Posted in: Uncategorized

Facebook Connect and Amazon? Where’s the Value Prop?

I read this article on All Facebook summarizing the basic arguments put forth in a slide deck called “Portable Social Graphs – Imagining the Potential” from Avenue A | Razorfish. I flipped through the deck and didn’t actually find the argument terribly compelling. I’m pasting thoughts below (I left them as a comment on AllFacebook but wanted to post them here too).

I read this slide deck and didn’t get why it’s such a big deal.

1. Amazon already offers collaborative filtering based on the feedback from a lot of other people. In the off chance that my friend and I bought the same product, why is that information more useful to me than information from someone else who’s a qualified / experienced product reviewer on Amazon? Most of my real friends have never reviewed the places I go on Yelp but I still get lots of utility from it.

2. When it comes to music, we already have some pretty good music solutions for sharing content with friends and the community at large. I’m not sure why the iTunes piece was more important or interesting than what can already be done using a broad, crowd-based filtering approach.

The one benefit to Amazon would be the same benefit that Beacon offered – the ability to broadcast activity to the News Feed to drive more commerce activity.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Back to Top