Amazon Joins the Party

The AllFaceBook blog is reporting two new applications for Facebook both created by Amazon. I've added the Amazon Giver application. I'm just clicking through it now. I'm excited to see this given my experience with Amazon Wish Lists, which I've blogged earlier.

This is a big step for a major e-tailer. Moving out to the social Web introduces some interesting questions for businesses, and for libraries. I've been working through some of these questions myself since we introduced the WorldCat in Facebook application. The socialization of content raises new questions for everyone:

• How deeply do we allow users to integrate our content into third-party sites


• Which social platform (or platforms) do we develop for? Facebook? OpenSocial?


• Do we build on Facebook and Bebo's (AOL!?) implementation of their platform or MySpace's implementation of OpenSocial?

These questions need to be asked in the context of the organizations audience which means that new tools for measuring that audience (and for measuring success) will be needed. How valuable are the page views to your site if most of your content is consumed via RSS? How do you manage usage statistics reported from multiple social networks? What does "engagement" mean for your organization?

The recent Graphing Social Patterns West conference highlighted the shift from measuring impressions to measuring engagement. One of the more interesting AppNite demos at GSP West was developerAnalytics, a Facebook application that measures the virality and engagement of an app as well as revenue generated from the app. This is just an early example of the tools that businesses will need to master as they socialize their content through the Web.

There is a lot to learn in this emerging environment. Here at WorldCat, we are eager to learn. And as we learn, we'll bring web-scale to libraries.