Amazon Gets Social

There must be some unhappy Amazon affiliates this week with the announcement of Amazon Giver and Grapevine. TechCrunch has the scoop. These two new facebook apps allow you to get an Amazon wishlist right on your Facebook profile page. They also allow you to get product recommendations and actually buy products without leaving Facebook.

   
My initial thought was that this is a big bummer for the half a dozen or so other apps that already link to amazon product pages (with a nice little affiliate link). Competition from the big fish has gotta hurt the conversion rate. It also makes you wonder how successful are these Facebook apps that try to monetize by driving affiliate conversions? There are apps like visual bookshelf that are actually useful. They provide a useful service that users actually want. In Visual Bookshelf's case they let you see what your friends are reading. They also provide a link to Amazon were you can buy your copy. Visual Bookshelf has over 29,000 active users today. Apparently someone likes the app, but are people buying books from it?

Amazon must think there is some potential here, but as of today Grapevine and Giver have 124 and 221 active users respectively.  Granted the apps have been live for less than a week, but thats still not much of an adoption. Time will tell. Bill care to weigh in?