Wednesday, September 28, 2011

Silk Fire Kindling

Far and away the most insightful take on today's monumental set of announcements from Amazon comes from Chris Espinosa, who says:
Amazon now has what every storefront lusts for: the knowledge of what other stores your customers are shopping in and what prices they’re being offered there. What’s more, Amazon is getting this not by expensive, proactive scraping the Web, like Google has to do; they’re getting it passively by offering a simple caching service, and letting Fire users do the hard work of crawling the Web. In essence the Fire user base is Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, scraping the Web for free and providing Amazon with the most valuable cache of user behavior in existence.

Read through the comments, too. Great discussion.

Nothing stands still. The world evolves. As the Red Queen said to Alice:

"Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!"

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