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Amazon Hacks For Fun and Money
An anonymous reader writes "There's a new BusinessWeek article looking at some of the cool hacks coming out of Amazon's open API and XML feed policy. Some nifty stuff - 27,000 developers have apparently signed up to build hacks on Amazon data. It seems '..most are only part-timers and hobbyists, but a growing number are serious programmers who seek to make a living selling products based on the data Amazon is offering on a silver platter.'"
How long until Amazon patents "software to provide price comparison on cell phones and other portable devices". Surprised they haven't put out a patent already.
It's mentioned in the article, but this is slashdot....
Amazon Hacks
Tips and Tricks for Mozilla
Okay, when I read the title I pictured a busty female warrior sitting infront of a computer hacking away at some hapless souls files. She was sexy too.
has begun to allow others access to its private data, its most valuable asset after the collapse of the technology industry. It looks like Amazon is just the latest in this trend.
--
Getting too much pr0n?
I wonder if they include their highly advanced "one-click" technology in with this? It would truly be a gift to experience a technical achievement of this magnitude.
I mean, who would have thunk it? "one-click"! This certainly is the pinnacle of innovation and ingenuity. Sure is a good thing they patented this... otherwise who knows what might happen if such power was available to mere mortals? Inconcievable!
I'd rather be a conservative nutjob than a liberal with no nuts and no job.
Imagine mcdonald wanting to be a better franchise and hired annoying teenagers to cause problems in and outside the restaurant to see how they can improve.
Give amazon some credit, cause few businesses nowadays besides financial institutions would go the distance to improve themselves.
Now... if they can get rid of that Jeff Be...
They've known for the last couple years at least (at least since that's how long I've known insiders) that selling their own merchandise would be a small part of their long term strategy. It did get them the infrastructure, though. After that came the hosting of other large e-commerce sites. Now they're recruiting an army of channel sales / resellers. Very smart people over there. Wish they'd stop patenting business processes though.
until some federal genius decides to label O'Reilly as a terrorist organization due to their sponsorship of "hacking"?
...or were they just too stupid to do this earlier?
Basically they are letting independent developers come up with new ways to sell their stuff, without Amazon having to pay those developers.
Why weren't they doing this already?
I can think many useful things can come out of this. For exaple, a product which let you access/search the vast amounts of information they have on each of their products could be quite useful. (Although this could be constructed as a simple (well, sort of) script that retrieves certain parts of the pages Amazon has on each product.) Now, let's hope no disputes arise between Amazon and the people who want to use their information. This could range anywhere from people not giving credit to Amazon for the information, or claiming as their own, to disputes about money that's made selling products to access this information in the certain way. This could be viewed by some as selling the information. (Don't you think Amazon will want in on large amounts of money that's made from their own data?)
Since it's all being created from/based on their data?
Ahh the sound of a thousand rushing patents...
I think I can do something with this.
I suppose I'll have to look into this.
I was not aware of this at all before.
Thanks folks!
RIAA Radar is a site which may be of interest to Slashdotters, which I presume is done using this Amazon API.. check if a CD was release by an RIAA member label before you buy it!
I love how the industry first hypes and then later wonders where the surge in web services is.
They still don't get it. You can't force an industry. It's usually the guys on the ground level making cool things with the technology that drive it's success.
Becaus of this, the Amazon and Google services are going to be huge in driving the web services industry.
-- jimmycarter
I think it is nice that they are trying to improve themselves but I think that they would have profitted more by doing this earlier.
Gold-Stores seems to use the XML interface to allow the user to shop seamlessly at Amazon yet use payment mechanisms, such as Moneybookers, e-gold, E-bullion, Pecunix, and EvoCash, that Amazon does not directly accept.
Neat!
Amazon hacks YOU!
This would be great if they guy hooked it up to Froogle and made it work on a PDA - you could buy anything you saw, anywhere, for the cheapest price you could find on the web, while you were in a real store!
(runs off to fill out a patent form...)
Given Amazon's track record I suggest you developers check the license daily.
This has already been done! Amazon already advertises on their Web Services page products that were designed to help their sellers for example.
Check out Seller Engine
It uses the data feed from Amazon to allow Amazon sellers to create new listings and to reprice their current inventory by getting uptodate data from Amazon. You can just enter an ISBN number and you can see the sales rank of that book, the minimum price on Amazon, the availability, the list of sellers offering it, etc...
I sell books on Amazon and have been using this for about a year now. It is a lot easier than selling on Ebay because it is much faster to put your inventory for sale, you don't have to pay to list something for sale and you can make sure your products are always competitive by using a tool like SellerEngine.
Whose API charges beacoup fees, and makes it pretty much impossible to, say, write an open source shopping cart that'll sync with Ebay auctions (for the 10-50,000 people that sell on ebay and our own sites and might want to keep track of stock).
They (meaning idiot analysts for the most part) always say the real battle is between Ebay and Amazon for the future of online commerce. Amazon's got the right idea here, at least when it comes to getting their brand out free. Too bad it costs so much to list...
Are they still doing different prices for different regions? If so, can you check out the prices for each of the different regions with this?
If you are interested in storing Amazon.com Properties for longer than 24 hours, you may only do so with the written consent of Amazon.com. If you fail to obtain written consent, Amazon.com reserves the right to take legal action.
Sorry, I'd rather scrape the data. Then I can keep it for longer than 24 hours.
In other news, a league of hackers who took up Amazon.com's challenge to "hack" its web services have announced a new technology called "zero-click."
Said m0rp3us, leader of the group "3y3 0f th3 d0g," "zero-click" will order various items automatically using already stored in a user's billing info.
"All they have to do is sign-in once and they're done. The stuff basically orders itself after that," he said, " and delivered to your home. It's like Christmas every day!"
When asked if he will patent the new technology, Jeff Bezos declined comment, but did mention that the technology was responsible for three new automobiles and a new town that he was going to play with later.
Amazon.com's shares were up with the news.
I've got a ton of books, CD's and assorted merch (VHS tapes, Games, DVD's) that I'd like to catalog. These items all have barcodes, and theoretically Amazon sells a good chunck of them. Is there an app that would sync to Amazon and gather all the pesky details for these items from a simple barcode swipe? I know the there exist such a product as DVD Profiler for my DVD's... but I'd like to stop duplicate purchases if possible. If there isn't, how hard is it to program with Amazon's API? Many Thanks!
'Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?'
Any perl programmers looking to play around with this should checkout the Net::Amazon module.
While Amazon allows (mostly) free and open access to its API and data, Google, on the other hand, limits everyone to 1000 queries a day.
This means that coders who have tools that are based on Google results (say, some sort of link popularity checking tool) then have to either grab Google the regular way and try their darn best to pretend they're a regular visitor.. or get multiple API keys, which is against the T&Cs.
Of course, I can see why Google is doing this, simply because there's no benefit for them if people just leech their results, but....
you forgot:
(strstr(submission, "Linux") || (strstr(submission, "patent") || (strstr(submission, "case mod"))
There's a lot of cool things you can do with their API. I wrote a script to look up CD cover art, then ran it against my webradio station's playlist, and came up with a nifty "now playing" box. Check it out....
DEAR GOD MODDERATOR! Do you know what you have done? by modding a Soviet Russia joke up, you have defied the very laws of the universe, thereby causing them to collapse into themselves creating one giant implosion the will engulf the entire universe, destroying us all! jerk ;p
YOU SUCK BALLS!
Nice to see the word "Hacker" used properly, to mean someone pushing the limits of X tech, as opposed to the usual "Hacker = Criminal".
For many years I've seen the negative responses, as a self-confessed computer hacker. Its only in the past few years I've noticed more recognition of the true meaning of hacker from people.
Jonah Hex
Horror & SciFi Erotic Nudes
if you are up on your amazon history, it's greatest business move was hooking up with all of the mom and pops out there in the mid-90s, and having them link back to the mothership that was the amazon bookseller
this is that, all over again
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Amazon becomes a platform. The web site turns into infrastructure.
I'm impressed. Really impressed. I feel compelled to play with it, see what comes out of it.
I dunno...I'll be out and about and will see a sign some where like "saves you 20%" and the first thing that pops in my head is "In soviet russia 20% saves you" or something.
Anyone know the origin of these?
They've been doing this from the start with an open associate program. People have been able to link to Amazon.com books and get a commission since the 90s.
The idea of product datafeeds isn't really that new either. You will find the hotel industry allowing datafeeds and other low level integration.
Amazon is giving better quality lower level access to data than many others. But are not as many leagues ahead as the Business Week article seems to indicate.
I guess I should mention the annoying thing. The people playing this amazon datafeed game are creating millions upon millions of web pages with different terms optimized for the search engines. The general result is a marked increase in the number of webpages to index, and a decrease in the quality of search engine results.
Seller Engine will do that for you.
When you buy the software you get a CueCat for free and you can go ahead and scan them in one by one and see on the screen the details that you want about those items. You can also export the data in a tab delimited text format.
The program is actually more directed towards people who sell on Amazon.
When did we start calling programming hacking? Am I missing something. You took an XML feed and made an aplet to manipulate it. OOOOOOH. It's ccalled programming. Hacking implies that it is forbidden, agressive, or both. Stupid mainstream press with their coopting of our phrases.
It's not stupid. It's advanced.
Clutter from Sprote Research. It does live cover lookups of CD's playing in iTunes from Amazon's music site. Very cool and an easy way to find the cover art for CDs to put into your MP3 tag info.
cheap labor conservatives - they want to keep you hungry enough to be thankful for minimum wage.
...speaking seriously, a rich pro-open-source organisation should patent that and then get it legally made public domain (if possible). At least then we know that a large corporation will actually patent that first.
Note to M1-ers: a curt but otherwise insightful message is not "Flamebait" or "Troll".
Read the title, doesn't it already say that? "Amazon hacks for fun and money"
AllConsuming.Net makes great use of the amazon APIs, along with those provided by google, and various blog interfaces.
...its sort of like an All Music Guide for books.
eBay Strikes Me As Very Vulnerable... to a distributed auction service run through Kazaa or something. Probably the only thing that stops someone from totally killing eBay with distributed auctions is a silly patent; but even silly patents will run out within most of our lifetimes.
Of course, verifying who is who on a p2p network is a challenge, but picture this: The RIAA et. al. may force p2p networks to provide user identification.
Don't see that as a crisis--see it as an opportunity. An opportunity to kill PayPal.
Of course eBay has tremendous brand recognition, but what happens if somebody starts streaming price comparisons (from Amazon?) through a p2p? Commision-free auctions are just one click from there, if you'll pardon my pun. Then, the patent issue devolves into what it really is, which is just a brawl between corporate legal budgets. Amazon/p2p/hackers vs. eBay/Paypal sounds like a great main event after all the warmup fights we've seen.
Of course eBay has brand recognition. So did Studebaker and DuMont.
I'd better hurry up and patent my business method of taking online wagers based on the size of corporate legal's payroll. Oh... wait... a bunch of online brokers have prior art.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
"...either SOAP or XML over HTTP..."
/gloat
and given this free choice, I predict that SOAP will quickly become a second choice to XML over HTTP (presumably XML/RPC).
Never liked SOAP, so this is a gloat.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
see the wikipedia's entry on slaaahdot trolls
Quite frankly, they rock. Almost anything they sell is available and the team is flexible on what all you can do with it. Many of the developers offer their code as examples, and they have examples themselves in the 'kit' of just about any platform you want out there, from ASP to PHP, via SOAP or XLST. Here's my spin on it:
DVD Jones
It's a DVD cataloging (and sharing) site that offers recommendations from Amazon filtering out what you already own.
People think Microsoft is the answer. Microsoft is just the question, "No" is the answer.
I suppose everybody in slashdot uses IE/windows these days. That site crashes Galeon under Linux for me....
/L
This strikes me as interesting. In some ways, what Amazon is doing here is basically an Open Data initiative. I am trying to draw an analogy between this kind of thing and the Open Source Software movement.
It is useful to consider the long-term implications of this.
Let's say that lots of people, sites, companies, etc, start using this lovely, free Amazon data. Then Amazon turns around and tells the world in 3 years that people have to start paying for the data. Kind of a suck-you-in-seeming-"open"-but-not-really kind of trick.
Makes me think that if Debian was to make a judgement on this, the Debian Free Data Guidelines would declare this as NON-FREE (tm) as Amazon can at any point "change the license".
Now, who knows if Amazon will ever do this. And no, I don't really read all these bad things into it. I think it is cool for them to make the data (and all) avaiable.
It just makes me think.
Maybe we need a GNU General Public License to cover "Open Data". Hmmnn...
The post makes no sense, the poster obviously didn't even read the article. Whoever modded it up didn't read the article either.
~Berj
Perhaps the game plan at USPTO is to approve everything, lest someone sue the gov't, and letting the applicant's laywers duke it out.
It's roughly based on the "humor" of 80's standup comic Yakov Smirnoff. He used that joke over and over. (In soviet russia, television watch YOU, etc) Then they made fun of that routine in an episode of Family Guy (the one that was on Cartoon Network tonight, coincedentally) then some /. nerd started saying it, and it stuck.
That's about what I can piece together knowing what I do about slashdot, television, and bad 80's comedians.
This message brought to you by the Council of People Who Are Sick of Seeing More People.
a wanker with no life, that just sits on /. post the same fucking shit over and over again...
READ THE FUCKING ARTICLE! Come on Moderators, don't be stupid. Meta moderation is going to kill you guys. The parent post made no sense in relation to the article.
Hey superpulpsicle, suck my meatsicle you whore.
This could easily solve that. Someone should be able to write a script that can display X number of items fitting these keywords and that listing can be totally customized and worked into your existing web pages quite well resulting in more sales for Amazon and a bigger referral check every quarter.
I praise Amazon for doing this.
I promise to mod up any post of the first five people to mod the parent into /. anonymity.
Simply mod parent down, reply to this post notifying me of your most excellent use of moderation points and I'll mod your next post up (even if it is a first post troll linking to goatse).
I hate the RIAA Radar...it just told me that Wierd Al is on Volcano records...and that's an RIAA label...[sniff]
Oh well, off to KazaaLite to get the album then.
If the RIAA wants my money at this point, they'll have to sue me for it.
Mordor...a magical, mythical land where women are more rare than dragons--but where every man would rather find a dragon
We were going in the right direction .... down to 4 .... then some tool brought it back up to 5. And all this time superpulpsicle still thinks he's insightful.
Where is -5 Didn't RTFM when you need it!
"She's a West Texas girl, just like me" - G.W Bush Iraqis
Sounds like the old "Get'em Hooked and they'll come back for more."
.gif .mp3 coke speed weed... take your pick.
1.Give it away free.
2.Wait for them to get hooked.
3.Change the rules.(EULA)
4.Charge big bucks for it!
5.Profit!
Sounds like:
I don't want a pickle; I just want a Motor-Cycle! A four foot cop arrived with a five foot gun!
Amazon announced today, two years after they first opened their data for harvesting and scrutiny by 3rd parties, that they have been purposely salting that data for the last 18 months, for the purpose of skewing any results gleened by said 3rd partiers.
Amazon will be selling their own un-skewing software, for anyone that wishes to know the truth behind what they thought they knew the truth behind before.
This process of releasing skewed data has been patented, and is known as 'Salty Skew 42-Click'.
hut!...hut!...hut!
... trying to find out why that businessweek.com page keeps crashing my mozilla.
...?!
What the
A World in a Grain of Sand / Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Infinity in the Palm of your Hand / And Eternity in an Hour.
Here I was expecting to see a police car on Amazon's banner, or a watermark of Artoo in the background, or a magic pi ball somewhere.
Dammit.
P.S. Go here if you don't get this post.
Is anyone else having this problem? The Business Week page is consistently fatal to Mozilla on both my Red Hat desktop and Debian laptop. It gets about a third of the way through the page load and then
*poof* no more Mozilla - instant vanishing act.
Normally I'd just chalk this up to isolated Mozilla suckage, but it happens on both my boxes, every single time I try to load that page. Anyone else encountering this?
This story has no substance. There are no 'hackers', there is not story. It reads like an ad for a failing .com; I'm surprised slashdot would run such tripe.
Most of the posts about Amazon's one-click patent should be moderated off-topic. Maybe this one too, but I'll risk that to make a point in favor of Amazon. It's really too bad Amazon got painted as bad guys for the one-click patent, even if that was a trivial and laughable patent.
I advocate buying from Amazon to reward their giving so many features to end users. We take Amazon for granted now, but we should be thankful for their accomplishments. Amazon is chock full of cool features that might have existed in labs or in peoples imaginations, but weren't available for real users until Amazon put them out there: purchase circles, user reviews, multiple competing industry reviews, page previews, author interviews, people-who-bought-this-also-bought info, real-time best seller lists, real-time popularity indicators, wish lists, user-created theme lists, recommendation agents, used book stores/zshops, great searching and great sorting of results... all on the same site, in one place, easily navigable -- fantastic. Really, it's one thing to have an idea and hack it up for a few geek friends to use, it's another thing to put such a powerful toolset as Amazon is in the hands of millions of ordinary users. Not only does Amazon lead the industry, it really created online book selling the way it is today. If it were not for Amazon, the Barnes & Noble online site would probably look a lot like bookstore.com, or worse maybe even B Dalton's web site.
Amazon rocks, and the APIs are just one more example of that.
I'd like a button on the Mozilla toolbar to initiate a p2p search and download of an album while I'm browsing its page on amazon.
:) ...in a way... i like it.
the computer is online
i am not at it
what a waste of ressources
Mozilla also has support for various web services, SOAP, XML-RPC and more making it ideal to capitalize on burgeoning amount of raw data in XML sites such as Amazon are offering these days.
you are just making excuses.
You can't really expect them to hire experts to analyse every request
That is the entire point of having Patent Offices in the first place. If they're not gonna bother analysing every suggestion then we should do away with them completely and just use an automated submission system and let the courts decide the legality of any patent. If they don't have the time or people to analyse a request thouroughly then shouldn't it be by default denied rather than granted? Especially since the situation you describe in the courts is the same the world over (big companies are basically un-touchable)
As for companies sueing when their patent is denied....well if you have a clear and sensible patent system in the first place they should never be in that situation.
Patent offices in other countries manage to work fine without all these ridiculous patents coming out. I'm not saying they're perfect but it does seem to be mainly the USPTO causing controversy..
Amazon is a great data source but is still one-dimensional. The real value to the user is when many great data sources are combined together interestingly. These guys have adopted the newspaper syndicate model and combined Google and Amazon with events from a theatre so you can search for CDs of musicals and get tickets.
There must be at least 1 out of work /. reader who can fill this position in Arlington, VA.
o bs /jobs.htm
http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/ac/ahrpa/ohr/j
USPTO Job #: 03-050
Closing Date: 12/31/03
Description: Patent Examiner (Computer Engrg, Elec Engrg, Computer Science)
Salary: $32,819 - $70,959
Hoping to tip the scales in our favor.
The example taken from the developer kit:d ev-t=[developerâ(TM)s token goes here]&AuthorSearch=Tom%20Clancy&mode=books&type=li te&page=1&f=xml
http://xml.amazon.com/onca/xml3?t=webservices-20&
Returns:
There are no exact matches for the search.
and the search: http://xml.amazon.com/onca/xml3?t=webservices-20&d ev-t=[developerâ(TM)s token goes here]&AuthorSearch=Isaac%20Asimov&mode=books&type= lite&page=1&f=xml
Returns a bunch of CD's (seems like the search is made for music instead of books)
in GNUin GNUin GNUin GNUin GNUin GNUin GNUin GNUSegmentation fault
check out readerware. it does all of this for you: you scan in your cd's, books, or dvd's, and it goes to amazon, tower, etc. to pull up the relevant info and populate your database for you. it can decode and use cuecats, as well. i wouldn't have been able to catalogue my 1500+ cd's without it!
Clearly people mistake humor these days as something that is "interesting" and "insightful". Grab that funny stick (slight variant of the clue stick) and bop your noodle with it a couple times.
Okay, so it's a typo. But clearly a bunch of dumb-ass virgin moderators who wouldn't know sex from their right hand marked this up as funny because they thought it had something to do with conception, contraceptives, or some other such thing as would pop into their pr0n-infested minds.
... dumbasses!
Inconceivable means exactly what the original poster meant. Namely:
1. Impossible to comprehend or grasp fully: inconceivable folly; an inconceivable disaster.
2. So unlikely or surprising as to have been thought impossible; unbelievable: an inconceivable victory against all odds.
I do not think this word is spelled the way you think it is spelled.
Sean
Actually, this joke is at least as old as Bob Hope's 1964 book "I Owe Russia $1200". Hope traveled to Russia, and on his return was asked by an interviewer "Do they have television there?" Of course, he replied, "Yes, but it watches you."
I've been using their web services for a while now for BooksUnderReview.com to grab review info and while the interface and XML over http are great, Amazon's web services servers have a tendancy to become overloaded 20-30% of the time. I finally had to write into my scripts to do extensive error checking to make sure we really did get a completely valid response before processing any of the info.
There are entire websites based around the premise of using dynamic AWS (Amazon Web Services links), but with the AWS unreliability most of us have found that "local pre-caching" works best. For places looking for product info in an easy to get fashion, AWS works great as long as you plan around it's non-available times.
Some of their restrictions are very annoying (1 second between accesses and content storage time restrictions), but understandable. Still, it's something I'd love to see more and more major sites using.
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
But in this case Amazon is not using us to collect data (here I treat user comments as a separate issue as they are not put in through the external web service I believe)... they are just offering us a window into a datastore they require to run their business.
I liken it to putting in the biggest window possible in your storefront so people can see what you have to offer and be drawn to you for sales. They are extending that concept in N dimensions to provide a fractal multi-dimensional storefront window, if you will, that lets many many people see in to various parts of the store.
With that analogy in place, you can see that for Amazon to close this window to the public (like shutting down access or charging fees) is roughly equivalent to putting boards over all the windows of the shop and then trying to convince people to come in and buy.
CDDB is more like a freelance photogrpaher taking pictures of all of us, then selling the pictures for a huge profit and not giving us any of the cut.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
"... dumbasses"
And you're the one who's missing the bleedingly obvious Princess Bride references.
Pot, Kettle, Black and so forth...
passthelove.com lets people find dvds, books, and music to 'share the love' on and save 10%.
tunebounce.com is a music reccomendation and rating engine that uses Amazon's similiarity search to find related artists.
AWS kick ass!
hooray! it's a sex wiki
In Slashdot America, Soviets televise YOU =p
That's about what I can piece together knowing what I do about slashdot, television, and bad 80's comedians.
/. can you get a level 5 informative post with that knowledge
Only on
no, judging by the grandparent post, they are a windows user, in that case you beg an plead to Microsoft to make an application that will check the license for you, and then when MS discover that it could be used to check on their own licenses, they decide to put in DRM to not allow reading the license, or denying the license, only knowing it changed, and accepting it.
OK I'm done.... for now. (Thank goodness for the "Post Anonymously" Box.
The Amazons on TV do no such thing. Those are the only ones we care about. Forget all that Greek myth crap!