There has been quite a bit of talk in the past couple of days about Amazon starting a wiki – Church of the Customer started it all but the interesting thing is that no one that I can see (including Church of the Customer) seems to have a link to it anywhere. Some say it’s something that only some people can view – but even still I would have expected links it it.
The wiki is called ProductWiki but most people don’t seem to be able to find out where it comes from. Business Week does have a link to a help page explaining what a wiki is but it doesn’t really refer to an Amazon wiki as such.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/wiki/ currently points to an error page for me – but it’s not a ‘this page doesn’t exist’ type error but one that says they are having problems processing the request. So maybe that’s where it is.
Interestingly (and maybe it is connected – and maybe it’s not) if you go to http://www.productwiki.com/ you’ll find a ‘coming soon’ message – in fact whatever is there is coming very soon – midnight tonight in fact. Perhaps this is the new home for Amazon’s ProductWiki or perhaps someone else is capitalizing on what they see Amazon doing.
The page design doesn’t look very Amazon-ish and they tend to keep everything on the one domain so I’m not sure it’s officially Amazon or not but time will tell.
update: a whois on the www.productwiki.com site has no obvious connection to Amazon. It’s registered to Amanie Ismail from Canada. Probably a dead end to that lead.
update II: I’ve just had an IM from Tim Flight who says he can see Wiki links on normal Amazon pages. They also have a description as follows:
You can create Wikis about a many different things on Amazon. For example, you might create a Wiki to describe a particular opera recording. Within that Wiki you could create links to Wiki entries defining words such as “soprano” and “coloratura”.
You can view how a particular Wiki entry has changed over time, to see who has contributed what and when, and you can subscribe to be notified by email of any future updates to Wikis you are interested in.
A list of Wikis you have contributed to appears on your Your Amazon Home and Profile pages.
Interesting. Obviously I’m living in the wrong part of the world (again) to participate in it but it looks like an interesting interaction with customers by Amazon.
It will be interesting to see if the term ProductWiki is trademarked as per the indication at the .com site because then Amazon might have to change their references to their wiki or pay Amanie Ismail a healthy fee to licence the term.
Hi, this is Amanie from ProductWiki.
It’s cool that you’re digging deeper into this phenomenon. We’ve been working on ProductWiki for a year now. It’s an interesting coincidence that Amazon has released their “ProductWiki” feature this week.
We’re launching tomorrow at midnight. (Not tonight as you mentioned).
LOL, this is going to be really interesting to watch…. Amanie, you should be hiring the best trademark lawyers you can before it’s too late.
Looks like you don’t have “productwiki” as a registered trademark, actually nobody does after I checked with the US Trademark office.
See AdSense publishers look closely: Amazon tags and wikis its way to stickiness for more about the Amazon wikis.
When they added tags they did it 50/50, so perhaps its the same deal.
[…] Amazon’s ProductWikis were first spotted by a number of US blog sites, notably Church of the Customer Blog. There is, however, some confusion as not everyone is able to see them, suggesting the wikis are a beta product not yet available to all. You can see some screenshots here. […]