
‘Nobody is using it’: Amazon Spark is not taking off with brands, agencies - ilamont
https://digiday.com/marketing/nobody-using-amazon-spark-not-taking-off-brands-agencies/
======
jordan801
I didn't even know it existed. But, even if I did, why would I use it? Most
products have a few hundred reviews that are already present, that I can use
to decide if it's a good product or not. It definitely doesn't help it's
cause, that it's only available for Prime users. Oh, it comes with some user
uploaded images? Prepare to filter through a barrage of unprofessional images,
that are too dark to even make out the product.

It almost feels like this product was conceived by someone's kid, and they
allowed it's release to give him/her a participation trophy. Then abruptly
afterward swept it under the rug, afraid someone might behold the abomination.

It: -Has no market use. -Has terrible application. -Has no marketing, other
than this article.

~~~
emodendroket
I read one theory that products like Amazon Spark or Facebook Mail exist to
ward off antitrust regulators' attention by giving the appearance of more
competition between tech giants without having a serious expectation of
success. I'm not sure if that's true but it's interesting to consider.

~~~
kozikow
How does it help the company in question? In the scenario, you propose
Facebook mail is selflessly helping to fend off antitrust regulators off
Gmail.

~~~
scrooched_moose
Google pretends to have shopping [1] to shield Amazon, Amazon pretends to have
social media [2] to shield Facebook, Facebook pretended to have mail to shield
Google [3]. It's an interesting thought, especially considering how half-assed
most of these non-core projects are.

1) [https://www.google.com/shopping](https://www.google.com/shopping)

2)
[https://www.amazon.com/Spark/b?ie=UTF8&node=16907772011](https://www.amazon.com/Spark/b?ie=UTF8&node=16907772011)

3) [https://www.theverge.com/2014/2/24/5443454/facebook-
retires-...](https://www.theverge.com/2014/2/24/5443454/facebook-retires-its-
email-service)

Combine it with the wage collusion case [4] from a few years ago and it's
entering the plausible territory

4) [http://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-tech-
job...](http://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-tech-jobs-
settlement-20150903-story.html)

~~~
patentatt
Could also be Amazon pretends to have social media, and then when challenged
as being a monopoly they can say something like "well, ecommerce is but one of
our many products and across out entire portfolio we have lots of competition"
or something to that effect. Just redirect to the sham loser products to make
an appearance of competition, even though the lion's share of revenue is
derived from a line of business that has a monopoly position.

------
SwellJoe
I've said it before and I'll say it again: Amazon builds things like this
(their phone, their tablets, Alexa, and apparently their social media
platform) based on what Amazon wishes were true, not what actually is.

Amazon wishes people built their daily lives around shopping at Amazon and
would share that with their friends. Amazon wishes people wanted to take
pictures of products so you could buy them from Amazon (this was one of the
"innovative" features of the Fire Phone, it was called Firefly, and I never
used it once in the year or so that I used that generally awful phone). It's
like they start from the premise of, "Sell more stuff!", and then build
products around that. Anything else that gets into the mix is just a flashy
gimmick to get you into the store.

There have been Amazon products that have succeeded, obviously, since they're
bigger than god and still growing (and I shop there all the time, and use/like
AWS). But, boy, do they suck at consumer technology.

~~~
hbosch
> (their phone, their tablets, Alexa, and apparently their social media
> platform)

Obviously with the exclusion of the phone, I'm under the impression that Fire
TV and Fire Tablets sell pretty well. I know lots of parents who use Fire
Tablets for their kids over iPads because they are cheap and the content
restriction is really easy. Also, aren't Echo/Alexa-driven products pretty
much thriving?

~~~
SwellJoe
Yeah, well, some people _do_ base their lives on shopping at Amazon, so
there's a market there. It's just not as big as it could be. I mean, my prior
comment was somewhat limited in nuance. Sure the Kindle tablets are reportedly
well-liked, but they're _most_ well-liked by people who buy everything from
Amazon.

The thing is, I have a lot of this stuff I'm making fun of. I have a Fire TV
Stick, I have a Kindle (the old-fashioned kind with an e-ink display), I had a
Fire phone. But, I recognize that they are Amazon service delivery platforms.
They exist to sell me products from Amazon. It's all part of a big ecosystem
where lots of little frictions are removed from my life if I buy from Amazon.
In addition to the devices, I have Prime, I have an Amazon Visa card (5% cash
back on purchases from Amazon), I've bought a bunch of music from Amazon (and
can have it all stored on Amazon when I change devices without having to
remember where I bought it from or deal with weird download limits or
whatever), etc.

I'm making fun of myself here, basically, because I'm the ridiculous and
stupid consumer that Amazon is building all the their ridiculous and stupid
consumer products for. But, even I saw through the bullshit that was the Fire
phone and found it absolutely ridiculous. And, I have a Nexus tablet and no
interest in a Fire tablet, even at a better price than competing Android
devices. The value proposition from a standard Android device with the Google
apps is higher for me in phones and tablets. I won't likely fall for another
Amazon produced phone or tablet. And, I haven't yet seen a compelling reason
to invite Alexa into my home.

------
hbosch
This one can’t be a shocker. I even had to open my Amazon app to see if it
existed for me, and sure enough it’s tucked way down at the bottom of the left
side menu.

Definitely odd to shove a weird pseudo-social marketing feed into my shopping
app... there’s no way the people behind this actually thought it would catch
on, right? If this disappeared tomorrow I don’t think anyone would notice.

~~~
dkarl
I can't find it at all, in the app or the web site. Either they decided to
launch it dead, or they haven't really launched it yet.

------
narrator
Can people stop naming products "Spark" already? There's a programming
language, Web framework, cluster computing technology, email client, and
instant messaging client all named the same thing.

~~~
humanrebar
Protip: Look for the Wikipedia disambiguation page. Here's the one for "ace",
which is more overused than Spark, even:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ace_(disambiguation)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ace_\(disambiguation\))

Here's spark:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spark](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spark)

------
tantalor
Previously:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14799025](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14799025)
3 points, 8 months ago

 _Amazon launches Spark, a shoppable feed of stories and photos
(techcrunch.com)_

1 Comment: _Yes, a new way to help people shop! It 's just what we needed ;)_

------
tambourine_man
I though it was one of the many AWS products. I would have guessed one that
sends email/SMS, etc.

~~~
cwilkes
I thought it was a hosted offering of Apache Spark which has been around for
years. Odd to choose a name like that.

~~~
ianamartin
That was my first impression as well. Yet another hobbled open-source
technology being offered at a ridiculous price to tighten the lock-in noose on
AWS. Yay.

Turns out it's just another social media flop. I'm okay with that.

~~~
ramphastidae
Can you elaborate? Are you saying Apache Spark itself is hobbled, or Amazon is
offering a hobbled version?

------
agentofoblivion
I work there and have never heard of it.

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Twirrim
I totally missed that it existed. Now that I know it does, I still have no
interest in it. It's not clear to me at all what value it's adding.

------
ibdf
Amazon is now like google, they just keep building things without any
commitment to it. If it sticks they will add more developers to it, if it
doesn't they will kill it. They were pushing Spark on mobile. It's sorta
hidden under the nav menu. You click on the nav icon, and then you get the
menu, and to the right of the menu you see some spark cards. It's terrible UI,
terrible placement and annoying.

------
DeGi
Am I the only one who misread this as “Apache Spark”?

~~~
panchicore3
+1

------
amelius
There should be a limit to the amount of crap a company can shove in your face
after they get the privilege of your attention.

------
stornetn
I can understand the rationale for why Amazon would build something like this.
Amazon owns a large chunk of the market of ecommerce in instances when
customers already know roughly what they’re looking for. A big growth
opportunity that’s mostly untapped for them is convincing people to do their
serendipitous, casual browsing (think: walking through a mall and seeing
what’s on display) on Amazon. This is their latest attempt to capture that use
case and foster that kind of “daily habit” type mentality (see also their gold
box deals and similar product features).

One thing that’s unclear to me is why they’d use Instagram as their
inspiration rather than Pinterest when the latter more clearly lends itself to
shopping, and when there’s a natural tie-in with Amazon’s wish lists
functionality (totally conceivable to change wish lists into some kind of
Amazon pinboards).

------
vijaybritto
Amazon Spark what?! Anyway, I just want to see a video where some business guy
announced the plan to launch a consumer product for paid users and the rest of
the team roll their eyes! :D Should have happened definitely!

~~~
camtarn
More likely, the dev team carefully conceal their eye-rolling, and agree
enthusiastically to the plan.

If your normal job is working on the ancient Amazon website codebase and
holding back the bile you feel as you add yet another "SIGN UP TO PRIME!!!!!!"
banner, then a couple of years of being paid to build a green-fields project
using the technology of your choice sounds pretty great.

~~~
humanrebar
Maybe they write this stuff off as an employee retention program.

~~~
camtarn
Hah! Could be. It certainly worked for me - I stayed eight years, rotating
teams on average every three years. Greenfields project, big established
project, greenfields project, back to big established project. Learned a heck
of a lot too, in a very wide variety of areas.

------
codingdave
Amazon launched a social media platform? I am a Prime member, and had no clue.
I'm not sure I would have been interested had I known, but this may be a
marketing failure as much as anything else.

------
patja
It seems like there are some product categories where there are known
reputable reviewers and this is an attempt to formalize that and make it more
discoverable. A cure for the fake reviewers ' influence on review
aggregations. Sounds great in theory. I'm thinking of those couple of guys who
methodically tear down and test every aspect of every major new USB-C cable or
accessory. I tend to trust what they say, or at least I value the information
they are presenting.

------
robotbikes
It seems like they were trying to emulate AliExpress, which has built-in
giveaways and all kinds of badges for "bloggers" who take pictures of their
items and write reviews. It appears to be mainly used by Russians although it
is open to Americans on the app, but the links don't appear anywhere on the
English webpage. AliExpress is like a bizarre hybrid between Amazon & Ebay (at
least the imported stuff) with an international bent.

------
jhaile
I also had no idea it existed. I can imagine that someone had the idea that
having an "instagram-like" feed of product content that was tightly tied to an
e-commerce platform that allows you to purchase those products was a good
idea. But it doesn't seem like they are executing it in a way to get
adoption...

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lwlml
Never heard of it until today.

> Spark, which launched in July, is a social feed of photos. It is similar to
> Instagram, but open only to Prime members.

There is the reason--thinly veiled way to encourage people to buy Prime.
Facebook succeeds because "everyone is there." Not everyone can afford Prime.

------
joezydeco
Mazda did a product launch yesterday at the New York Auto Show and mentioned
they were doing some kind of "social" thing with Amazon. Is this it? This
seems kind of sad.

------
biasforaction
Looking for the "Amazon App" in the AppStore results with a dozen or so Amazon
applications, which one are they referring to?

------
Grue3
Apple Ping anyone?

