Amazon Will Do Everything It Takes To Kill California's New Sales Tax Law - Business Insider

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Amazon is backing a referendum to overturn California's sales tax law, the New York Times reports.
Here's what's going on: states -- deep in the hole these days -- want e-tailers, and in particular Amazon, to collect sales tax on their affiliates. Amazon and others say, correctly, that they don't have to if they don't have a presence in the state. This debate has been going on for a while but has new urgency given the budgetary troubles of most states.
Affiliate marketing is one of the big ways Amazon generates incremental sales, so it's a big deal for them.
Recently California demanded the sales tax from Amazon. In response, Amazon shut off its affiliates. California then said, in essence, too bad, you still owe us all the sales tax from before you shut them off. And then Amazon gave them the one-finger salute.
So here we are.
Now Amazon is fighting back with the tools it has, a referendum to change the law in California.
A couple things are worth noting here.
Amazon is in the right here. The law and constitutional jurisprudence say it doesn't have to collect sales tax in states where it doesn't have nexus.Amazon supports a federal-level solution which is backed by 40 states called the Streamlined Sales Tax Initiative.And finally, anyone who messes with Jeff Bezos is in for a big fight.
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How Google+ Will Beat Facebook: By Spamming You - Business Insider

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Google+ is an impressive social effort from Google but what Facebook has that it doesn't is being a platform. Right now, outside developers can't build apps on top of Google+, though that functionality is in the works.

And top Facebook developer Chris Turitzin writes in a post that the one thing that would make him move to Google+ is "viral channels."

In other words, the ability to spam you. 

When Facebook opened up its platform, it left as many viral channels open as possible to draw in developers attracted by the hypergrowth possible on the platform. Then once the platform was established -- and because there was no competition for developers to speak of (Twitter is also a social platform but the usecases are very different--FarmVille for Twitter?) -- Facebook started turning down those viral channels one by one. Facebook did that both to benefit the user experience and also because once viral channels are less powerful, developers have to buy Facebook ads to get distribution. 

Now developers are frustrated and ready to bail for a platform that would open up those viral channels. 

While that's potentially great news for Google+, it's potentially bad news for users, as that would mean tons of spammy notifications overnight. (Which, in turn, would be bad for Google+ because it would turn off users.)

After a bit of experimentation, things should settle around some equilibrium at some point.

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