Amazon's Social Network
Even if you don't realize it, behind all of the swipes, button clicks, and reviews: Amazon has a social network which captures it all. Much like Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr: you can follow people and share your activity. But, there are a few items which make the network uniquely Amazon. That's what we're talking about on today's blog.
What is Amazon's Social Network?
Before you ever purchased anything at Amazon, you had to create a profile. A profile usually has two distinct elements: 1) your identity and 2) your access. Let's look at this in more depth.
Your identity part of the profile is usually where your username and password are kept. Also, it includes any amounts of gift cards, credit card info, or a photo. On Amazon's system, there is an internal profile (that only you can see) and external (what the public sees). The picture below is a public profile. Obviously, I've got some work to do.
Your access (or what you're authorized to enter) are the various sites that you can access within Amazon's empire. These include sites such as Good Reads, Amazon's chief shopping site, developer.amazon.com, MTurk, and others.
| Amazon Profile Page |
On the "Public View," the page is broken into several sections:
- Recommendations Bar
- Search bar (Friends and Family)
- About
- Following
- Wishlists and Registries
- Gift Ideas
- Insights
- Community Activity
Recommendations Bar: Allows you to perform the following functions: Your Browsing History, Recommended for you, Improve your recommendations, Your Profile, and Learn More. Within the "Your Browsing History" section, you can remove each item (via the "remove" button). The 'Recommended for You" is exactly that, items based on "Your Browsing History" are used for the "Recommended for You" section. Any items that you would like can be copied to a "Wish List" using the "Add to List" button.
Search bar (Friends and Family): Find Friends and family to share your recommendations with using this searching tool.
About: Information (including links to Twitter, Facebook, and other places).
Following: Any authors that you are following will appear here if you press the button on their Author page saying "Follow".
Wishlists and Registries: From the "Recommended for You" section or if you're tagged in any registries.
Gift Ideas: Groups different gift ideas together for various age groups.
Insights: If you have contributed to the Amazon site through reviews, ideal lists, and other places will appear here.
Community Activity: Any "Site Activity" on the Amazon site (likes, recommendations, etc.) that you've done on the site.
Conclusion
Amazon's social network has some of the same elements as Facebook, Google+, and Twitter. It's also a way to delete browsing history, get gift ideas, and have a place to create wish lists. Thank you for reading the blog! If you have any comments, please leave them below.
