Amazon’s Facebook Applications Make Me Understand Facebook Finally
I have been constantly impressed with Amazon. Who would have guessed that they would expand from an online retailer to areas such as cloud computing and data storage services, much less execute it in a way that is both consistent and highly useable (disclaimer: brandonwerner.com uses both services). They recently launched two additional applications just for Facebook, Amazon Giver and Amazon Grapevine.
By far the best application is Amazon Giver. Far from a simple widget or featureless placeholder for your wishlist that you can get in JavaScript from Amazon.com’s website, the Amazon Giver application is first to deliver on the promise of Facebook’s application platform, which is to take your social graph and combine it with your own data to make both services more interesting and engaging. In fact, this application is such a revelation to the possibilities of Facebook’s platform that one could argue they should have approached Amazon to build this to show off during the Facebook F8 conference, since the slew of Zoombie fights and Friend purchasing from shady and ill-concieved applications on Facebook now has certainly hurt their credibility and made many companies turn up their nose to the platform. Amazon’s work proves that is a mistake.
I’m not certain what the future of this widget/social bubble is, or if our collective attention will look elsewhere, but what has been proven here is that even if Facebook’s relevance in the future is uncertain, Amazon’s isn’t.
