Now that I’ve reentered the Twittersphere I have a request. Amazon, would you please integrate Twitter with the Kindle? Yes, I know that with enough patience I could Twitter from my Kindle; after all, it has a browser and a web connection already. I’m talking about something more usable.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve recently had the urge to grab a piece of Kindle content and Twitter it. Some of my recent tweets have been about Kindle content. For example, I’m in the midst of reading Lawrence Lessig’s Remix and I’ve tweeted a number of times when I ran into an interesting point. I would have tweeted even more if it wasn’t so cumbersome.
Here’s what I’m talking about… Every menu on the Kindle should include a Twitter option. No matter where I am in The New York Times, a magazine or a book, I should be able to click on the Kindle wheel and immediately Twitter the experience. Better yet, Amazon needs to figure out how to incorporate tiny links to all this content. If I want to share an excerpt or a story, give me a tiny url to embed in my tweet.
That’s not such a big deal with a newspaper like the Times, which is already accessible online…but what about the content I want to excerpt from a book? Ah, that’s where Amazon needs to integrate their “Search Inside” feature with this new functionality I’m describing. I’d love to link to brief excerpts in these various tweets. I don’t plan to give the entire book away…just mention a few interesting pieces of it.
This last component will require buy-in from both Amazon and all their publisher partners. Open minds will immediately appreciate all the grass roots marketing this can generate for their content; others will simply get their clocks cleaned by their open-minded competitors!
Come on, Amazon…make my day and fold this into a Kindle software update!
Paul – I couldn’t agree more, and the fact that I wished connectivity was built into even paper books was the reason I built http://bkkeepr.com – a way of recording what you read, via Twitter. As soon as ereaders with connectivity become hackable, I’d love to see this facility built-in.
And that should have been addressed to Joel, obviously…
Joe, why not just use a laptop or the eeePC and be done with it?
How about one with Oprah built-in? Yeesh.
http://mikecane2008.wordpress.com/2008/10/23/oprah-to-flog-abominable-kindle/
Amazon does not charge for the wireless connection used by the Kindle, and continuous twittering would use that connection extensively. Perhaps Amazon will begin charging for access or start to push advertising to Kindles to defray costs. Text messages require only small amounts of bandwidth, but perversely cell phone companies charge exorbitant fees for text.
“AT&T’s Text Messages Cost $1,310 per Megabyte” is the title of an article on Techcrunch that looks at the cost of SMS (Short Message Service) on the iPhone in the U.S. Twitter does not have to use SMS across a wireless connection but I cite the article because it may represent what a cell phone company would like to charge Amazon for text messaging on a Kindle. I hope Amazon can get a much better rate.
Apparently SMS bandwidth costs more than bandwidth to the Hubble space telescope.
Sun’s java for phones integrates with the phone’s SMS capability, so java based books readers on phones can SMS from within the book.
There is one example here: http://www.booksinmyphone.com/?list=book&id=watts01 It lets you forward a link to download the book, if the phone supports it ‘all the way’ it integrates with the phone’s contact list.