The New York Times reported this week that Amazon.com (NASDAQ:AMZN) hopes to apply the same sort of collective intelligence behind the popular Wikipedia online encyclopedia to online shopping, allowing users to write, edit, and update product-related wikis on its site. Amazon has taken its ProductWikis feature out of beta, in the hopes that community intelligence can help its customers make more informed purchasing decisions -- and of course, increase customer interest and loyalty.
Wiki is a Web technology that creates sites that are easy to establish and edit, allowing a community of users to quickly create, revise, and expand upon linked pages. The most widely known wiki, Wikipedia, started the ball rolling with its community-written and -edited encyclopedia; despite one high-profile brush with controversy, it has been a solid success. Another recent example of community-based content is Digg.com, which provides community-based ratings of news articles on the Internet, allowing Web surfers to decide what they think news should be.
According to the Times, there are already 4,500 ProductWikis on Amazon's site. If you doubt the logic behind the idea, consider that some of the most popular forms of user-generated feedback help to drive commerce and viral interest in products and services. Amazon and eBay (NASDAQ:EBAY) have long bolstered their sites with user ratings and feedback, and Netflix's (NASDAQ:NFLX) tell-a-friend feature, allowing users to recommend movies to their buddies, improved the service's usefulness.
ProductWikis will ostensibly allow Amazon to take on some comparison-shopping sites like eBay's Shopping.com. The feature might also be a volley against Google's (NASDAQ:GOOG) Froogle.
In addition to letting users write and edit the content, ProductWikis rely on users to police entries, reporting any comments or changes that are offensive or irrelevant, condemn the products without cause, or heap too much praise. That's a smart move; the balance between content and commerce relies on a certain lack of bias, and product evangelism or smear jobs would undermine the usefulness of such a feature.
As the Web increasingly embraces community-based content, more established Internet companies like Amazon don't want to be left on the sidelines. Even better, features like ProductWikis allow Amazon's customers to do all the work yet make the company's services more useful. It seems to me that this new feature also fits well with Amazon's ongoing drive to make its site the Web equivalent of a shopping mall, a place where customers gather to socialize as well as shop.
ProductWikis aren't the only community-based content tool Amazon has been experimenting with, either. Searching for a product on Amazon still yields the usual reviews, ratings, and maybe a ProductWiki. Now, however, users can also "tag" their search results, start a discussion, and find news and reviews. Whew!
Amazon and other Internet companies may ultimately offer even more improvements upon bricks-and-mortar shopping malls. After all, when was the last time you went shopping and polled a bunch of nearby customers about what they think of a certain product? Features that draw upon the experience, opinions, and intelligence of its customers should prove a boon to Amazon's online experience, so long as the quality of the information meets users' standards for integrity.
Totally wiki-d further Foolishness:
- Last winter, Wikipedia had to call security.
- eBay recently lent a helping hand to Meetup.
- Amazon tried a talk show on for size earlier this year.
Amazon.com, Netflix, and eBay are Motley Fool Stock Advisor selections. To find out what other companies David and Tom Gardner have recommended to subscribers since April 2002, click here for a 30-day free trial.
Alyce Lomax does not own shares of any of the companies mentioned.
