Amazon – a case study in abusive social networking

I wrote about some of the differences between social networking on either side of the corporate firewall a few days ago. One big difference is that within a company, users are unlikely to misbehave. There are plenty of ways that people can abuse social web sites for fun or for gain; Amazon exhibits most of them:

• Abusive tagging. Take a look at the page for “Playing with Fire” by the appalling Kevin Federline, and scroll down to the tags. I particularly like “music to make you long for the sweet release of death”. (To protect the innocent, I should point out that a screen capture of those tags is included in this tagging presentation, which is well worth reading).
• Agenda-setting tagging. There is a campaign to tag products that contain digital rights management with the tag “defectivebydesign”.
• Baiting collaborative filtering. Amazon recommends products to its users by storing the purchase history of every user, and thus creating a huge database of products that tend to be owned together. However, simply viewing a number of pages in a single session also creates a relationship between those two products. For a product with few sales, it doesn't take many unique visits to both a target of ridicule and an unsuitable product to manipulate the system. The Register ran an article about one of these a few months ago; since Amazon tends to remove the recommendations pretty quickly I can't give a current example. Incidentally, someone calling himself George Orwell has tagged the Pat Robertson book “books on hate”, which is an example of abusive or agenda-setting tagging.
• Amateur comedy. Since the product recommendations Amazon is giving me after viewing Kevin Federline's album are shockingly bad, I may as well go for broke and point out the customer reviews for Katie “Jordan” Price and Peter Andre's album, where some of the customer reviews are genuinely funny. Since sarcasm isn't as much a feature of American comedy as it is British, the UK version of Amazon seems much more prone to this.
• Spam. Its customer reviews are subject to approval, so Amazon is pretty much free of spam. I don't think I need to point to an example elsewhere.