Amazon.com Needs An Affiliate Facebook Application

When Amazon.com found Second Life, I was there and followed it's progress vicariously, and at some times directly. It was a genuinely good idea whose time has yet to arrive; the Second Life interface does not support the same level of maturity that has made the Amazon.com website a success. While I was interested in exploring the architectures involved, my main thrust was quite simple: I review books, and if someone finds my review useful and purchases the book - I get a commission. This is not a very grand job; the pay is nothing to start a Swiss Bank account with and it requires time and effort to write a good book review. For one, you have to read the book. Secondly, you have to think about the book. Last, but not least, you have to rate the book in a thoughtful way.

This is not a complaint; I enjoy doing book reviews - I get paid, however little, to read books. Some publishers send me books at no charge to do this, so I even get books at no cost a lot of the time - something that I find as appealing as Angelina Jolie or Catherine Zeta-Jones. This may explain why I am still single. I prefer to think that I haven't bumped into someone who is willing to put up with me.

When I order books, I typically do so through Amazon.com. It works for me for most books that I wish to get, not to mention other things - though I must note that they are unwilling to ship Nutter Butters to me here in Trinidad and Tobago. Go figure.

That said, Amazon.com dwindled away to nothingness in Second Life - the key being that they could not attract the very thing that had made them successful in the first place: The effort of developers. The key to that would seem to be that developers do not work for free, not even in open source, and that the incentive for development as well as the technological base of Second Life itself was not sufficient to break through into something useful for Amazon.com.

But there's Facebook. And on Facebook, Amazon.com has a group with about 3,600 people as fans. They also have an application, called 'Unspun', which allows you to create lists and so forth to share with your friends. Again, though, they are failing where they built their success: Affiliates. You, me, your network. The thought that if I recommend a book and someone buys it there should be a commission seems to be somewhere between the Scylla and Charybdis in Amazon.com's leveraging of other technologies. As I wrote in Social Networks: Where Is My Economy?, I would like to know why it is that my recommendations should profit someone else when I did the legwork. There seems to be something morally questionable about profiting off of the work of others in such a way. Even, perhaps, morally reprehensible.

It isn't that I want to get rich off of Amazon.com affiliate linking - that seems just about impossible - but for original content creators, it is a revenue stream, however small. And that revenue stream could benefit anyone who recommends a book or product - it is sensible, perhaps even intuitive, for a company to reward people who make recommendations. After all, that is how Amazon.com was built - and how it has pretty much dominated it's market(s).

So why is it that there is no Amazon.com affiliate application that works on Facebook? I can offer some explanation: First, there is no incentive for someone to write such an application other than to do so for themselves - and they probably wouldn't want to share it. Because of this, the onus would fall on Amazon.com to make it available - but instead of focusing on what built them in the first place, they seem focused on cutting out the middlemen. Is that what they are after? It seems like a form of suicide in one way, but then in another it seems sensible: They've built the store already. No need for the construction workers anymore.

Even so, I imagine that people would be a lot more interested in having an Amazon.com Facebook application if they were to get affiliate income from it. Web 2.0 doesn't mean, "get everything done for you for free" - though it does seem to mean, "Get as much as you can until someone starts complaining".

OK. I'm complaining - but pleasantly, and in the hope that it is taken as constructive criticism. After all, they may already be working on something. Or maybe not.