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‘Nobody is using it’: Amazon Spark is not taking off with brands, agencies
- hbosch 9y agoThis one can’t be a shocker. I even had to open my Amazon app to see if it existed for me, and sure enough it’s tucked way down at the bottom of the left side menu. Definitely odd to shove a weird pseudo-social marketing feed into my shopping app... there’s no way the people behind this actually thought it would catch on, right? If this disappeared tomorrow I don’t think anyone would notice.
- dkarl 9y agoI can't find it at all, in the app or the web site. Either they decided to launch it dead, or they haven't really launched it yet.
- Twirrim 9y agoI totally missed that it existed. Now that I know it does, I still have no interest in it. It's not clear to me at all what value it's adding.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- codingdave 9y agoAmazon launched a social media platform? I am a Prime member, and had no clue. I'm not sure I would have been interested had I known, but this may be a marketing failure as much as anything else.
- jordan801 9y agoI didn't even know it existed. But, even if I did, why would I use it? Most products have a few hundred reviews that are already present, that I can use to decide if it's a good product or not. It definitely doesn't help it's cause, that it's only available for Prime users. Oh, it comes with some user uploaded images? Prepare to filter through a barrage of unprofessional images, that are too dark to even make out the product. It almost feels like this product was conceived by someone's kid, and they allowed it's release to give him/her a participation trophy. Then abruptly afterward swept it under the rug, afraid someone might behold the abomination. It: -Has no market use. -Has terrible application. -Has no marketing, other than this article.
- portofcall 9y agoYou’re the fourth person on a tech site, out of five who commented, who didn’t even know it existed. That’s pretty telling.
- dfxm12 9y agoYou’re the fourth person on a tech site ... It's not really a tech tool though, and probably isn't marketed to tech people. It's a 6 month old Pinterest-but-for-shopping type of mash up. It's not really out of line for the developer crowd to not know it (or to have read the press release back in July and promptly forget it). Plus I think there was an article on here a week or two ago about how hard it is to compete with Pinterest...
- toss1 9y agoAdd another Prime member who didn't know it existed! Not only that but I can't even find it going to look for it. amazon Prime page ^F "spark" returns nothing, Search on Amazon returns energy drinks and other items by that name, the android app doesn't seem to have it either. It might actually be useful if it has good search & discoverability for products, but if no one even knows about it...
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- emodendroket 9y agoI read one theory that products like Amazon Spark or Facebook Mail exist to ward off antitrust regulators' attention by giving the appearance of more competition between tech giants without having a serious expectation of success. I'm not sure if that's true but it's interesting to consider.
- patentatt 9y agoWell that is diabolical, and a very plausible theory. It does explain some of the more oddball products put out by large dominate companies.
- agentofoblivion 9y agoI work there and have never heard of it.
- tambourine_man 9y agoI though it was one of the many AWS products. I would have guessed one that sends email/SMS, etc.
- cwilkes 9y agoI thought it was a hosted offering of Apache Spark which has been around for years. Odd to choose a name like that.
- ianamartin 9y agoThat was my first impression as well. Yet another hobbled open-source technology being offered at a ridiculous price to tighten the lock-in noose on AWS. Yay. Turns out it's just another social media flop. I'm okay with that.
- ramphastidae 9y agoCan you elaborate? Are you saying Apache Spark itself is hobbled, or Amazon is offering a hobbled version?
- Tommah 9y agoYes, I thought the same thing. I was picturing a bunch of marketers trying to crunch big data.
- jhaile 9y agoI also had no idea it existed. I can imagine that someone had the idea that having an "instagram-like" feed of product content that was tightly tied to an e-commerce platform that allows you to purchase those products was a good idea. But it doesn't seem like they are executing it in a way to get adoption...
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- joezydeco 9y agoMazda did a product launch yesterday at the New York Auto Show and mentioned they were doing some kind of "social" thing with Amazon. Is this it? This seems kind of sad.
- tantalor 9y agoPreviously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14799025 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14799025 3 points, 8 months ago Amazon launches Spark, a shoppable feed of stories and photos (techcrunch.com) 1 Comment: Yes, a new way to help people shop! It's just what we needed ;)
- amelius 9y agoThere should be a limit to the amount of crap a company can shove in your face after they get the privilege of your attention.
- draw_down 9y ago> Spark, which launched in July, is a social feed of photos. It is similar to Instagram, but open only to Prime members. Nonmembers can view the feed, but they can’t post. Wow, that is insane. Who thought that was a good idea?!
- Grue3 9y agoApple Ping anyone?
- DeGi 9y agoAm I the only one who misread this as “Apache Spark”?
- panchicore3 9y ago+1
- vijaybritto 9y agoAmazon Spark what?! Anyway, I just want to see a video where some business guy announced the plan to launch a consumer product for paid users and the rest of the team roll their eyes! :D Should have happened definitely!
- camtarn 9y agoMore likely, the dev team carefully conceal their eye-rolling, and agree enthusiastically to the plan. If your normal job is working on the ancient Amazon website codebase and holding back the bile you feel as you add yet another "SIGN UP TO PRIME!!!!!!" banner, then a couple of years of being paid to build a green-fields project using the technology of your choice sounds pretty great.
- humanrebar 9y agoMaybe they write this stuff off as an employee retention program.
- camtarn 9y agoHah! Could be. It certainly worked for me - I stayed eight years, rotating teams on average every three years. Greenfields project, big established project, greenfields project, back to big established project. Learned a heck of a lot too, in a very wide variety of areas.
- narrator 9y agoCan people stop naming products "Spark" already? There's a programming language, Web framework, cluster computing technology, email client, and instant messaging client all named the same thing.
- stephengillie 9y agoThey could name it Pandora Nexus. Overused names are a pet peeve of mine. "Oh, your speechbot is named Jarvis? How original."
- olyjohn 9y agoChevy Spark
- croshan 9y agoAnd there also used to be a hardware prototyping board, now renamed to Particle, for exactly that reason.
- humanrebar 9y agoProtip: Look for the Wikipedia disambiguation page. Here's the one for "ace", which is more overused than Spark, even: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ace_(disambiguation) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ace_(disambiguation) Here's spark: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spark https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spark
- acheron 9y agoMaybe they could name it Elm.
- SwellJoe 9y agoI've said it before and I'll say it again: Amazon builds things like this (their phone, their tablets, Alexa, and apparently their social media platform) based on what Amazon wishes were true, not what actually is. Amazon wishes people built their daily lives around shopping at Amazon and would share that with their friends. Amazon wishes people wanted to take pictures of products so you could buy them from Amazon (this was one of the "innovative" features of the Fire Phone, it was called Firefly, and I never used it once in the year or so that I used that generally awful phone). It's like they start from the premise of, "Sell more stuff!", and then build products around that. Anything else that gets into the mix is just a flashy gimmick to get you into the store. There have been Amazon products that have succeeded, obviously, since they're bigger than god and still growing (and I shop there all the time, and use/like AWS). But, boy, do they suck at consumer technology.
- camtarn 9y agoYeah, so much this. There's a very sound principle within Amazon that one should "work backwards from the customer": pitch ideas for new products based on identifying a clear customer need, then inventing a product that will fulfil that. But a lot of the pitches I saw were essentially working backwards from sales targets or existing tech - first, invent a customer with an insatiable desire to buy stuff in inexplicably odd ways ("I want to buy stuff by scanning it with my phone!") then invent a product to do that. The Fire Phone was probably the biggest example of this. I think it just started as somebody deciding that Amazon needed a phone, to drive sales like Android drove web use, and then they chucked in all sort of flashy tech that they happened to have on hand. Such a gigantic pile of WTF. At least the tablets started out with the idea that people were buying Kindles, listening to Amazon MP3, and watching Amazon Video, and perhaps somebody might want to combine all three in one device. The first Fire tablet was a shoddy pile of minimal-viable-product, but the later ones were fairly nice.
- hbosch 9y ago> (their phone, their tablets, Alexa, and apparently their social media platform) Obviously with the exclusion of the phone, I'm under the impression that Fire TV and Fire Tablets sell pretty well. I know lots of parents who use Fire Tablets for their kids over iPads because they are cheap and the content restriction is really easy. Also, aren't Echo/Alexa-driven products pretty much thriving?
- ibdf 9y agoAmazon is now like google, they just keep building things without any commitment to it. If it sticks they will add more developers to it, if it doesn't they will kill it. They were pushing Spark on mobile. It's sorta hidden under the nav menu. You click on the nav icon, and then you get the menu, and to the right of the menu you see some spark cards. It's terrible UI, terrible placement and annoying.
- biasforaction 9y agoLooking for the "Amazon App" in the AppStore results with a dozen or so Amazon applications, which one are they referring to?
- lwlml 9y agoNever heard of it until today. > Spark, which launched in July, is a social feed of photos. It is similar to Instagram, but open only to Prime members. There is the reason--thinly veiled way to encourage people to buy Prime. Facebook succeeds because "everyone is there." Not everyone can afford Prime.
- patja 9y agoIt seems like there are some product categories where there are known reputable reviewers and this is an attempt to formalize that and make it more discoverable. A cure for the fake reviewers ' influence on review aggregations. Sounds great in theory. I'm thinking of those couple of guys who methodically tear down and test every aspect of every major new USB-C cable or accessory. I tend to trust what they say, or at least I value the information they are presenting.
- robotbikes 9y agoIt seems like they were trying to emulate AliExpress, which has built-in giveaways and all kinds of badges for "bloggers" who take pictures of their items and write reviews. It appears to be mainly used by Russians although it is open to Americans on the app, but the links don't appear anywhere on the English webpage. AliExpress is like a bizarre hybrid between Amazon & Ebay (at least the imported stuff) with an international bent.
- stornetn 9y agoI can understand the rationale for why Amazon would build something like this. Amazon owns a large chunk of the market of ecommerce in instances when customers already know roughly what they’re looking for. A big growth opportunity that’s mostly untapped for them is convincing people to do their serendipitous, casual browsing (think: walking through a mall and seeing what’s on display) on Amazon. This is their latest attempt to capture that use case and foster that kind of “daily habit” type mentality (see also their gold box deals and similar product features). One thing that’s unclear to me is why they’d use Instagram as their inspiration rather than Pinterest when the latter more clearly lends itself to shopping, and when there’s a natural tie-in with Amazon’s wish lists functionality (totally conceivable to change wish lists into some kind of Amazon pinboards).