Amazon is now tapping into your Facebook likes, lending them to your purchase recommendations. Proving more monetization opportunities around socially-shared preferences, Amazon still wants to make it as easy as possible to buy from its site. It’s a more personalized experience with hopes to entice consumer activity.
Amazon’s social networking integration also ties into your friends’ birthdays, recommending items based on their own likes. There’s also ways to filter recommendations by format (books, movies, music) and popularity amongst friends. Facebook in fact tried its hand at a similar tool, though at the time it was missing the direct retail factor. From Inside Facebook,
“These lists are reminiscent of Facebook Pulse, a early and now deactivated feature of Facebook which showed you the most popular items in different interest categories within your network. Even if one isn’t interested in purchasing anything, this data is entertaining and could use a way to be shared back to Facebook.”
Those worried about the privacy factor, note that both Facebook and Amazon are hoping to avoid a Beacon-like scandal. Amazon is ensuring customers’ purchasing behavior will not be shared with Facebook. That hasn’t kept many privacy advocates from voicing against the new Amazon feature, and I think it’s only a matter of time before we see more ways to share Amazon activity back to Facebook.
Facebook currency will eventually be used for more than gift cards and cookies, and the necessity for centralized accounts to share information will only grow as social platforms do. The virtual exchange of information is becoming more and more associated with our consumer behavior, and Amazon will want nothing less than to Sears-Roebuck the web and mobile fronts.
Amazon’s domination continues beyond the world of retail, as ground zero for the volatile publishing industry. Determining ownership of digital rights and distribution exclusivity, publishers are facing quite a fall out over platforms like Amazon.
None of this will discourage third parties from creating apps around this socially-shared consumerism. Amazon may have found its way to tap into Facebook data, but there are plenty of apps that have been aggregating this cross-platform information for some time. Facebook and Amazon will eventually tie into a social and financial “credit score,” determining your value as a natural market advertiser, if you will. End users will have to see more usable rewards for this “credit score.” As this all takes place at the point of user engagement, third party apps will continue to be the best suited to close that multi-platform gap for some time.
