Wednesday, December 2, 2009
Chapter 11; Merchants
The rating systems that Amazon and EBay uses are real. They are real people giving real testimonies; it is not a thought-out commercial. The comments are "nuts-and-bolts" straight up feedback. Although this system, which in many ways reminds me of folksonomy, is probably not 100% representative of the true characteristics of a product, I think that for the most part, it works. For instance, my Dad bought a playstation off of EBAY from a seller who was rated by others as a legitimately reliable seller-unfortunately, even though my dad had that suppossed re-assurance....we had problems with the Playstation. However, what makes me look past his example? Well, the reason is because EBAY is a very recognized term. Pretty much anybody you run into on the street is going to know what you are talking about if you mention the word EBAY. Why? Because EBAY is well-known because alot of people use it because nine times out of ten, it works!!! The same philosophy holds true for Amazon.com. If people are posting comments and testimonies to this website, most of them are probably accurate or Amazon.com would not have the success that it has. I have personally had great success with Amazon; I used it to purchase my Shirky and my Abelson Books for a lower price than Barnes and Noble!
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I love the Amazon. I read the books first on Kindle. (I have to say, I would have preferred to have them in paper, as its easier to highlight and navigate a paper book.)
ReplyDeleteYou're the first person so far to note that the ratings in Ebay aren't perfect... and remember - they aren't all necessarily authentic.... but despite their hiccups, they work "okay," just as Wikipedia is "good enough" if not the best. That's a theme that we'll see for at least the next 10 years, I'm guessing... free, fast, easy access to information that's "good enough." We'll still likely have to pay for premium content...
but we'll see...