Amazon deserves to be as usable as possible
so I think they should develop their Lists and MediaLibrary services a little more. Of course, my hope is that this is already in development or being implemented.
Amazon has created YourMediaLibrary which is a sort of online bookshelf. You can add books, music, and videos to the MediaLibrary and keep it in your Collection. However, there are only two ways to add products to your Collection.
- You must click, the "I Own This" box under the items under your Recommendations.
- You must manually search through YourMediaLibrary for books to add to your Collection.
My concern is that I should be able to do this from the Amazon search bar. Instead of having to go an extra step to purposely add media to my Collection, it should be usable throughout normal website use, i.e. shopping and the like.
Also something I noticed is that the only way to hide items from your main Collection view is to put them in the Trash. The items I wanted to hide were books I have sold. I wanted to still keep the record that I had owned them but keep them out of my current Collection. I thought I could Tag the books with "sold" and therefore separate them from my current Collection. The tagging was simple and straightforward but there was no way for me to hide the items from my current Collection. I had wrongly assumed their tagging system had an archive or hide function. [Spending too much time on Gmail's organizational platform.]
Other than this small quall I had, the overall service of YourMediaLibrary seems very useful and interestingly styled so that it looks significantly different than that of Amazon’s main site. Maybe they want to branch off into an affiliate partner. I could see the YourMediaLibrary taking over Amazon’s main site digital content sales. However, it may be just as simple to leave all of the commerce on Amazon’s main site, so that YourMediaLibrary remains a purely social network.
[These thoughts will be merged with fancy pictures and keen looking graphs later . . . maybe. 8-]