Amazon Adds Social Recommendations Based on Facebook

Amazon has just unveiled a new feature that brings Facebook integration to the e-commerce site. The feature is based on the Facebook Open Graph, revealed a few months ago, and enables users to find out what their friends like in terms of movies, books, music and so on. The idea is to provide purchase recommendations based on your social graph and your interests.

Users have to link their Facebook accounts to their Amazon ones and the feature is entirely opt-in. If you do use it, Amazon will look at your friends’ interests and favorites and match those to the products it has on offer. It will then make recommendations based on their preferences. The recommendations will also be based on your own interests, Pages you ‘liked’ and so on.

This could actually provide much more accurate recommendations than pure algorithm-based ones, especially when used in parallel. Of course, the relevancy of the recommendations depends on how much data you and your friends have on your profiles. Amazon also uses the Facebook data to notify you of upcoming birthdays and make gift suggestions based on what your friends already like.

What is interesting is that the integration doesn’t go both ways. Amazon pulls data from Facebook, but doesn’t publish anything back. In fact, some of the first things Amazon notifies users wanting to connect their Facebook accounts relate to privacy.

“Amazon will not share information from your account with Facebook. Amazon will not share your purchase history with Facebook. Amazon will not attempt to contact your Facebook friends. Amazon will never post anything to your Facebook Wall without your consent,” the “Connecting Amazon with Facebook” page reads.

It’s a first good step and people will likely find it very useful. And from the looks of it, there should be no issues with privacy. This is a very good example of what Facebook had in mind when it introduced the Open Graph tools and now that the Facebook privacy brouhaha has settled down, more sites will start taking advantage of the new features.