
Amazon is building a social graph under the radar - yarapavan
http://www.thenetworkthinkers.com/2012/04/next-big-thing.html
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abeppu
A couple commenters point out that this isn't really a social graph, which is
totally fair objection to the way the author is talking about this stuff. But
my main concern is that this doesn't present any evidence that Amazon _is_
doing this (and I'm not saying they aren't), but just suggests why it might be
in Amazon's best interest to do so. They put together a couple graphs, one of
which appears to be based on publicly visible "customers who bought X bought
Y" data, but that data has been around and visible, and scrape-able for
_years_ , and they don't present any reasons for believing that this data is
being used by Amazon in a different way now than it was 5 years ago. So, in
other words, reckless speculation.

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carbocation
It seems quite a stretch to call a database of movie and product ratings a
"social graph." Amazon _is_ building something extremely valuable; they are
doing it above the radar, not under it; and it doesn't strike me as a social
graph.

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zerostar07
I never care about other readers' notes. In fact i find it annoying that you
can't turn them off on the kindle. I don't care what other readers wanted to
take note of, maybe because people read a book for different reasons and keep
notes for different reasons (one may be doing research on a subject, another
may just be collecting jokes). If that was a general case, Library books would
be sought after for their side notes. There's little information there. OTOH
the "people who bought this also bought" is sometimes useful, sometimes a
recipe for very average reading.

To be fair the "friend network" recommendation are not much better either, but
the trust factor involved makes us perceive them as more important.

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WarDekar
Are you sure you can't turn them off? I thought with my Kindle 2nd Gen I was
able to- I recently replaced it with the most recent Kindle Keyboard and
unfortunately do to an accident it is out of commission right now so I can't
check, but I was fairly certain with the 2nd Gen (note I probably hadn't
updated the firmware in a long time) I could turn off other people's notes and
highlights.

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stock_toaster
I can (and do) turn it off on my 3rd gen keyboard kindle.

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nextstep
So it's last.fm for books? How it that a social graph? I don't mean to
discount this data entirely, but what some reads (or what music someone
listens too) is not anywhere a comprehensive picture of a user; for this
reason, niche "social" services like these hypotheticals won't be able to
compete with a monster like Facebook. If the service could be a Facebook app,
why will users choose this new standalone network over their existing network
that already has all of their friends?

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th0ma5
At ROFLCon a couple years back, the Three Wolf Moon meme was described as
being started by a guy looking for law books on Amazon, and it said "people
who bought xxxx (law books) also bought.... the three wolf moon shirt" ... so
he had to buy it. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Wolf_Moon>

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twelvechairs
I think the point being missed here is that although knowing what people might
like is indeed a marketers dream, most computer-generated recommendations
systems don't do a very good job at it.

Perhaps some people use recommendations like those at Amazon, but I think
generally most people avoid them because (at least at present) the signal to
noise ratio is ridiculously bad.

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drumdance
Pandora works great for me. I rarely listen to my own library any more.

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tqs
Pandora's recommendation system is not based on a social graph, nor is it
particularly "computer generated" compared to most other automated
recommendation systems.

It's based on the Music Genome Project. For over 8 years, they've been having
highly trained musicologists listen to each song individually, then manually
categorize them on ~400 attributes (e.g. is it syncopated? major or minor key?
does it have vocal harmonies? etc). Pandora uses this data to find similar
songs to the ones you like.

You'd think it wouldn't scale but Pandora seems to be doing it.

"The Music Genome Project's database is built using a methodology that
includes the use of precisely defined terminology, a consistent frame of
reference, redundant analysis, and ongoing quality control to ensure that data
integrity remains reliably high. Pandora does not use machine-listening or
other forms of automated data extraction." <http://www.pandora.com/about/mgp>

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lancewiggs
As it hasn't been said yet - I really hope that Amazon does not do this. We
trust Amazon to deliver products, not strangers. Apple's Ping failed for good
reason.

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xiaomei
I wonder why Netflix doesn't match users with similar movie preferences.
Perhaps is a legal restriction.

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MasterXen
I thought it was closely related to staying within the boundaries of VPAA:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Privacy_Protection_Act>

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warmwaffles
Right but if you were matched against other anonymous users with similar
likes, it would be legal

