Amazon will capture and control every Web transaction performed by Fire users.
Chris Desponosa – The split browser notion is that Amazon will use its EC2 back end to pre-cache user web browsing, using its fat back-end pipes to grab all the web content at once so the lightweight Fire-based browser has to only download one simple stream from Amazons servers.
But what this means is that Amazon will capture and control every Web transaction performed by Fire users. Every page they see, every link they follow, every click they make, every ad they see is going to be intermediated by one of the largest server farms on the planet.
People who cringe at the data-mining implications of the Facebook Timeline ought to be just floored by the magnitude of Amazons opportunity here.
Amazon now has what every storefront lusts for: the knowledge of what other stores your customers are shopping in and what prices they’re being offered there.
Whats more, Amazon is getting this not by expensive, proactive scraping the Web, like Google has to do; they’re getting it passively by offering a simple caching service, and letting Fire users do the hard work of crawling the Web. In essence the Fire user base is Amazons Mechanical Turk, scraping the Web for free and providing Amazon with the most valuable cache of user behavior in existence.
From TechDirt
Notwithstanding that, 4 million are likely to be pre-ordered and Amazon.com expects them to sell out. Kindle Fire is only available for pre-order in the United States.
Leave a Reply