This recommendation by Amazon, that just arrived in my email inbox, is either one of those smug moments when you kid yourself into thinking “ha, see, even the big guys get it wrong” or Amazon knowing more about me than I realise…

“Dear Amazon.com Customer,

We’ve noticed that customers who have purchased Head First HTML with CSS & XHTML (Head First) by Elisabeth Freeman also purchased books by Patricia Thayer. For this reason, you might like to know that Patricia Thayer’s Coming Home To The Cowboy (Silhouette Romance) will be released soon.”

I like the “people who purchased X also purchased Y” feature when it works but this is a not the best example of it in action.

Similarly, if you’ve ever bought anything from iTunes, you may have noticed a “Just for you” section appears with tunes you may be interested in based on your past purchases. All is well until you buy a tune by “The Veronicas” for your daughters (honest!) and from then on you’re doomed. Just for you: “Hilary Duff”, Just for you: “The Pussycat Dolls”, Just for you: “High School Musical”, etc., until you Just switch it off. What they need is the “I like/don’t like it” feature that Pandora has.

Anyway, I have a cowboy waiting for me, The Veronicas playing in my head and an excited anticipation of the kind of traffic the keywords in this article will pull in!

This entry was posted on Friday, August 4th, 2006 at 11:36 am and is filed under Promote. 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.