Amazon.com launched the “Public Notes” feature for its Kindle electronic reader earlier this year, allowing people to share the highlights and comments they make in an electronic book — the digital equivalent of marking up a page, scribbling in the margins and leaving it for friends to discover when they pick it up.

The feature and its accompanying website have been getting more attention over the past few days after Amazon integrated Public Notes more tightly with Twitter and Facebook — enabling automatic sharing between Public Notes users who have connected on those social networks, if they’ve turned on Public Notes in a particular book and opted to link Twitter and/or Facebook to their Public Notes accounts.

Wired’s Tim Carmody explains the pros and cons of Amazon’s new approach …

The old way was a bit of a crapshoot — it was hard to find and add other people unless they explicitly advertised their accounts or began broadcasting their highlights and marginalia on their blogs or social media. … The new way is a little bit creepy — particularly since there doesn’t seem to have been any announcement from Amazon that they were changing how social media links were going to be used.

Amazon would be smart to address those concerns, to avoid a Facebook-style privacy backlash.

But in the broader scheme of things, this is the interesting part: Amazon is using technology to create a social network that connects a large community of readers. It’s an example of digital experience clearly trumping its traditional predecessor.

Success in social networking requires critical mass, which is why the potential power of the thing might not have been obvious until the Twitter and Facebook connections were amped up.

When you also take into account Amazon’s existing community of reviewers on its main e-commerce site, suddenly the company seems like a notable player, at least, in social networking.

And assuming Amazon is really coming out with its own Android tablet computers, which seems to be a foregone conclusion at this point, it’s easy to imagine how all of this could provide the core ingredients of the social experience on those devices … whatever they turn out to be.

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