> "Complaining about free streaming content is not a great way to start a review. How's the streaming content that Apple provides?"
I'll bite. I really don't like the Prime free Videos thing. It's not the lack of selection (though that is an issue), it's that there is zero discoverability.
Amazon's concept of "recommendations" is quaint and still entirely obsessed with the concept of a physical product, and fails dramatically when put alongside modern recommendation engines like Netflix, or any number of smaller startups that deliver better content recommendations. Netflix's content selection isn't terribly awesome either, but it doesn't feel lacking because the system does such a fine job of finding you something to watch.
And it's not that Amazon tries to build out a good discoverability system,and it just isn't any good. It simply doesn't have one. When you drop into the Video Store, almost none of the things it shows you are meant to be relevant to you. We see global bestsellers. We see new releases. We see nothing relevant to the user, and that's a pretty big problem for a device whose mission is to help customers discover content and buy it.
The same applies to the MP3 Store. Where Apple has Genius, Spotify/Rdio have social features and tastemaker-based recommendations... the Music Store on the Fire has... nothing.
I'm really disappointed with mine. The out of box experience is so good. You pull it out of the box and power it on, it's already registered to your Amazon account. You're led through a simple setup process as good as iPad with iOS5. You even get these cute chalk-mark-scribbles tutorial overlays when you first land on the home screen.
And then you drop off a damn cliff, and 20 minutes later you realize the device is pretty vacuous. About the only part of the entire device where I don't have serious issues is the e-reader, thank God.
modern recommendation engines like Netflix ... the system does such a fine job of finding you something to watch.
I strongly disagree (about Netflix). I think their recommendation engine is dismal. It pretty much never finds me things that I'm interested in.
To me, the strongest evidence that Netflix is after a red herring is the Netflix Challenge. The goal was an algorithm to provide the most accurate ratings, but I think that phrasing the question in that way makes it almost irrelevant.
The real question should be: what movies will this user likely find to be very good. That means that a precise rating is never necessary, and no rating is needed at all for things that are outside the 4-5 range. And an algorithm to find movies that simply have a high likelihood of high scores is a very different beast from an algorithm that can precisely rate movies across the whole spectrum.
I think they're still working on recommendations, the app is still quite basic. It shows similar products well, but doesn't try and tell me what I want. To be fair, I have not bought/watched much video content on Amazon and on the website the recommendations are pretty sparse because of that (I have bought Curb Your Enthusiasm and Seinfeld DVD sets, so the recommendations are mostly from those).
When I go to the Music store on Kindle it has recommendations for me on the front page (I haven't bought music on Amazon for a while so they are a bit out of date, but it took me a second to figure out why all the top albums were so good). If I uploaded my music to Amazon Cloud I'd expect the recommendations could be better--Amazon currently only knows a very small part of my music collection.
For a comparison, I just logged onto the music store from my iPhone and the "Genius" recommendations on there are as bad as they could be, despite Genius working great on my desktop. Apple has the benefit of knowing all my music, so this is a little disappointing. It seems they go by artist mainly and don't weight by play count (I have some popular albums, albeit mostly un-listened and they drove almost all recommendations.) I would heavily weight by play count, that's the best tell that the music is actually enjoyed.
> "If I uploaded my music to Amazon Cloud I'd expect the recommendations could be better"
On the contrary, I think it gets far worse. Think about your entire music library. How much of it do you actively listen to? How much of it do you still care about? Or is it left over from those 6 months when you just can't get enough hiphop, and now you can't stand it anymore?
Tracking recent purchases will make for strong recommendations, since that's a good measure of where your tastes lie right now. Using your entire library (which is the only recommendation the Kindle can do) will inject a lot of noise, which is what happened to me (my entire library is on Cloud Player).
The whole thing desperately needs a Genius-like recommendation system. We know Amazon has the tech to do this, so why isn't there anything even remotely like it? Why is it that when I listen to music the UI is sparse and empty, and I'm not being upsold on relevant music?
Genius suffers from the same library-wide problem, but the difference is if you select a song, it will give you recommendations based solely on it. I've used this to discover new music a lot, and it works really well. Amazon desperately needs the same thing.
> "I think they're still working on recommendations, the app is still quite basic."
That really describes the entire device. You can see what they're getting at, but it's fallen so far short of the goal that it's sometimes infuriating how big the squandered opportunity is. Everything is "quite basic", and considering this is supposed to be the electronic gateway to all video, audio, periodical, and textual content... it does a really poor job everywhere of pushing content to you.
> On the contrary, I think it gets far worse. Think about your entire music library. How much of it do you actively listen to? How much of it do you still care about? Or is it left over from those 6 months when you just can't get enough hiphop, and now you can't stand it anymore?
Amazon right now doesn't know what I have or what I listen to. If they know what I have, it can't hurt things. They get listen data from your usage and can pick up further listen data from iTunes (the playcount data there is a great record of what I actually listen to).
Genius is great at finding similar stuff if I give it stuff I like, but the recommendations at the store are crap.
I'll bite. I really don't like the Prime free Videos thing. It's not the lack of selection (though that is an issue), it's that there is zero discoverability.
Amazon's concept of "recommendations" is quaint and still entirely obsessed with the concept of a physical product, and fails dramatically when put alongside modern recommendation engines like Netflix, or any number of smaller startups that deliver better content recommendations. Netflix's content selection isn't terribly awesome either, but it doesn't feel lacking because the system does such a fine job of finding you something to watch.
And it's not that Amazon tries to build out a good discoverability system,and it just isn't any good. It simply doesn't have one. When you drop into the Video Store, almost none of the things it shows you are meant to be relevant to you. We see global bestsellers. We see new releases. We see nothing relevant to the user, and that's a pretty big problem for a device whose mission is to help customers discover content and buy it.
The same applies to the MP3 Store. Where Apple has Genius, Spotify/Rdio have social features and tastemaker-based recommendations... the Music Store on the Fire has... nothing.
I'm really disappointed with mine. The out of box experience is so good. You pull it out of the box and power it on, it's already registered to your Amazon account. You're led through a simple setup process as good as iPad with iOS5. You even get these cute chalk-mark-scribbles tutorial overlays when you first land on the home screen.
And then you drop off a damn cliff, and 20 minutes later you realize the device is pretty vacuous. About the only part of the entire device where I don't have serious issues is the e-reader, thank God.