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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
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.
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...
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
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!
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...)
Utter BS. More so than ever companies are realizing that continuous improvement is neccesary to remain competitive. Do a google on "six sigma", an process improvement methodology which started out at Motorola after a Arizona State Univ. PhD came up with the program and has balooned in the number of companies that use the six sigma methodology. For many Deming, Juran and Taguchi, the classic gurus of quality, are praised as gods. Or check out www.asq.org (American Socity of Quality) Engineers are just starting to realize the power of Experimental Design (DoE) and statistics, which current computer technology now allows even those with just basic statistical backgrounds to perform advanced statistical tests and interpret the results easily. The list goes on. Improvement is the norm, not the exception in countries such as Japan, which were in a full on quality revolution in the 60's-70's with the help of Deming, leaving America aghast and having American companies beg for his help after turning him away in the 50's and 60's. Only fairly recently has America started to catch on to quality.
Given Amazon's track record I suggest you developers check the license daily.
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?
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....
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....
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
Somewhat off topic... But, imagine the fun of a job where McD's paid you to reak havoc in Burger King and Wendy's resturants :-P
/walk-in throughput.
It already happens. All of the big chains (PepsiCo (i.e. TacoBell, PizzaHut, HotNNow, etc.), McDonalds, etc.) use simulations+data/video to improve their drive-through
Some corps decided that a pure FIFO is best on average, where McD decided to let people get out of line and wait (if the order is unusual) -- So it has been reported that some McD people (who knows? franchise owners? managers?) send people out to nieghboring places with large custom orders at rush hour that totally screw up a pure FIFO system.
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.
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".
No, it doesn't.
Yo mama so fake, she failed the Turing Test.
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"?
Well, I suppose some guys might think that's sexy.
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.
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...
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.
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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.
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!
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.
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.