INTERVIEW:Amazon’s Jeff Barr on future of shopping
By Adam Reuters
SECOND LIFE, Oct 23 (Reuters) - Jeff Barr (right) has the futuristic title of Web Services Evangelist at online retailing giant Amazon.com; as Jeffrey Batra in Second Life he is working hard on projects that bridge the virtual world and the real one.Will his employer follow suit?
Although Amazon founder and Chief Executive Jeff Bezos was an early investor in Linden Labs, the company has been tight-lipped about its plans.
“Amazon.com, the retail business, does not speculate on what it may or may not be doing in the future as it relates to Second Life,” said Amazon spokesman Andrew Herdener in an email.
That hasn’t stopped third-party developers and others from working on their own solutions. Earlier this year, 3pointD.com reported that a group of Amazon engineers were working to bridge Second Life and Amazon.com, outside of the formal auspices of the company. Amazon Chief Technology Officer Werner Vogels described the initiative as a “completely grassroots effort” to 3pointD’s Mark Wallace.
“Amazon’s Web Services is pleased to see developers innovating in SL using Amazon.com shopping technology and data,” Herdener said.
Barr spokes with Reuters in a telephone conversation earlier this month. The following is an edited excerpt.
Reuters: Jeff, can you tell us a bit about your job and how it relates to Second Life?
Jeff Barr: My job is to be the Web services evangelist… to communicate with developers all over the world, encourage them to look at Amazon’s collection of Web services, and encourage them to build great applications on top of those services. When I saw Second Life it really struck me as a developer platform. It was the place to go for folks … who think creatively, think about the future — I’ve just been really impressed so far.
Reuters: Which Web services do you see people using most commonly in Second Life?
Jeff Barr: We’ve so far seen some ecommerce from Second411, Life2Life, and Jnana.
Second411 is a heads-up-display, as you’re browing thorugh the world it gives you search capabilities — you can do an integrated search through their product catalog of vendors selling objects in the world, and also the Amazon catalog. You get a nice integration of the real and the virtual.
The second one is called Life2Life. It’s an Amazon store — or actually a set of technologies used to build stores — and this is very, very similar to the Amazon associates program coupled with the e-commerce service. With that service we encourage developers to pull the data from our site to get product information, descriptions, cover art, and so forth.
In this case their site is essentially real-life objects inside of Second Life. They’ve coupled it with the Amazon shopping cart, so you can do searches within the store, put objects into your cart, and initiate the checkout process, all remaining in character with your avatar.
Jnana is different, and is very much in line with how people could shop in the future. They’ve decided to attack the long tail of shopping — it’s really easy for people to find the top 10, 15 or 100 things in a catalog, but what do you do when you have a very complex space?”
Reuters: So how does it work?
Jeff Barr: They’ve built shopping experts — you walk into a little (virtual) kitchen, you click on a wok, and it then interviews you. Do you need to cook for yourself, a family, a restaurant? It narrows down the products that might meet your needs
Reuters: It seems like going to shop on Amazon.com is still easier at this point than shopping in Second Life.
Jeff Barr: Ease of use is only one way you’d look at it, integration is a really important thing. You can imagine a Second Life build where you have a concert or a musician that’s just done a live performance, or maybe an author who has done a book reading. Just as you’d walk out of a venue in real life and buy a book or a T-shirt or a CD, now you have the same ability in the virtual world — it’s contextual commerce.
People love to do things that stay within the metaphor. So if you can say in character and if you’re essentially doing your shopping in avatar scale, that seems to maintain the quality of the experience.
Reuters: Are there still constraints in Second Life you find frustrating?
Jeff Barr: If you think back to the Web browsers of five or six years ago, we had all the capabilities to do AJAX and it was just a matter of time before people got clever enough and had enough experience. It just took developers a long time, and being absolute masters of the existing technology before they pushed it to the next level.
If you look at Second Life and the scripting language, you realise we’re just at the very very beginning of how people can use this.
