Does Amazon’s new Page Recommendation and Product Reccomendation in one widget make sense?  I see the logic from the programmer’s point of view, both processes have the same first steps - scan the text and check for relevance with another data source.  As a blogger and reader I’m not as sure there’s a connection at all.  This is a common programming pitfall.  When you are deciding on features and design you have to remove yourself from the backend of the program as much as possible and focus on what makes sense from the users perspective.  This may mean separating features that have a lot in common programmatically into different parts of the interface.

I’ve installed the widget and we’ll see if it adds value or not, having the ability to tweak the results would be nice as I can certainly see the value in recommending books with a similar subject matter.  If the widget trys to sell me some Roomba filters and printer ink then it won’t be adding value to my site, it’ll just be trying to sell something and what does that have to do with page recommendations?

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This entry was posted on Thursday, July 3rd, 2008 at 12:00 pm and is filed under selling out, website, widget. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.