basically,

the hardest part about being an amazon associate is coming up with new things to recommend.

the second hardest part is getting anyone to pay attention to your list of recommendations.

the third hardest part is getting people to read AT ALL.

we want to do this with TIME LOG technology.

we can pump the stream out to twitter too, but new book/music/movie recommendations should be input by new users via the TIME LOG (or via the METAZON PANEL itself, which I see as a simple app built on TIME LOG technology itself).

• we’re going to have millions of users
• we want them to discover each other
• ppl discover one another through their media consumption choices
• recommendations are inherently fun
• a constant stream of new media products is issued by the various media industries
• recommendations can be rich and personal
  • provides an awesome way to publicize one’s existence on METANOTES and make new friends
• all of this leads into amazing circles content

assuming TIME LOG is fully built,

we’ll need to have a way to quickly let users add recommendations that are auto-linked to our Associates account as well as the proper page on Amazon.

we’ll need to have a different set of state-sanctioned lists.

it’s like a TIME LOG of recommendations.

it should be trivially easy for a user to recommend a book or music or movie.

i don’t mind repeats !

if a lot of ppl like something, let it show up in the recommender some more !

this is instantly both an embeddable widget and an iPhone app.

very amazing.

i wonder if amazon has an iPhone app yet. if they do, we can set up links to go right into that iPhone app and not even go out into a new tab. that way we can make sales from ppl who have iPhones even better.

the gist is that we are adding a user-generated content real-time recommendation layer over Amazon.

meanwhile you can “discover” other users’ preferences in real time.

cool.

something you need to see is TWISTORI – this is a great UI concept and where I’m going with the way the panel will look.

what i envision is a hypnotic flow of Amazon book/music/movie recommendations that are generated by METANOTES users from within a METANOTES panel (using an Amazon favicon). then you can click on any of these recommendations and buy the book/cd/dvd in a new tab. and our Amazon Associates account is associated with each sale.

you get one point for submitting a rec

and one point for everyone who clicks your rec

we can give away something to the top recommenders each month, like a macbook air (if we’re making that much money that is)

imagine a METABOOKS twitter account, with a twitter badge in the panel where the tinyurl link to the book on Amazon includes our associates code.

this constantly updated stream of new recommendations must be

• fun to watch
• fun to click on
  • ideally linked to a METANOTES space about the book !
• fun to recommend on

you should be able to drill down into a specific users’ rec lists.

if a user rec’s something you like, you should be able to click on that users’ name and see all their recs.

just registered METAZON.NET and METAZON.ORG

the idea will be fleshed out here

a user-generated community of book/music/movie recommendations, all tied to YOUR amazon associates link.

the problem is: how to get people to participate when they could have their own amazon money come in ?

the answer is: we’re easier and more fun.

you should be able to “block” dumb recommenders.

if you block a dumb recommender, their logs are tagged as “invisible” to you, so you don’t see their dumb recommendations anymore.

over time, your personal stream of recs becomes more refined to YOU.

plus you’ll meet a lot of cool ppl this way.