Constant & Endless

Makes sense.

I love several things about this:

1. This is only the first in an ongoing series, with three other parts as of the moment I published this post.
2. You can buy the contract from Peter Jackson’s film adaptation of The Hobbit on Amazon.
3. James Daily, who wrote the post to which I link above, bought that prop contract from Amazon and used it in the creation of the article series.

Wonderfully fun stuff!

This is interesting: Netflix delivers its streaming option via one of Amazon’s cloud storage and content distribution networks. I try to avoid summarizing other peoples’ work, but the other interesting bit here is that Amazon’s in-house streaming video service saw no interruption.

If I was a paranoid conspiracy theorist, I’d throw around phrases like “net neutrality concerns” right about now. Is Amazon prioritizing their own content over the content of competitors whose content they’re contracted to deliver?

Lee Hutchinson, writing at Ars Technica:

These kinds of outages are a jarring reminder of the true nature of “the cloud”—it’s still just servers in data centers.

Amazon’s market power in ebooks leads to some questionable behavior, as well as some anti-competitive business practices.

Now it is becoming increasingly clear that reliance on Amazon by some of the internet’s most popular services could be a liability. Their cloud hosting services, which, to be fair, are well known for affordability and reliability, look like an attractive single point of failure for the things we use on the internet every day.

Ian Griffiths and Dan Milmo of The Guardian, quoting ” a contract seen by the Guardian,” presumably between Amazon and one of its UK publishing “partners”:

If the base price exceeds the base price … provided to a similar service then … the base price hereunder will be deemed to be equal to such lower price, effective as of the date such lower price comes into effect.

That’s a good deal, especially coupled with the recent ebooks settlement.

The US antitrust regime is focused on protecting consumer interests. That means that as long as Amazon’s book selection continues to rise and their prices continue to fall, they’re unlikely to see any problems on the competition law front.

That’s probably not good for consumers in the long-run, especially given Amazon’s DRM and control over your devices and library. I’m going to go out on a limb here and predict that Amazon will face some antitrust scrutiny of its own in the next year.

I want to thank Mr. Nathaniel Robertson for pointing people in need of cleaning up their Kindle archive to this bookmarklet that allows you to bulk-delete entire pages of Kindle Library content. Many thanks to the person behind Japanese blog Net Buffalo for solving this problem.

I, like them, needed to get rid of months of Instapaper cruft. This bookmarklet did the trick. Instapaper’s Kindle integration is wonderful, but I wish Amazon would let us auto-delete recurring content.

Kevin C. Tofel, writing at GigaOM:

This could mean vastly better tablet apps for the higher resolution Kindle Fires similar to the improved iPad apps that iOS developers made instead of scaled-up iPhone software.

I think he’s right: assuming developers embrace this change, it can only bode well for the quality of app experiences for consumers.

But that’s not the only angle here, is it?

I’m not a developer, so I have some questions. My questions imply their own answers, so correct me if I’m wrong:

1. How is encouraging the development and maintenance of multiple simultaneous versions of an app going to be helpful to developers?
2. Doesn’t each version come with its own bugs, complaints, and quirks?
3. Don’t developers want easier ways to incorporate device flexibility into a single binary?

Romain Dillet at TechCrunch explains it like this:

Now when you land on a company profile page, you will see a big brand name with a small @username below, a gigantic header photo, a small logo next to every tweet, photos of new products in the sidebar without having to scroll, a pinned tweet at the top of the timeline for a current promotion, and finally the traditional flow of tweets.

Twitter is not hiding the ball on this one: their advertising blog post makes it hard to see the new profiles as motivated by anything but improving advertiser utility.

Twitter’s downward spiral into user-neutral (at best) and user-hostile (at worst) changes suggests their ignorance of the operating principle I mentioned last week.

That’s a shame, because the company-first-via-users-first approach is serving Amazon and Apple, and their partners and users, very well.

John Gruber writes one of the most respected and prolific tech blogs on the web, Daring Fireball. Some people deride him as a blindly-worshipful Apple fanboy who delights in pointing out the failed attempts of other companies to copy Apple’s products and strategy.

I don’t agree with those people.

This article by Mr. Gruber is a great example of his willingness to praise true innovation. Amazon has taken inspiration not from Apple’s hardware or software design, but from their approach to product development.

Place the delight of your customers first and the device and multimedia sales will follow. Put another way, Amazon, like Apple, operates on the premise that putting customer experience first is the best way to put corporate success first.

Further Reading

• Jeff Bezos, inheritor to Steve Jobs’ crown? by Om Malik at Om.co
• Making Money While Keeping Prices Low: Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos Explains It All (Mostly) by Tricia Duryee at All Things D

Amazon increased the power and range of its Kindle offerings and achieved impressively-low pricing across the board. Again.

I’m 100% certain someone I know will get one of the newly-announced devices, maybe even before the holidays, and I can’t wait to have a look.

Further Reading

• Comparison of the Kindle Fire HD to other major tablets at The Verge