Sharing Lives As Stories On the Web 30
blackbearnh writes "Jeff Holden spent a decade at Amazon, where he was involved as Senior Vice President of Consumer Websites with the recommendation engine, Amazon Prime, and the product review system. He's left now, and has started Pelago, a company that wants to help mobile users turn their lives into stories they can share on the web. Among the interesting effects he discusses in this interview for O'Reilly Radar is that users of their product, Whrrl, have talked about changing their lives to make more interesting stories. Holden also talks about some of the work he did at Amazon, privacy issues that arise when social networking starts to become ubiquitous, and why he thinks the Apple App Store review system is seriously broken. 'One of the things that happens with an iPhone is when you uninstall an app, it asks you to rate it. And it defaults to one-star. ... The problem is ... there's no kind of qualification. Anybody just downloads it and checks it out or doesn't check it out, right? And I think a number of people run it and they see that you have to sign in and they just delete it. And you get a one-star rating out of those experiences.'"
More interesting life (Score:5, Funny)
Yes, because there isn't any service out there that lets people share the pointlessness of their lives. Otherwise, so many of its users would see marked improvements over "Going to take the dog to the vet" and spreading this banality to everyone stupid enough to click 'yes' and be added as a friend.
Automatic coolness measurement (Score:4, Funny)
The next step may be something that reads your GPS tracking info, evaluates how interesting your life is, and feeds this into your social networking profile. [facebook.com]
Re:More interesting life (Score:3, Funny)
My dog is offended. He worked hard to learn how to twitter.
Life's a bitch.
Or at least he hopes it is.