Andrew
Excellent piece! I think it's fascinating that now when you go shopping at Amazon, you can bring your friends with you! I threw together a graphic for it:
http://fjglynn.com/2010/07/28/hey-everybody-lets-go-shopping/
Cheers, Joe Glynn, Boulder, Colo.
When the largest online store on the web integrates with the largest social network, good things happen.
Today you can connect your Facebook account with your Amazon account. You can see a list of your friends’ birthdays, with gift suggestions.
You can also see relavent products related to your friends’ interests.
Every one of your friends now has a “Facebook profile” on Amazon too, which lists their favorite books, movies and TV shows. There are no interactive links with Facebook’s graph API, or any new sharing features on Amazon.
Amazon also states it’s terms of use front and center when you connect your accounts:
- Amazon will not share information from your account with Facebook.
- Amazon will not share your purchase history with Facebook.
- Amazon will not attempt to contact your Facebook friends.
- Amazon will never post anything to your Facebook Wall without your consent.
I think this is a cool feature, but it’s not complete. There are many more ways Amazon can build social features from Facebook into it’s website. They should challenge Blippy or Swipely and do social shopping the right way, by adding everyone’s purchases into a combined social feed.
