers to specifically target their goods and services to consumers. Twitter is in a great position to take advantage of this trend, as an output pipe for such feeds. It's yet another example of how a brand new communications tool like Twitter is being used in ways that few people would've predicted, least of all Twitter's developers.
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I've found several interesting uses for Twitter: http://hombrelobo.com/porno/twitter-amor-y-odio/
The post is in Spanish, but most services mentioned are in english, like Twittertimer, monitwitter, and twitterfeed.
Closer to NZ John of Tweet-r fame has written a Twitter notifier for 1-day.co.nz which is an NZ version of Woot. Just add http://twitter.com/1day as a friend on Twitter and you are good to go.
John and I have been discussing these personalised feeds a bit recently and there is definately an opportunity to provide real targeted deals based on users preferences.
Thanks for the nod! I work for Amazon and I wrote up that Twitter bot as a side project one day after seeing how Woot! (another favorite of mine) was publicizing its deals. I'm glad to see that you guys like the idea.
Twitter Twitter,
I should ask the blogger inside me to be on twitter.
>e.g. you could sign up to an Amazon
>Twitter feed of just music deals
if you want an editorialized version of that, sign up to twitter.com/musicreviews
(disclosure, that's my recently started music nano-blog, with affiliate links to amazon at the end of every review).
It's going to happen more and more that people offer a little "lifestream" or "placestream" data to those that subscribe. There will be some interesting new ways of puttting these Micro Communications into action using open API's, and Twitter are a great example of how to do that. There is probably an evolving role for an enterprise version of this kind of thing.
I prefer to use the Amazon Gold Box feed since it's lighter and can be used in a feed reader. The feed filters out the other deals Amazon puts in and only shows the deal of the day, each day:
http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=OCKoFn0T3BG2VUzZ6UjTQA&_render=rss