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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.'"
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"?
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 suspect it's already been done. A quick USPTO search on "software and price and comparison and internet" yields over 1000 results.
Side note: How can a patent with over 20 references be considered new and innovative? Seriously, that's not genius or inspiration, it's adding 1+1. Looking through the software patents, it's a joke that most of them got granted - the Cheif Patent Officer must be Obvious Guy.
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
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
Part, I think, of the reason they weren't doing this before is the question of "name recognition" and their desire to build a brand.
By first establishing themselves as a complete "product", i.e. "Amazon", people will now recognize these portal'd Amazon links as something new but still part of the Amazon-whole.
If they had simply introduced this ability from the beginning, they risked other companies somehow taking advantage of it to make it appear as if the "store" was the secondary-site, as opposed to Amazon itself.
"Stumble before you crawl"
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.
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.
What is really even more sad is how incompetent the people at the USPTO are. There lot of competent software engineers out of work out there who should be hired by the buffoons that run the place. Maybe then will shit like one-click get rejected at the first glance.
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One is born into aristocracy, but mediocrity can only be achieved through hard work.
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.
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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Because one has nothing to with the other. The number of references or the existence of prior art does not speak to the degree innovation or novelty. Any article in any modern scientific journal can easily have 20 or more references. Heck, a letter to the editor might have a dozen.
/. about patents and intellectual property is wrong. Including this post.
Itâ(TM)s called acknowledging your sources. Letâ(TM)s say I come up with some new, innovative way to clone mammals that is 100% successful. Letâ(TM)s say I want to patent my new, innovative process. Letâ(TM)s say the first step of my process involves cleaning and sterilizing the apparatus is a way that has been documented previously. Rather than 1) restating a procedure that has already been documented, and 2) taking credit for someone elseâ(TM)s work, I would reference the original publication of the sterilization procedure. In the jargon of patents, that is prior art. And it in no way affects the patent-worthiness of my innovation.
If someone devised a method of delivering food over the internet with TCP/IP, I bet that would be a good candidate for a patent. There doesnâ(TM)t seem to be any obvious way to transport physical food by TCP/IP. But part of the patent application would have to reference the prior existence of TCP/IP. Itâ(TM)s called prior art. Its existence does not automatically invalidate the patent.
Seriously dude, everything you read on
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.
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.