James Tauber's Blog 2004/04/15
Amazon and Google
Word has just gotten out in the blogosphere about Amazon.com's A9 search engine. This, and my recent rediscovery of Alexa has got me thinking a lot about the similarities and differences between Amazon.com and Google and also synergies both inter-company and intra-company.
Random Thoughts:
- The A9 toolbar has a "diary" feature for making notes about pages. Is this the beginning of Amazon.com's blogging story?
- Will GMail somehow be tied to Orkut at some stage?
- What if Amazon.com expanded Amazon Friends to be a full-blown social network?
- Why doesn't Amazon.com do a music version of IMDb?
Amazon and Google are two of my favourite companies. It will be fascinating to see what happens over the next few years.
UPDATE (2004/04/16): Found (via Scoble) an interesting Amazon what-if: Amazoning the News.
by jtauber : Created on April 15, 2004 : Last modified Feb. 8, 2005 : (permalink)
Digital Lifestyle Aggregation
If it isn't obvious already, I'm deeply interested in the convergence between email, IM, blogs, calendars, contact lists, music playlists, photo collections, etc. It was the original driver for Redfoot and, in fact, drove a lot of my passion for SGML (and then XML) in the mid-nineties.
I've just come across Marc Canter's use of the term "Digital Lifestyle Aggregation". I like it.
I still think RDF or something RDF-like is core: at least the concepts of URIs, out-of-band relationships and relationship types as first class objects.
by jtauber : Created on April 15, 2004 : Last modified Feb. 8, 2005 : (permalink)