There is speculation on Valley Wag about Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos being in talks with Twitter. He's already an investor, but is Amazon looking to a future that might include buying into the real time web?The Gawker Media blog says it has heard whispers that Amazon.com is talking to Twitter about buying it. Bezos is already a personal investor in Twitter. His Bezos Expeditions and Spark Capital invested $15m last summer.If it bought Twitter (which today is reported to be bringing forward plans to charge) you could see it integrating it possibly with Kindle as well as Amazon.com.Valley Wag reports the Amazon/Twitter rumour in a post that is not chiefly about Twitter, but about Amazon buying social media news rating site Digg.com.
Not heard that one? No surprise, there have been no reports about this it's just that Valley Wag sees it as a perfect fit and is floating the idea. Its logic is pretty simple and goes like this: Digg needs to sell itself, it has a lot of traffic with very little revenues, but just how valuable is a site that rates?Good question, I've always like Digg, but it is difficult to see its value. Buyers who have run the slide rule over the business, including Current and News Corporation, have decided that it is not for them. A deal with Google fell apart for different reasons relating to questions of engineering.Valley Wag makes a cogent point: News Corp and Current looked at Digg as a media play, but community-generated sites like Digg aren't that advertiser friendly. It isn't really a media play although with News Corp's ownership of gaming sites like IGN.com, you can see what sparked the initial interest.Digg is still hugely popular, but earlier this year visits to Twitter surpassed Digg for the first time. Maybe no surprise Twitter is growing like wildfire. I thought recently that it had widespread, but not "mass" appeal, but as it permeates ever deeper into celebrity/popular culture that is probably not correct. Seeing Twitter in a headline is not a surprise. It is becoming common place.I digress, Amazon's user reviews are a gold mine. Valley Wag quotes one unnamed study that suggests Amazon.com makes $2.7bn (yes billion) annually in incremental sales because of its user-written reviews. I always check user reviews on Amazon and find them largely helpful. Was this review helpful it asks? Sure it was [click to vote]. If you look at it like that then it makes a really good fit. The system is very similar to what Digg does.Valley Wag suggests that this could be a bonus when it comes to Amazon.com's Kindle e-book reader as Amazon already charges for some news feeds available for free on the web for the Kindle. See where that's going? Would you make a micro payment for a really good piece of user voted content to read on the Kindle? If it had loads of Diggs? That would certainly cheer up magazine and newspaper publishers as they wrestle with how to find ways of charging for content.
Of course, Jeff Bezos could go crazy and do a three way Amazon/Twitter/Digg. Amazon can afford it.
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Having sifted the rumour mill this morning, I'm not sure if there are any gold nuggets there. It
I blogged last week asking whether there was a future for e-papers/e-readers and into my in-box pops
Gordon Macmillan
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