3 ms·
Agreed. These purchases seem to work the best when they're used for defensive purposes and to round out a product offering that already has a substantial userba
by ethbro 9y ago
Agreed. These purchases seem to work the best when they're used for defensive purposes and to round out a product offering that already has a substantial userbase.
Whatever gadgets they might hang off the app, they're fundamentally a way for people to talk to each other. If you don't have the people, why would you need a slick implementation? As you mentioned, the app would go out of vogue and users would move on.
Amazon making a bid here sounds like a play for a decent social seed, likely steming from users of its core properties (shopping and dev). Of all the mega-corps, Amazon is one of the few that has all the pieces and user-engagement, but no social component.
Which is ironic, because their properties would play a lot better with one than, say, Google or MS. And starting with something like Slack (bottom up vs top down) is an interesting move.
- stingraycharles 9y ago> Of all the mega-corps, Amazon is one of the few that has all the pieces and user-engagement, but no social component. Honest question, since I might be out of the loop here in Europe, but what user engagement pieces does Amazon have then ? I use Amazon for shopping and AWS, and would have no idea what other products they have that are dominating a market. Is this about Kindle ?
- hkmurakami 9y agoThis would possibly be a first step for AWS to start moving up the stack.
- ethbro 9y agoThe shopping portal, reviews, AWS, Kindle, and Echo are all direct touchpoints with users of some sort. If you're going to launch social, you could do a lot worse for a starting point... And in a broader sense, I'm much more optimistic about building a social network to unify disparate features that people already love, vs imposing one from the top down (e.g. G+). FB only got away with the latter because of being first, and seems to be pivoting to backfill as much functionality around it as quickly as possible.
- htormey 9y ago“Amazon making a bid here sounds like a play for a decent social seed, likely steming from users of its core properties (shopping and dev). Of all the mega-corps, Amazon is one of the few that has all the pieces and user-engagement, but no social component.” Well they do own twitch & good reads, right?
- shostack 9y agoInteresting to note on this front is Amazon's move towards enabling voice and chat communication via Alexa between Alexa accounts, and by extension Alexa-enabled devices. Sounds like they really want in on the communication game.