Daily Archives: October 2, 2011

What Amazon learned from Apple’s media strategy

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Lovely post by Alexis Madrigal.

All of this information (aside from the value judgment) was roughly accurate, but slightly worse than the reality of Amazon’s products. These reports helped calibrate people’s (particularly bloggers’) expectations a bit below what Amazon would actually announce. The Fire came out at $199 and its OS and web browsing have been an early hit. People are surprised by the speed of the machine and its promised “cloud-enhanced browsing.” Crucially, too, Amazon held a very big punch — the $79 Kindle — even though they could easily have thrown it.

Tactically this morning, Bloomberg got to publish the Kindle Fire details just ahead of other media, mostly so that tech writers not at the live event could extract details for posts while the livebloggers were listening to Bezos. Amazon got its full narrative out there quick, but gave plenty of tweetable factoids just to the livebloggers. The whole thing was executed perfectly.

You may recognize this strategy, which has been perfected by a certain Cupertino company. Apple always seems to have some way of both putting information out there to get buzz going, but also holding back a key and buzzworthy set of details. It’s clear that Amazon was taking notes.

‘Frictionless sharing’ and Zuckerberg’s law

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A few days ago I blogged about the implications of Facebook’s latest intrusions into the lives of its users. The more I looked at the idea of “frictionless sharing” the more outrageous it seems. So it was refreshing to come on this succinct dissection of the initiative by Jeff Sonderman which makes the point more cogently than I did.

Facebook spent years making it easier for us to share by building its network and placing “Like” buttons across the Web. Its latest idea goes much further, turning sharing into a thoughtless process in which everything we read, watch or listen to is shared with our friends automatically.

Encouraging sharing is great. Making sharing easier is even better. But this is much more than that. What Facebook has done is change the definition of “sharing.” It’s the difference between telling a friend about something that happened to you today and opening your entire diary.

Yep. Jeff points out that a number of news organisations (including the Guardian group, for which I write) are careering headlong down this path by ‘partnering’ with Facebook in its latest wheeze. Which brings to mind Winston Churchill’s wonderful definition of appeasement as “being nice to a crocodile in the hope that he will eat you last”.

Jeff goes on to list a number of reasons why this idea of frictionless sharing is not only fatuous, but also cynically manipulative, in that it benefits only Facebook while purporting to be useful to its eager sharecroppers.

  • It means little to friends

    • The fact that people choose to keep most things private places significance on what they choose to share. If everything is shared automatically, nothing has significance.

  • It is misleading

    • If a woman reads a Yahoo News story about breast cancer and that fact is automatically noted in her Facebook activity, what are her friends to make of that? Does she have cancer? Does she have a friend with cancer? Perhaps a colleague was quoted in the article. Maybe she accidentally clicked on the wrong link.

    Facebook is presenting this information with no context. In the absence of context, people make assumptions.

    Can anyone in the new Facebook world read about personal health, relationship advice, personal finance or gay rights without their acquaintances speculating why? In other cases readers could be embarrassed by clicking on a Kim Kardashian photo gallery, a list of crude jokes, or anything else that some people may find distasteful.

  • It has a ‘chilling’ effect

    News organizations that employ the Facebook activity feed may end up hurting themselves by making readers stop and think, “Do I really want to read this, knowing my friends will see that I did?”

    Finally, Jeff asks news organisations pondering whether to jump aboard this bandwagon to ask themselves a question:

    Why exactly are you doing this — for your benefit, or for the readers? Pumping Facebook full of links to your site so you can benefit from a bump in referral traffic seems good, but you risk alienating users and eroding their trust. The last thing a news organization wants is for people to think twice before they click.

    Right on. Great post.

    • Kindle Fire: the tablet that knows your next move

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    This morning’s Observer column.

    The prospect of the forthcoming battle between these two technology giants has led some excitable analysts to declare that, whichever company triumphs, “the consumer is going to be the winner”. Oh yeah? The reality is that both Apple and Amazon are aiming at the same thing: locking in the consumer to their system. Apple has done this via the iTunes and App Store, which ensures that nothing runs on an Apple iDevice that hasn’t been approved by the company. Amazon’s approach is only slightly more subtle. The Fire comes with only 8GB of memory, which means that most of the content that its users will access will come from Amazon’s Cloud storage. In that sense, the Fire is the ultimate network appliance.

    But there’s an added twist. The Fire also comes with a pretty slick browser that loads pages faster than even browsers running on fast PCs. So 100 millisecond (ms) load times are reportedly reduced to 5ms. This is achieved by having the processing done not by the Fire but by remote virtual machines running in Amazon’s EC2 Cloud, and by clever caching and pre-emptive fetching of links. “This means,” writes Jason Calacanis, a well-known internet entrepreneur, “if you’re on the NYTimes.com they have, in their cloud and possibly already on your device, the next five pages you’re going to click on. They know this because the last five folks to hit the NYTimes.com’s homepage opened those pages. These kind of caching services have a ton of privacy implications”…

    That’s putting it mildly.

    LATER: Came on an interesting report of the thinking of a US market analyst. Horace Dediu. The nub of it is:

    Amazon’s margins on the digital goods it will sell through the Kindle are razor-thin. That means it will take a large volume of sales to subsidize the Kindle’s sales cost, encouraging Amazon to wait a long time between updates to the underlying hardware. They’ll need to amortize that cost over several years to make the accounting balance out, rather than pushing customers to buy a new tablet every year or two.

    As a result, the Kindle Fire is unlikely to advance rapidly in terms of its technology. Amazon is going to milk as many years as it can out of each generation of the tablet.

    We’ll see.