The Government is Watching AND Big Business is Watching

Last week I posted about how the various government agencies are sending info. back and forth to each other to the point where the Customs and Border people tell the EI people when people are out of the country and therefore unable to secure employment. (Note on that: I referred to the EI people as UI people for which I was corrected, but I argued that you aren’t paying to insure against Employment, you’re paying to insure against UNemployment. It should therefore be UI, not EI.)

Anyway, I had an experience yesterday that led me to believe that business intelligence at Amazon is TOO good.

I’ve been doing a lot of photography recently and have outgrown the functionality of iPhoto so I decided to invest in Aperture, a more highly functional photo organizer and RAW converter. I left Omakase HQ to head down to Ye Olde Computerre Shoppe to pick up the disk and returned to find an email waiting for me from Amazon. It was a recommendation email. It read:

For those who purchased “Back of the Napkin” by Dan Roam..

So I’m interested at this point because I’ve purchased Back of the Napkin and it was pretty good so I’ll open that email….

…we recommend “Aperture 2: A Workflow Guide for Photographers”

Talk about a timely recommendation. There isn’t even a purely logical connection between those books. It’s not as though it was recommending Harry Potter 2 after I just bought Harry Potter 1. I felt as though Amazon had an invisible person watching my every move and then sending recommendations to me before I get home. Now that would be (creepy) service.