Data Asset Example
One of the many reasons I’m Long $AMZNOne common characteristic of a great web service is a data asset that increases the effectiveness of your service as it grows. As I was Christmas shopping today, I found a great, simple example.
On Amazon, maybe people create wishlists of the things they want but can’t/shouldn’t buy. This explicit gesture of saying “I want this someday” is then aggregated and spit back out in the form of generic gift guides. Amazon looks at which bags, poker sets, kitchen gadgets, etc are added to wishlists the most often, and then creates gift guides which are organized a bunch of different ways:
Category (bags, poker sets, etc)
Personality (Geek, Gourmet, etc)
Relationship (Mom, Dad, Sister, etc)
Price (Under $25, Under $50, etc)
All of this information is driven by the actions of those creating wishlists, these people are not aware they are creating the gift guides. Amazon uses the raw wishlists plus the metadata about those people creating wishlists and the metadata of the items themselves to slice and dice the data into the various categories.
This kind of feedback loop from the data your users create is terrific design and will add to the defensibility of your web service as your data asset increases.
