User Generated Content

Dave Winer says

The thing I like best about shopping at Amazon are the user comments. They really are good. And I often base purchasing decisions on what the other users say. It got so bad that when I went shopping at Fry’s for some sound equipment I fumbled around until I realized what I was missing was the advice of other shoppers. I did the unfair thing, listened to a bunch of stuff and then went home and bought what I liked and what the others liked, from Amazon.

The gold mine of data Amazon is collecting from its user’s via their reviews has been increasing their bottom line for years’ now. Amazon is very prudent in how it uses this data and provides it to the customer.

Facebook is the other company that is sitting on such a gold mine and will unleash its true potential soon. Here is a piece from Scoble about facebook and Zuckerberg and the phase the business is in.

Data sets from Amazon

Amazon announced four new data sets available to the public yesterday. You can find more on this here at the Amazon Web Services Blog.

It would be interesting to know the findings/insights from the developers who would work with these data sets.