My Best Friend
Today while browsing on a site that had absolutely nothing to do with photography, there was an Amazon banner ad down the bottom offering me lenses.
So it knows I like photography, so what?
- These are Canon lenses, to fit my camera
- These are lenses I was already interested in
Amazon already knows what I want, now they just want to convince me to buy from them with low low prices.
Before everyone goes screaming Big Brother and putting on their tin foil hats, I’m not at all worried by this. In fact it leaves me with positive feelings. This can only be a good thing.
- Amazon only offer me stuff I want and stuff I’m interested in - I don’t mind looking at ads for things I like
- This means they save money advertising things to people who don’t want them. They can pass these savings on to the consumer (while also maximising profits)
- Imagine the amount of computing power used to do this for all of Amazon’s users & products. Now imagine all the rest of the computers powering Amazon’s competitors and every other service on the web. Higher demand for computers is a good thing - more innovation, more progress - means better computers for use in non-commercial fields like medical research, science, etc. Yeah, there’s negative side-effects. But what problem can computers create that they can’t fix?