A rare day spent out and about.

I did an informal usability review for an iOS app oriented toward consumer-sourced aggregation of review and product info. No, I can’t tell you who.

It was fun and I was glad to contribute, being a fan of the service.

Thinking about it a few minutes ago I started poking around the profile-based suggestions embedded into my Amazon user account and as expected they are fucking terrible, as they always have been. Amazon should figure out how to buy my search history from, well, actually from me, not Google.

I suppose I would totally let Amazon snoop on my user-ID tied search results for a blanket, all-merchants discount of something like 20%. The problem (for them) is that I have multiple Google IDs, but honestly, how many of us can there be?

Being an Amazon merchant, I would expect they would pass the 20% on to third party merchants, and as a merchant that would be something I would very much NOT appreciate. Unless they could show specific, attributable revenue growth that exceeded the discounted charges. That sort of transparency seems unlikely.