Comments on: How Does Amazon Scale Behavior Modelling? http://bokardo.com/archives/how-does-amazon-scale-behavior-modelling/ A Blog about Social Web Design Fri, 19 Feb 2010 06:52:26 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.2 hourly 1 By: Brian Phipps http://bokardo.com/archives/how-does-amazon-scale-behavior-modelling/comment-page-1/#comment-1956 Brian Phipps Thu, 03 Nov 2005 16:11:53 +0000 http://bokardo.com/?p=255#comment-1956 Very interesting post. I would say that “customer modeling” is in fact part of a larger process, which is that of “creating a customer.” Of course, before a company can “create a customer” it has to design the customer it intends to create. That introduces the new field of “customer design.” A lot of modeling is needed to make that happen, and it’s a different form of modeling than the ethnographic studies that observe behavior. Companies can use ethnographics to fit their operations to customers, but a greater challenge is to create the customers that will move their business forward. In this regard, Amazon has made giant strides, but Google is even more dynamic, using a good deal of holistic intuition. Here is an example of how they are creating the Googleized college student: http://services.google.com/university/. For UI designers, the good news is that they are fast-becoming the center of the business universe. Companies are waking to the fact that brands are interfaces, and soon every major company will need UI teams to create its brand APIs. Amazon and Google are pointing the way. Very interesting post. I would say that “customer modeling” is in fact part of a larger process, which is that of “creating a customer.” Of course, before a company can “create a customer” it has to design the customer it intends to create. That introduces the new field of “customer design.” A lot of modeling is needed to make that happen, and it’s a different form of modeling than the ethnographic studies that observe behavior. Companies can use ethnographics to fit their operations to customers, but a greater challenge is to create the customers that will move their business forward. In this regard, Amazon has made giant strides, but Google is even more dynamic, using a good deal of holistic intuition. Here is an example of how they are creating the Googleized college student: http://services.google.com/university/.

For UI designers, the good news is that they are fast-becoming the center of the business universe. Companies are waking to the fact that brands are interfaces, and soon every major company will need UI teams to create its brand APIs. Amazon and Google are pointing the way.

]]> By: Jon Myers http://bokardo.com/archives/how-does-amazon-scale-behavior-modelling/comment-page-1/#comment-1920 Jon Myers Sun, 30 Oct 2005 05:13:28 +0000 http://bokardo.com/?p=255#comment-1920 Hey great post. Just to extend on the thought of how Amazon scales behavior modeling. I believe another key ingredient of behavior modeling that contributes to Amazon's success is the ability to model the collective action and cooperation of large groups of people. The ability to distill massive group complexity to make intelligent predictions about the tools that will allow people to organize into "virtual domain specific federations" and share and ultimately trigger bundled transactions. I have not seen their modeling processes, but it is clear that Bezos is comfortable in dealing with ambiguity and complexity. I believe how companies deal with these two factors in the modeling process affects their ability to uncover patterns, trends and anomalies that impact the business in both positive and negative ways. Non-linear thinking. Best, -jon Hey great post. Just to extend on the thought of how Amazon scales behavior modeling. I believe another key ingredient of behavior modeling that contributes to Amazon’s success is the ability to model the collective action and cooperation of large groups of people.

The ability to distill massive group complexity to make intelligent predictions about the tools that will allow people to organize into “virtual domain specific federations” and share and ultimately trigger bundled transactions.

I have not seen their modeling processes, but it is clear that Bezos is comfortable in dealing with ambiguity and complexity. I believe how companies deal with these two factors in the modeling process affects their ability to uncover patterns, trends and anomalies that impact the business in both positive and negative ways. Non-linear thinking.

Best,

-jon

]]> By: Josh http://bokardo.com/archives/how-does-amazon-scale-behavior-modelling/comment-page-1/#comment-1897 Josh Tue, 25 Oct 2005 20:32:13 +0000 http://bokardo.com/?p=255#comment-1897 Parrots...of course!!! Parrots…of course!!!

]]> By: PeteCashmore http://bokardo.com/archives/how-does-amazon-scale-behavior-modelling/comment-page-1/#comment-1885 PeteCashmore Mon, 24 Oct 2005 19:25:19 +0000 http://bokardo.com/?p=255#comment-1885 "If someone is familiar with how Amazon actually does this I would be very interested in hearing how brilliant their solution is compared with my brute force silliness" I thought everyone knew: they use parrots. Originally, they tried out a version of <a href="http://www.google.com/technology/pigeonrank.html" rel="nofollow">PigeonRank</a>, but it turns out that pigeons are only good for indexing webpages, and pretty useless when it comes to powering large-scale recommendation engines. Who woulda thought? :) “If someone is familiar with how Amazon actually does this I would be very interested in hearing how brilliant their solution is compared with my brute force silliness”

I thought everyone knew: they use parrots. Originally, they tried out a version of PigeonRank, but it turns out that pigeons are only good for indexing webpages, and pretty useless when it comes to powering large-scale recommendation engines. Who woulda thought? :)

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