Will we see an Amazon Social Network today ?

Amazon has invited journalists and bloggers for a press event today in New York.

We are all expecting to see the Amazon tablet announced, the Kindle Fire. It will be a 7 inch Android 2.x device and will not only focus on books reading but is likely to be a compelling selling point for other Amazon content as well: Movies, Music, Applications.

However, I anticipate that Amazon will soon enter the “social network” market in a broad sense.

They currently have the Amazon website, which is a huge source of reviews for hundreds of thousands of items, from books, to DVD, electronics and many more. This site has a huge audience: 20% of Internet Users Visited Amazon in June.

They also have the extremely low profile Kindle site: https://kindle.amazon.com/

This is a draft of a social network for content discovery. It is linked to your Kindle device reading. They know which books you have bought and when you have read a book, they offer you to rate. You can thus share with your followers what you have read and if you like it. You can also share your quotes from the book.

Does it sound familiar ? It looks a bit like the new Facebook feature announced last thursday to share lightweight activities. You can share on Facebook what books and articles you read. Facebook can already do more of course: You can share movies that you watched and music you have listened to.

Amazon is about to launch a tablet with new media capability and will be very soon in an excellent position to do share more behaviour.

So, I do not think Amazon will today launch a “social network”. They are probably not ready yet. However, I bet that Amazon will launch a social network initiative sooner or later. When they will enter that market, they will do that with extremely good fighting chance and an obvious business model: Selling you more goods.

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