While browsing Amazon over the last few weeks, I'd noticed they'd seemed to kill off their "Gold Box" feature. (You know, the one where they gave you a "special" set of offers, basically a discount on something that you had to buy in the next 60 minutes?) The old gold box was pretty annoying, since it gave you ten offers per day, and you could only see the next offer by rejecting the previous one. Still, I'd look at it (mostly during a dull lecture) just to see what Amazon was marketing to me. Mostly they seemed to be pushing jewelry they couldn't sell or power tools I didn't need, and since I wasn't (at that point, at least) in the market, it was a pointless exercise.

Well, today the Gold Box came back, but with a new and interesting twist. Now it displays two offers, and you have two choices: either accept one of the two, or "hold" one in order to see the next offer. In my case, they started out with a book (tenuously-related to the last thing I'd been browsing) and a piece of software. Curious, I decided to "hold" the software offer and see what came next. There seems to be an interesting logic to it: if I held the same piece of software, it showed me more software twice, then picked something from a different section. The rules of what's chosen for you next offer don't seem too fixed, but do seem to make decisions based on my actions.

Anyway, I'm impressed: the Gold Box has gone from being an annoying curiousity to a tool for compiling even more customer data. For one thing, it's more likely to show me a product I'm interested in, thus increasing their sales. On the other hand, information about the product I hold reveals preferences, allowing them to target additional products to me more intelligently. And they get this from one rule change. Nifty.