[轉載]亞馬遜測試類似TikTok功能

WSJ
By Sebastian Herrera

Even Ama­zon.­com Inc. wants to be a lit­tle like Tik­Tok.

Ama­zon is test­ing a fea­ture in its app that would show users a Tik­Tok-style photo and video feed of prod­ucts for shop­pers to share with other users. The test is cur­rently vis­i­ble to a small num­ber of Ama­zon em­ploy­ees, ac­cord­ing to a per­son fa­mil­iar with it.

Ama­zon joins other ma­jor tech­nol­ogy com­pa­nies such as Meta Plat­forms Inc. and Google par­ent Al­pha­bet Inc. that have at­tempted to bump up en­gage­ment through short videos and an end­less stream of con­tent.

The por­tal be­ing tested un­der the in­ter­nal name “In­spire,” ap­pears as a di­a­mond wid­get on the home page of Ama­zon’s app, ac­cord­ing to Is­raeli-based ar­ti­fi­cial in­tel­li­gence firm Watch­ful Tech­nolo­gies Ltd., which has tracked the fea­ture’s use. The wid­get brings shop­pers to a feed that shows a stream of im­ages and videos of prod­ucts, with shop­pers able to like, share and ul­ti­mately pur­chase items. While most of the feed now ap­pears as still pic­tures, Watch­ful re­searchers said the por­tal also fea­tures video con­tent.

An Ama­zon spokes­woman said the com­pany is “con­stantly test­ing new fea­tures to help make cus­tomers’ lives a lit­tle eas­ier.” Ama­zon of­ten ex­per­i­ments with new prod­ucts and ser­vices for em­ploy­ees be­fore re­leas­ing them pub­licly. It is pos­si­ble the com­pany may al­ter the “In­spire” fea­ture sig­nif­i­cantly be­fore launch­ing it to the pub­lic or not re­lease it at all.

Ama­zon is the lat­est tech gi­ant to try to cap­i­tal­ize on the sharp rise and pop­u­lar­ity of Tik­Tok, owned by Chi­nese com­pany Byte­Dance Ltd.

Tik­Tok—which made its name with light­hearted videos of peo­ple danc­ing, but has grown to in­clude large seg­ments of groups dis­cussing every­thing from books to in­ternational crises—was the most down­loaded app of 2021. Roughly 67% of teenagers be­tween the ages of 13 and 17 use the app, ac­cord­ing to a re­cent sur­vey by the Pew Re­search Cen­ter, and Tik­Tok’s top con­tent pro­duc­ers can make mil­lions each year. Charli D’Ame­lio, for ex­am­ple, who started post­ing videos of her­self danc­ing on Tik­Tok in 2019, made $17.5 mil­lion last year, ac­cord­ing to Forbes.

Ama­zon’s In­spire “could be­come the kind of re­ally sticky so­cial me­dia way to browse,” Watch­ful re­searcher Daniel Buchuk said. “It’s a way of adopt­ing a new so­cial ex­pe­ri­ence on the app.”

Meta and Google have launched sim­i­lar in-app fea­tures that closely re­sem­ble Tik­Tok’s for­mat. Meta in Feb­ruary launched its short-video prod­uct, “Reels,” for all global Face­book users af­ter ear­lier in­tro­duc­ing the fea­ture in 2020. The com­pany has com­peted with Tik­Tok for young users, and com­pany ex­ec­u­tives have pegged its fu­ture to video con­tent, say­ing video now ac­counts for more than half the time users spend on Face­book and In­sta­gram.

Google has also poured re­sources into short-form video. You­Tube ranks as the most pop­u­lar plat­form among U.S. teens, and more than 1.5 bil­lion logged-in users watch You­Tube “Shorts” a month, Google said in June. Shorts al­low users to post videos of up to 60 sec­onds and are now promi­nently fea­tured on You­Tube’s main page on its web­site and app.

Ama­zon, too, has dab­bled in so­cial-me­dia-like ser­vices.

The re­tailer posts live videos from cre­ators on its web­site, who pro­mote items avail­able for pur­chase. It has at­tempted to court elite so­cial-me­dia users to its in­flu­encer pro­gram, which al­lows cre­ators to build per­son­al­ized pages on Ama­zon and earn money when fol­low­ers make pur­chases through cus­tomized links.

The com­pany hasn’t yet seen the suc­cess of its ri­vals, though it has tried to lure top cre­ators in part by invit­ing them to Ama­zon-hosted re­treats fea­tur­ing re­sort-style ameni­ties and pam­per­ing.

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各大科技巨頭都開始學TikTok，搞視頻直播帶貨。TikTok病毒擴散開來，以後不想看也躲不掉。

Amazon上面賣的東西本身就很多中共國廠商換一個美國的殼，刷成千上萬5星好評，結果買到手東西完全是垃圾。

這些中共國元素的侵略進我的生活，真的感到好煩。現在Biden政府還在那綏靖，實在看到Biden那卑躬屈膝的猥瑣樣子就難受。