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Technology Stocks : Amazon.com, Inc. (AMZN) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: H James Morris who wrote (25165)	11/9/1998 11:20:00 AM
From: Rob S.	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 164684

I agree. It is looking weak this morning compared to almost every other Internet stock. The Internet index is at new highs and is into the extreme short-term overbought area of the TA. No telling how much higher it will go. MSN, Excite and other portals have equipped their sites with "one-click" purchasing capability so that users can buy from a number of vendors with a single sign-up being required. Internet sales are expected to grow nicely this fall/winter - that has something to do with the rally in these stocks. It is interesting to note: As I posted a couple months ago, international standards for secure user client profiling data exchange have been under development under committees of the W3C. The Open Profiling Standard was in the final comment stage and should have ben released months ago. The purpose of that standard was to allow users to input their vital stats, such as name, address, phone, credit card number(s) and preferences once and then release it to "trusted" sites with just a click or two. All the information would be encrypted and only that part of it that the user wanted to transmit would be released to the site. I sent a couple of e-mails to the committee asking them what had happened to the standard - that it looked like it was being taken over by the large internet portals and merchants and was back-burnered from becoming an open standard. I never got a reply. I hope that's not the case - that we don't end up with something so important to the consumer exclusively in the hands of the large portals. But I can imagine that having a user controlled open standard must scare the exlax out of the big internet companies because it would help to enable greater diversity and comparison shopping and would devalue the "stickiness" of their own registration process. Strike one for the large portals and against the consumer.