Privacy Plug-In Fakes out Facebook

Social networks are rife with examples of users failing to understand the privacy implications of posting sensitive information online.

Credit: Technology Review

In February, for example, school officials in Wisconsin suspended a teacher who posted on Facebook a picture of herself pointing a gun at the camera. In April, the Swiss insurance company Nationale Suisse fired an employee after she called in sick and then posted updates on the same site. Others have raised concerns about users handing so much personal information to social-networking companies themselves.

Now, researchers at the University of Waterloo in Ontario have developed a browser plug-in to help users keep their information private from prying eyes and from social-network providers as well. Urs Hengartner, an assistant professor of computer science, and his colleagues say the plug-in replaces sensitive information in a user’s profile and news feed with meaningless text that can only be unscrambled by trusted friends or contacts. Dubbed FaceCloak, the tool assures its users that sensitive data stays private, Hengartner says. “If you have a particular illness, you might want to allow only your friends to see that,” he says. “This leaves it up to the user to decide what information to keep away from Facebook.”

The tool is the latest shot in a battle between social networks and privacy-conscious users. Most users of Facebook, MySpace, and other social networks remain unaware of the privacy implications of posting personal information to such sites, says Alessandro Acquisti, an associate professor of information systems and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University.

In 2005, Acquisti and fellow CMU researcher Ralph Gross showed that nearly 80 percent of Facebook users revealed their birthday publicly and the majority provided public access to their real-world addresses–information that could be used to commit identity theft. “You feel like you are talking to a friend casually in a conversation, but in reality you are publicizing information in a forum where it will stay for a long time,” Acquisti says. “Privacy is not the first thing you think of when you use a social network.”

Nowadays more people appear to be privacy conscious. In a more recent study, Acquisti’s group found that 30 to 40 percent of users change the default privacy settings to take greater control of their information. But social networks themselves have not been good protectors of privacy, Acquisti says, because monetizing personal information is a potential gold mine. This is demonstrated by Facebook’s Beacon advertising service, which allows affiliates to tailor advertising according to users’ activities on Facebook and beyond.

Private updates: A user (John Doe, in this case) can specify that his name and birth date should be hidden by tagging the data with ”@@.” FaceCloak then populates drop-down menus with private versions of the information. Credit: Hengartner et al.

FaceCloak, implemented as a plug-in for Mozilla’s Firefox browser, allows a user to designate–using two “at” signs (“@@”), by default–what information should be encrypted and only made available to friends. A FaceCloak user holds a secret access key but also sends two other keys to her friends. Those keys are then used to access the real information, which is held on a separate server. While the same concept could be used on other social networks–such as Twitter and MySpace–Hengartner and his colleagues focused on the largest provider.

Similar tools are being developed by other academic teams to address the privacy issues plaguing social networks. A group of researchers from Cornell University created another Firefox plug-in, called None of Your Business (NOYB), that encrypts profile information so that it can only be read by a small group of friends. And two researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have developed a Facebook application called flyByNight that encrypts users’ data.

Unlike those projects, however, FaceCloak works with any number of contacts and does not rely on the cooperation of the social-network provider. The University of Waterloo researchers attempt to hide which users are encrypting their data with FaceCloak by replacing the hidden data with arbitrary text taken from sources on the Internet. “Users who submit encrypted information stand out, both to Facebook and to other users who can see the profiles, and therefore might raise suspicion,” Hengartner says. “By using fake information, we can avoid this problem.”

There are still some major issues, however. Images are not yet supported by FaceCloak and the third-party hosting server used could potentially be compromised. Moreover, a FaceCloak user still has to be careful, Hengartner says. “The same problem arises in real life,” he says. “When you tell a friend some personal information about you, you need to trust your friend to deal with this information responsibly. If she misbehaves, you can’t erase the information from her brain.”

Source: http://www.technologyreview.com/web/23405/page2/

Adding Trust to Wikipedia, and Beyond

The official motto of the Internet could be “don’t believe everything you read,” but moves are afoot to help users know better what to be skeptical about and what to trust.

Color me trustworthy: WikiTrust codes Wikipedia pages according to contributors’ reputations and how the content has changed over time. Credit: University of California, Santa Cruz

A tool called WikiTrust, which helps users evaluate information on Wikipedia by automatically assigning a reliability color-coding to text, came into the spotlight this week with news that it could be added as an option for general users of Wikipedia. Also, last week the Wikimedia Foundation announced that changes made to pages about living people will soon need to be vetted by an established editor. These moves reflect a broader drive to make online information more accountable. And this week the World Wide Web Consortium published a framework that could help any Web site make verifiable claims about authorship and reliability of content.

WikiTrust, developed by researchers at the University of California, Santa Cruz, color-codes the information on a Wikipedia page using algorithms that evaluate the reliability of the author and the information itself. The algorithms do this by examining how well-received the author’s contributions have been within the community. It looks at how quickly a user’s edits are revised or reverted and considers the reputation of those people who interact with the author. If a disreputable editor changes something, the original author won’t necessarily lose many reputation points. A white background, for example, means that a piece of text has been viewed by many editors who did not change it and that it was written by a reliable author. Shades of orange signify doubt, dubious authorship, or ongoing controversy.

Facebook, Twitter Leading to Web Video Boom

In a new survey, the Pew Internet and American Life Project has found a meteoric rise in Americans’ interest in online video, with the number of adult Americans who’ve watched a video on sites like YouTube nearly doubling since December 2006, when it conducted a similar survey.

Pew found that 62 percent of its survey respondents said they’d watched a video online, up from 33 percent in the previous survey.

That figure outranks by a large margin the portion of adult Americans who spend time social networking sites like Facebook (46 percent) or on status-updating sites like Twitter (11 percent).

Unsurprisingly, the younger demographic led the way, with 89 percent of users between the ages of 18 and 29 saying they had viewed content on a video-sharing site, while a smaller but growing portion of the 50-and-older segment said they went online for video content.

Nineteen percent of respondents said video-sharing sites figured into their routine on a typical day, up from 8 percent in 2006.

Sharing sites like YouTube, which are dominated by amateur, user-generated content, continue to dominate Internet video by volume, but Pew also identified the rising tide of premium content coming online.

In the most recent survey, 35 percent of respondents said they had seen a TV show or a movie online, up from 17 percent when Pew asked the question in a similar survey in 2007.

Last year’s “Google-killer” plans a comeback with social search.

One year ago, the search engine Cuil exploded on the launchpad. Hyped as a “Google-killer,” the site stumbled as its servers crashed and its algorithms spat out irrelevant search results.

Social search: Beyond general search returns (shown in gray), Cuil will provide a subset of results from users’ social networks (box, upper right); clicking a face calls up the details (blue box). Credit: Cuil

Now, the Menlo Park, CA, startup hopes to stage a comeback in part by being the first search engine to pass search queries through users’ social networks to generate socially enhanced search results as a companion to regular ones. If, for example, a user searches for the band Green Day–and if she has allowed Cuil to access her Facebook account or any other social networking account–she’ll see a special box on the results page, showing those in her network who like Green Day and similar bands. The feature is expected to go live by the end of August.

“We are trying to leverage the information found on users social networks to enhance search results. This is similar to what Amazon or eBay already does: ‘People who bought this book, also liked this one,’ ” says Seval Oz Ozveren, Cuil’s vice president of finance and business development. “I think there has been a lot of buzz about this whole idea of social search, but nobody has actually done it to date.”

Of course, many social-networking sites already let users search within their networks. And other search engines are trying to expand into social networks. A search company called Worio, for example, offers a Facebook application that generates recommended Web links, akin to search results, based on analyses of the news feeds and other information from a user’s social network. If several of your friends live in or are talking about Miami, for example, Worio might provide Miami-centric links. The Cuil foray will be different: it will present the social network search returns aside the general ones.

It’s far from clear whether Cuil stands much chance of killing off any competitors with its move into social search, says Dan Weld, a computer scientist and search researcher at the University of Washington. However, he says, it’s well established that websites tied to trusted members of people’s social networks are more likely to be seen as particularly relevant.

“Statistics show that people, especially young people, are much, much more likely to click on a URL if they see it in a blog or Tweet from someone they trust. This clearly has a big impact on Web marketing and is leading a number of companies to develop tools to track and target these social influencers,” he says. “But whether it will really jive with search isn’t as clear to me.”

Concept mapping: Cuil’s recently added features include a “timeline” and “mapline.” Credit: Cuil

With $33 million in venture backing, Cuil was founded by Stanford computer scientist Tom Costello and a pair of Google alumni: Anna Patterson and Russell Power. Its core claim is that it searches more pages on the Web than anyone else–three times as many as Google. However, this hasn’t yet translated into comparable popularity.

To further distinguish itself, Cuil has recently begun offering other kinds of special categories of search returns along with the main ones. In March it introduced a “timeline”–a box on the right side of the page with search returns expressed by relevant date. A search for “Great Depression,” for example, brings up a box listing events of the late 1920s and 1930s–from various acts of Congress to the rise of Nazism–culled from pages that include dates. (Google has a prototype of a timeline search tool that can be customized; it produces temporally arranged links to news stories, from Wikipedia content or other sources.)

In June, Cuil also launched a “mapline”–search returns arranged on a map, and not just for obviously geographical searches like “pizzerias in Palo Alto.” For example, the “Great Depression” search produces pins on a world map; mousing over these pins (most of which are in North America) yields links to sites that, for example, describe Depression-era crop failures in Saskatchewan and 1930s public-works projects in Oregon.

But the question remains whether any of this will help resuscitate Cuil. According to the analytical firm Compete, shortly after its launch on July 28, 2008, Cuil had 2 million visitors–a figure that cratered to 130,000 by February and has stayed flat since then. However, Ozveren strongly disputes those numbers. She says Cuil’s traffic has been doubling every six weeks since February, though she declined to provide alternative numbers.

Explaining the disparity, Ozveren says that Compete does not accurately track “hover-over” activity–previewing a result without clicking through. Hover-over activity represents a growing share of Cuil’s traffic, she says. Also, when Cuil launched, it was the only search engine that didn’t track and store the Internet protocol addresses of its users’ computers. Ozveren argues that Cuil users may therefore be more privacy-minded than most, and therefore less likely to install Compete’s website-tracking toolbar.

Still, the numbers are far worse than the hype suggested was possible just one year ago. The foray into social search is one way Cuil is trying to recover.

Source: http://www.technologyreview.com/web/23038/page2/

The information overload caused by too much choice could have lessons for other websites

Consumers can find more of what they want on the Web, but that may not always be such a good thing. New research about online dating sites shows that users presented with too many choices experience “cognitive overload” and make poorer decisions as a result. The findings could have implications for other kinds of websites, although new technologies and approaches could help address the problem, researchers suggest.

Credit: Technology Review

Dating sites are big business. According to a survey conducted in 2006 by the Pew Center for Internet and American Life, over 37% of all single Web users have tried them. Dating sites frequently resemble e-commerce sites such as Amazon.com; users enter search criteria such as height, appearance, and religion and are presented with a set of matches.

Pai-Lu Wu from Cheng Shiu University and Wen-Bin Chiou from the National Sun Yat-Sen University in Taiwan performed an experiment that involved giving online date-seekers varying numbers of search results to their queries on dating sites. Their study, published last month in the journal Cyberpsychology and Behavior, shows that having more search results leads to a less careful partner choice.

Chiou calls this a “double-edged sword,” since people desire a wider selection, but then devote less time to evaluating each prospect. Wu and Chiou conclude that “more search options lead to less selective processing by reducing users’ cognitive resources, distracting them with irrelevant information, and reducing their ability to screen out inferior options.” In other words, when faced with cognitive overload, date-seekers evaluated as many matches as possible, even ones that weren’t a good fit, and they were less able to distinguish a good option from a bad one.

http://www.technologyreview.com/web/23016/

Google isn’t saying how its new operating system will function, but the clues lie in its browser.

Credit: Technology Review

Soon after Google announced plans for its own operating system (OS), called Google Chrome OS, on Tuesday night, the Web giant clammed up about technical details, saying that the project is still at too early a stage. The first netbook devices running Chrome OS won’t be released until the second half of 2010, so most users will have to wait until then to find out precisely how the software will work. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t hints out there already, and the biggest clues can be found in Google’s Chrome browser, which the company says will be a key part of the new OS.

According to a post written by Sundar Pichai, a vice president of product management at Google, and Linus Upson, the company’s engineering director, the open-source Chrome OS will consist of a Linux kernel with the Google Chrome browser running on top inside an entirely new desktop environment.

The Chrome browser was released nine months ago and is Google’s effort to reinvent the browser completely: it’s designed from scratch with Web applications in mind and is meant to be the only application that a Web-savvy user needs on her computer.

In an interview in March, Darin Fisher, an engineer on the Google Chrome team, said that in early sessions, the engineers decided to “take a page out of the operating system book” when they built the browser. Notably, the Chrome team decided to treat the browser as a launchpad from which the user can start different Web applications. Each application operates independently so that if one crashes, it doesn’t affect the others. OSes, Fisher said, had to take the same approach to allow a single application to crash without requiring a user to reboot the whole system. This change in browser design helps give Web applications the stability that desktop applications enjoy.

The concept is easily extended back to the OS. Provided that the user relies on Web applications, such as Gmail, Google Docs, and the like, this simplifies the OS a great deal. It vastly reduces the number of applications that need to be installed and the amount of data that must be stored and processed on the computer itself.

With Chrome OS, Google will blur the line between the browser and the OS completely, says Ramesh Iyer, head of worldwide business development for mobile computing at Texas Instruments, which is one of Google’s partners on the project. “The browser is your operating system,” Iyer says. “The browser is your user interface. The browser is the mechanism from which you launch applications.”

Streamlining the OS to focus on the Web, Iyer says, will allow devices to run more powerful programs with less powerful processors. By keeping processor requirements low, new devices could use less battery power and stay lighter. Texas Instruments, for example, is working with Google to integrate the Chrome OS software with its OMAP 3 multimedia applications processors, creating a system that could be easily installed in netbooks and other devices.

Giving Web applications deeper access to the underlying kernel could make it easier for Web developers to provide better functionality and a better user experience, says Jared Spool, founding principal of User Interface Engineering, a consulting firm based in North Andover, MA. When Web applications such as Gmail and Google Maps first appeared, Spool says, the software engineers who built them had to do a lot of hacking to create the appropriate levels of interaction. “When we went from the desktop to the browser, we took a huge step backward,” Spool says.

With an OS tied closely to the Web, Google can introduce sophisticated resource management tools that will allow Web applications to run much more smoothly. A major role for the OS is allocating memory to applications and adjusting it as their needs change. A big problem with interactive Web applications to date has been that browsers didn’t have efficient ways to adjust the memory assigned to different Web pages. The Chrome browser has already improved the situation, Spool says, and he expects the OS to go even farther. He says that this will allow more powerful Web applications that run more smoothly on the new OS.

But building the Chrome OS won’t be as simple as sticking a browser on top of the Linux kernel, Spool says. The browser version of Chrome relies on the underlying OS’s user interface, for example. Features such as scrollbars come from the OS, not the browser, so Google will need to build all of this from scratch, and even simple things will require significant time and effort.

The Chrome browser also lacks the drivers needed to power any external devices, such as printers or iPods. Texas Instruments’ Iyer envisions a new way that Chrome OS could address this problem. “Wouldn’t you rather have a printer connected in the cloud?” he says. As more devices, including cameras, printers, GPSes, and so on, become able to connect to the Internet in their own right, the concept of a Web interface between a user’s computer and the device comes closer to reality. “This is the holy grail of the Internet,” Iyer says.

Pichai and Upson have also said that Chrome OS will support all Web-based applications automatically, and that new applications written for Chrome OS will run “on any standards-based browser on Windows, Mac, and Linux.” While Web application development has exploded in recent years, this might also introduce limitations, preventing the user from accessing interesting applications developed in programming languages not intended for the Web.

However, Google may have a solution for that too. The company is working on an experimental project called Google Native Client that would allow code written in non-Web languages such as C and C++ to run securely in the browser.

Chris Rohlf, a senior security consultant for Matasano Security, which has been involved in testing the implementation of Native Client, says, “It could be Google’s secret weapon when it comes to Chrome OS, because it would allow developers to extend that platform with things like video and graphics without having to wait for Google to implement any of that.”

http://www.technologyreview.com/web/22987/

Simple SEO Research Makes Money Online

Using SEO, search engine optimization, and keyword research is a rather simple and reproducible way to start making money on the internet. Let’s look at the basics that every internet marketer worth their salt goes through.

Step 1: Get into the mind of your buyer -You can start by thinking about the overall intent and motivation of your potential buyer. Can you think about what questions they are asking? What are they trying to do? You should use all these questions and start doing some keyword research.

Remember that you get 2 types of buyers. The first is a more analytical thinker and tends to ask many how and what questions. How to make money online? What is the fastest way to make money? What is the safest way to start an online business? How do I get traffic?

Other prospects are more emotional and relational in their approach. Spontaneous and humanistic types are concerned with the experience and the results: best selling money ebook, most successful online business, internet marketing for newbies.

Start thinking like your potential customer Nearly all people want to make easy money and many people want to make money online. However, not all people want to start a business. So you would rather use the words that people use who want to make money, even though they probably have to start an online business to do so. Knowing where they are in the buying process will help you convert traffic into sales easier.

Step 2: Now start thinking a little wider -You can use a keyword analysing tool like Wordtracker Keyword Universe. You could use the keywords from step 1 and get more options by using the thesaurus option. Get some wider and broader terms around ‘make money online’. Make sure that the new keyword phrases comply with the theme of your website, something in the line of ‘get rich quick’, start a home business’ and ‘work from home’. Just remember to include the buyer keywords, because quality keywords are worth more than many crappy keywords.

Step 3: Prioritize your keywords -When you prioritize your keywords you should look at how strong a buyer keywords it is as well as how much traffic it will bring. If your product represents enough value the buyer keywords you use will convert your website traffic into sales. Remember its fine to use keyword phrases that bring in low volumes of traffic with high money making potential. Optimise your pages and content for these long tail keyword phrases and you’re sure to impress the search engines to no end. So answer your customers’ questions and they will do the converting for you.

Freshly Baked Wealth teaches new internet marketers how to start a successful home business On their blog you can read more about how to make money online and other tricks of the trade. Their newsletter comes with a great free book.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Gill_Taylor

Big growing even bigger: Mobile Advertising and Internet Advertising

By Sanjay Sharma,

Advertisers these days have many options for advertising, but Mobile Advertising and Internet Advertising are the two most thrilling, as advertisements look very attractive when displayed on phone screens and on computer/laptop screens. Since much potential and scope lies in mobile and Internet advertising and it tends to deeply appeal to the viewers. Mobile Advertisement and Internet Advertisements have come in focus.

Mobile Advertising is closely related to online or Internet Advertising, though its reach is far greater – mobile advertising’s estimated targets say that by end 2008, there would be global total 4 billion. Global estimates of computers, including desktops and laptops, is at 800 million. Therefore exclusive advertising on web pages meant for access by mobile phones is a great idea.

It would be easier for an advertiser to convince people to buy their product when people would receive and view ads while there are already out for shopping. Giving them the relevant information needed can do this and supplying them with added details could also influence them to the extent that they straightaway proceed to buy product after seeing its ads. In these kind of situations, Mobile Advertising can be most beneficial.

As essential needs of all humans are very similar, a person who has received an advertisement through Mobile or Internet may not be in need of the service or product advertised but might know someone who is in need of it and so can pass on the advertiser’s message through word of mouth, forwarding the link or the advertisement. A major benefit of Internet Advertising is that the information and content can be accessed in any country even at late odd hours. Internet Advertisements are often interactive advertising so if the Internet Advertiser opts for a response, the viewer may like to visit the brand’s website, or try to contact them through email, phone, etc.

For mobile marketers Mobile Advertising or Internet Advertising is something already so big, a still growing market with open places that they could fill in. Mobile advertisement becomes in this way closer than ever. A major result of Internet advertising is information and content that is not limited by geography or time. The rising area of interactive advertising presents fresh and innovative challenges for advertisers who have until now adopted an interruptive strategy. Mobile Advertising and Internet Advertising in future are predicted to become the major sources of advertising.

The online encyclopedia is poised to let users find, edit, and embed clips.

Wiki video: Wikipedia will soon allow users to search for open-source videos and add them to existing pages. Credit: Wikimedia Foundation

The organization behind Wikipedia is close to launching an editable online video encyclopedia to enhance the current textual one. The hope is to revolutionize the popular reference site and goad content providers–from public broadcasters to the music industry–into allowing more video to enter the public domain.

Within two to three months, a person editing a Wikipedia article will find a new button labeled “Add Media.” Clicking it will bring up an interface allowing her to search for video–initially from three repositories containing copyright-free material–and drag chosen portions into the article, without having to install any video-editing software or do any conversions herself. The results will appear as a clickable video clip embedded within the article.

Later, Wikipedia plans to offer ways for users to search the entire Web for importable videos, and plans to provide tools to edit, add to, and reorganize the clips within the Wikipedia website, just as is now done with text.

“To have people be able to go in and annotate your video, edit your video, and improve upon it–in the same way people have been doing to your text posts–is pretty outstanding, and will create an audio-visual representation of our world that will rapidly become as definitive and collaborative as Wikipedia is in the textual world,” says Peter Kaufman, executive producer atIntelligent Television, a documentary production company in New York City that works with cultural and educational institutions, helping them bring their works online. “That may just be the holy grail.”

The initial video repository tapped by the new tool will be the Internet Archive, which holds nearly 200,000 videos, including documentaries, interviews, and oddities such as 1950s educational clips. Another source will be Wikimedia Commons, a database of more than four million media files, including many videos. (The database is maintained by the Wikimedia Foundation, which also created Wikipedia.) The third source, Metavid, is a repository of Congressional speeches and hearings. The closed-captioning text that accompanies such videos serves as a handy tagging system, and users can search for words or phrases and find the right section of a speech to import.

Key to Wikipedia’s video effort–funded partly by the Mozilla Foundation, makers of the open-source Firefox browser–is Wikipedia’s insistence that any video passing into its pages be based on open-source formats. In the future, the offerings behind the “Add Media” button will include a search function for scouring the Web for video content. The hope is that this requirement will force content holders–motivated by the desire for exposure on Wikipedia–to put their material into the public domain. “Once people see how open-source video will get much more visibility on the open Web, it will motivate the content providers to jump on board–or miss the ship,” says Michael Dale, a software engineer from Kaltura, a video startup based in New York City that is collaborating with Wikimedia on the effort.

The project also includes developing Web tools to create smooth methods for transferring and editing videos. When a Wikipedia editor finds relevant snippets, he will be able to preview them, and set the “in” and “out” points, without having to worry about file conversions. “Presently, the work flow is pretty atrocious” for people trying to download, convert, and edit video, says Dale, citing the notoriously confusing array of incompatible video formats now in use. With the new Wikipedia system, “people will be able to easily inject media into pages, in a way that wasn’t possible before,” he says.

The project also includes developing Web tools to create smooth methods for transferring and editing videos. When a Wikipedia editor finds relevant snippets, he will be able to preview them, and set the "in" and "out" points, without having to worry about file conversions. "Presently, the work flow is pretty atrocious" for people trying to download, convert, and edit video, says Dale, citing the notoriously confusing array of incompatible video formats now in use. With the new Wikipedia system, "people will be able to easily inject media into pages, in a way that wasn't possible before," he says. Kaltura is helping develop the tools needed to simplify video importing. "It's uploading, importation--all the things that have to happen before you can edit the files," says Shay David, CTO and cofounder of Kaltura. The system will be publicly demonstrated for the first time this afternoon at the Open Video Conference in New York City. Erik Moeller, deputy director of the Wikimedia Foundation, says that he hopes the effort will help promote wider access to vast stores of historical material, political speeches, interviews, documentaries, and anything else that could figure into Wikipedia, the world's seventh most popular website. "It is sad and unfortunate that the public broadcasters are not the ones leading this movement," Moeller says. "The mission should be to do whatever they can do to maximize distribution, and I'm not seeing that right now."

Kaltura is helping develop the tools needed to simplify video importing. “It’s uploading, importation–all the things that have to happen before you can edit the files,” says Shay David, CTO and cofounder of Kaltura. The system will be publicly demonstrated for the first time this afternoon at the Open Video Conference in New York City.

Erik Moeller, deputy director of the Wikimedia Foundation, says that he hopes the effort will help promote wider access to vast stores of historical material, political speeches, interviews, documentaries, and anything else that could figure into Wikipedia, the world’s seventh most popular website. “It is sad and unfortunate that the public broadcasters are not the ones leading this movement,” Moeller says. “The mission should be to do whatever they can do to maximize distribution, and I’m not seeing that right now.”

Source: http://www.technologyreview.com/web/22900/

Amazon Debuts Mobile Phone E-Commerce Site

Amazon today unveiled the beta launch of AmazonWireless.com, a new Web site offering mobile phones and service plans from a selection of phones from AT&T and Verizon Wireless.

The move marks the first time the e-tailer has dedicated a site solely to wireless phones and plans, although it’s been in the phone-retailing business since early in the decade.

The idea behind Amazon’s (NASDAQ: AMZN) new specialty site is to make the process of finding a phone and pricing plan simpler. In addition to expanding selection and adding carriers during the beta test phase, Amazon will be testing different features and gathering input from customers to ensure the best possible customer experience.

“We’ve taken our eight years’ experience selling cell phones to create a new site that makes a potentially confusing transaction much easier for customers,” Paul Ryder, Amazon’s vice president of consumer electronics, said in a statement. “The step-by-step purchase process on AmazonWireless makes it easy for customers who already have a plan to upgrade their phones. If you want to establish new cell phone service, we’ve made it simple to find the right phone, service plan and options for your needs. We’ve also eliminated the technical jargon and frustrating rebate paperwork that customers often face when buying a phone.”

AmazonWireless currently offers more than 120 phones. Customers can shop for phones by carrier, phone feature, price, color and brand. The site’s shopping cart guides customers through each stage of the purchase process, where customers will find typical Amazon features such as bestseller lists, detailed product descriptions and customer reviews.