Amazon’s stealth tagging project: 43Things
Katharine Mieszkowski of Salon.com breaks the story that Amazon is the sole investor behind the Robot Co-Op, which is behind 43Things, a site that helps people to connect with other people with like-minded goals.
Reading between the lines, it sounds as if Amazon is the majority owner behind the company. Amazon’s interest in the area is a sign of how seriously some significant players are taking the tagging phenomenom.
Given that self-improvement is one of the top reasons why people buy non-fiction books, it makes a lot of sense that Amazon wants to encourage people to set and meet goals.
(Small world: Katharine and I were in college together and were in Avignon together on a summer study program, way back in 1992.)
43er Josh Peterson’s 12/11/04 e-mail to me may be a clue re: 43 & Amazon’s plans. Here is Josh’s e-mail:
“I just spent about an hour surfing around [my MSFT-/VC-approved business plan for a provider of customized lifelong learning and career services (CLLCS)] with a bit of amazement. I run a little company…We are a team of folks who worked together at Amazon.com developing that company’s personalization and recommendations team and systems. We spent about 1.5 years thinking about what we wanted to build next. We thought a lot about online education tools. We thought a lot about classified ads and job networks. We thought a lot about reputation systems. We thought a bit about personalized advertising systems. We thought a lot about blogging and social networking systems. Eventually, we came up with the idea behind 43 Things.
…I guess I’m mostly just fascinated that we’ve been working a very similar vein to the one you describe, without having a solid name for it (we call it ‘the age of the amateur’ or ‘networks of shared experiences’ instead of CLLCS, but believe me, we are talking about the same patterns and markets, if not in exactly the same way). Thanks for sharing what you have - its fascinating stuff.”
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CLLCS details coming online at OpportuniTV.com.
Feel free to contact me with any questions, etc.
Enjoy,
Frank Ruscica
Comment by Frank Ruscica — 2/10/2005 @ 11:29 am
Hey neat… I studied in Aix-en-Pvce back in 2000 and my school had a “campus” in avignon as well.
Comment by bicyclemark — 2/18/2005 @ 2:01 pm