Amazon's New(ish) Social Network — Now Lifting Even More Info From Facebook, Twitter
Now Lifting Even More Info From Facebook, Twitter — Screenshot of my Public Notes profile at kindle.amazon.com — Amazon's “Public Notes” feature for Kindle has been available for months. So why did my following and follower counts rocket up overnight to five times what they had been?
Context & Ripple Effects
Amazon's social push on the Kindle has been building quietly: in July 2010 it started tapping Facebook connections for product recommendations, and a free Kindle software update preview earlier this year laid groundwork for richer reader-facing features. Public Notes — shared highlights and notes at kindle.amazon.com — has been live for months with modest traction.
What changed on August 8 is the plumbing behind those modest numbers: Public Notes profiles are now drawing more following and profile information directly from Facebook and Twitter accounts. One visible symptom is the author's own follower count jumping roughly fivefold overnight — evidence Amazon is bootstrapping its reading community from imported graphs rather than organic signups.
First-order effects
- Amazon gets an instant social layer for Kindle reading without asking anyone to rebuild a friend list — Public Notes inherits follow relationships from Facebook and Twitter profiles already linked to accounts.
- Readers who linked their social accounts see their Public Notes following and follower counts swell overnight (in reported cases about 5x), changing how active and populated the feature looks.
Second-order effects
- Facebook and Twitter become the default identity infrastructure for Amazon's reading community, meaning Amazon's social-commerce ambitions now run through APIs and policies it does not control.
- Rival booksellers and e-reader makers face pressure to match the imported-graph shortcut or watch Amazon's annotation-sharing look like the only reading network with critical mass.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, large commerce platforms will keep renting identity from social incumbents instead of building proprietary graphs — a structural dependence that hands Facebook and Twitter leverage over retail features built atop their data.
- Reading itself edges toward being a social, feed-driven activity hosted by retailers, with annotations and follows becoming competitive surface area between device ecosystems.
The trend: Retailers are increasingly importing existing Facebook and Twitter social graphs to bootstrap their own communities rather than building networks from scratch.