gin and malicious intent.

Lost in the “Is it an iPad Killer?” hype is the audacious introduction of the Silk browser. Under the guise of increasing speed (on WiFi; there is no 3G Fire where download speed would be a larger issue), Amazon is performing astonishing jujitsu on Google.

The “split browser” notion is that Amazon will use its EC2 back end to pre-cache user web browsing, using its fat back-end pipes to grab all the web content at once so the lightweight Fire-based browser has to only download one simple stream from Amazon’s servers. But what this means is that Amazon will capture and control every Web transaction performed by Fire users. Every page they see, every link they follow, every click they make, every ad they see is going to be intermediated by one of the largest server farms on the planet. People who cringe at the data-mining implications of the Facebook Timeline ought to be just floored by the magnitude of Amazon’s opportunity here. Amazon now has what every storefront lusts for: the knowledge of what other stores your customers are shopping in and what prices they’re being offered there. What’s more, Amazon is getting this not by expensive, proactive scraping the Web, like Google has to do; they’re getting it passively by offering a simple caching service, and letting Fire users do the hard work of crawling the Web. In essence the Fire user base is Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, scraping the Web for free and providing Amazon with the most valuable cache of user behavior in existence.

And all of this on Google’s dime. They use a back-revved version of Android, not Honeycomb; they don’t use Google’s web browser; they can intermediate user click through on Google search results so Google doesn’t see the actual user behavior. Google’s whole play of promoting Android in order to aggregate user behavior patterns to sell to advertisers is completely subverted by Amazon’s intermediation.

Fire isn’t a noun, it’s a verb, and it’s what Amazon has done in the targeted direction of Google. This is the first shot in the new war for replacing the Internet with a privatized merchant data-aggregation network.

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Apple employee CHRIS ESPINOSA, remarking on Amazon’s Kindle Fire via his personal blog.

Something to think about.

Also, I can’t believe I understood everything I read just now.

(h/t The New York Times)

I also don’t really understand any of that, but I’m also not as creeped out by data mining as many other people are. If the Kindle Fire wants to notice shit I buy, and tell me I can get it on Amazon for way cheaper, it deserves a a big hug.

Also, I reblogged this from inothernews,  a blogger who I look to as a fairly reliable source for Tech and news updates, and neither of us understood what they’re really trying to say. I want to review a few points:

1. Every company is trying to make an “iPad Killer”
2. This blogger (not inothernews, but the original source of the quote) works for Apple
3. He has a vested interest in us, the reader, not wanting the Kindle Fire.

I hope in the coming days I see a few things on tumblr:

1. A good explanation on exactly WHAT this quote says.
2. Thoughtful dialogue about how blog posts like that quoted above are just another form of viral marketing for Apple.