Word: popularity
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...also trying to make Amazon a model of i-age shopping. When we buy one book, Amazon's computers can tell us what other people who bought that book purchased (and what they thought of those purchases). Or the site's users can look up the most popular books at their company or in their hometown. A few clicks from Amazon's home page will reveal, rather worryingly, that the three most frequent Amazon purchases in Los Alamos, N.M., are the biography of an East German spymaster, a book about the black market for nuclear materials and a history...
That was the genesis of the Feedback Forum, one of eBay's most distinctive and popular features. Omidyar kicked it off with a Founder's Letter in February 1996 in which he laid out a philosophy that still guides eBay: that people are basically good, that they make mistakes, and that they should be given the benefit of the doubt. "I was afraid it would turn into just a gripe forum, but as I watched it develop, I was amazed to realize that people enjoy giving praise." In fact the feedback eBayers posted about one another was overwhelmingly positive...
Moreover, eBay has exposed America as a nation of collectors. Matchbook covers, cast-iron witches' cauldrons, Pez dispensers, pneumatic grease pumps from the 1920s, Three Stooges memorabilia--you name it, some American somewhere collects it. "We define ourselves by our stuff," says Robert Thompson, president of the Popular Culture Association and a Syracuse University professor who specializes in the study of collectibles. In a democracy, with everyone theoretically equal, people want to be different. We don't have a caste system; we've never had a blood-line aristocracy. We've distinguished ourselves by our cars, by the clothes...
About two years ago, Yahoo! launched one of the first and most popular personalization services, called "MyYahoo...
...result shows how easy it is under the aegis of democratic institutions in Russia to create a top-down pro-Kremlin party from scratch and then, with huge infusions of cash and a stunningly popular patriotic war in Chechnya, build it into a front-runner," says TIME Moscow correspondent Andrew Meier. The result, in which upward of 70 percent of voters appeared to favor parties backing presidential candidates of varying authoritarian stripe (both Putin and Primakov, remember, are products of the KGB), looks set to give President Boris Yeltsin his friendliest legislature since the collapse of communism. But Putin...