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.'"
Major disconnect (Score:3, Insightful)
I was very confused when I read the summary. The first half and second half seem to deal with totally different topics.
Life, stories and stories of lives are only interesting if they have good content. Content, content, content. Meet interesting people, visit interesting places, do interesting things.
If technology helps you improving your life/story content: nice. We could have an interesting discussion about how that could come about.
The second half of the story is about this dude's work at Amazon and boring technical details. When I glanced through TFA I saw that it is mostly about that, and the dude doing his best to distinguish his product from all those other web 2.0 products. This has nada nothing zero to do with an interesting life story.
Of course the blame is on the story submitter. The title fitting TFA should be something onionesque like 'area man stares at navel and creates his own special unique superior web2.0 niche'.
(And bad summaries are getting sort of the standard here on /., I should know better not be fooled by them anymore, maybe I am getting too old for this place.)