The holiday season approacheth, and so it's almost expected when those brainiacs at Amazon launch their latest way of leveraging off of their monstrously large purchase information database and provide you with another way to get purchasing ideas from someone other than publishers.

The new feature, "Just Like You," matches your Amazon purchase history against every other Amazon customer (who hasn't explicitly opted out of the feature) and comes back with the two people whose purchase histories and product ratings most closely match your own. Amazon then dubs these people as being "Just Like You," as we really are no more individual than the media we consume(?!).

Amazon strips almost all identification information from that person, except for what country they're from (and possibly other info I just haven't kenned yet) and, of course, their intimate purchases. (How embarassing if the people Just Like You are porn addicts... Yet another reason not to leave yourself logged in to public computers. Not that I would know, despite what Amazon thinks I might enjoy.

Okay, so 20% creepy, 20% insulting, 30% voyeuristic, and 30% cool, this feature is almost like making everyone a little anonymous blogger against their will. How far will they go with this feature? Can I subscribe to my Just Like Me clones, and get emails when they purchase new things, or just put them in their basket? Does someone else get a ping when I decide to buy a textbook for my class or a DVD for my mom? Even though I don't know who they are specifically, can I send a gesture of affinistic goodwill into the world and buy my clone things off their wishlist? Can I import their wishlist into my own wholesale?

The possibilities are endless if you break out from the commerce loop. Commerce is great because buying stuff online leaves an easy paper trail without anyone having to go through the actual effort of composition, but what if it tracked your clickstream wherever you went on the web? What if, turning the tables on Google's sites like mine (which is really astonishingly good), you could find 'people who surf like I do'? Step-back, Metafilter; adios mempool. You could track your clone as they traipse across the web, everyone safely anonymized. And if my doppleganger is particularly interesting, I could share their autogenerated realtime webtravellogue with others, making an instant websurfer-celebrity, memes that might grow to the point when inevitably the Truman in question would follow the meme link and lock thousands into a recursive loop, bringing down the internet and society as we know it.

Or maybe I'll just be content knowing that someone else there likes Portishead, Unix, and Shakespeare in Love, even if the are in Denmark.