Contributed Article on Mashable
Today, I had the opportunity to write about the Amazon-Facebook partnership on Mashable with a post titled How Online Retailers Can Leverage Facebook’s Open Graph. This post is directly tied to my ongoing interest in consumer focused applications, which has led me into the online retail space (first at Amazon.com and now at RichRelevance) as well as into the world of social media at Pelago where I worked on Whhrl, a mobile social application.
By enabling personalization across applications, the Facebook-Amazon partnership demonstrates that the gap between the two worlds is quickly closing. Most importantly for online retailers, while Amazon’s move made headlines because of their market position, the fact is that any merchant can now build an app to allow Facebook users to share their interests.