Interesting post about Amazon integrating a degrees-of-separation engine into it's platform. Thought-provoking. Would this add significant value for many people?

I think it would - but share of screen is scarce, and displaying info based on your preferences (or search terms) rather than your friends might be more valuable, because it's got more relevance to what you're looking for.

But this might be a very useful feature for browsing to things you might find valuable when you're bored - which is currently fairly costly in terms of time and effort on Amazon. So I think as a secondary feature it would actually be very cool.

Interestingly, a comment to this entry indicates where the real (higher value) market gap is - it's exactly the reverse of this suggestion:

"...I was just AIMing with TC earlier today about how fed up I was of endlessly cutting and pasting my favourite music, books etc. from one social networking startup to another - and thinking that that stuff should be abstracted and held somewhere else, then imported/linked to/inferred by Friendster or Orkut or whatever - in a FOAF kinda way but for culture."