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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.'"
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.
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.
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!
Given Amazon's track record I suggest you developers check the license daily.
Actually, the creator retains the property, according to Amazon's Web Services Licensing Agreement (Section 2). If you submit any info to Amazon (like "in use" shots of products), they are given an irrevocable license to use.
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?'
Regardless of what you think about Amazon opening up its API and inventory data, this is a nifty product. Scan something anywhere and get the Amazon data on it. Now I comparision shop Amazon with BestBuy, Circuit City, or B&N while I am at the store. Wait?! Is this illegal under the DMCA?
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...)
* Moderating...
Let's see:
- Bashed DMCA... Check (pointlessly, but all the better)
- Bashed Patents... Check
- Bashed SCO... FAIL
- Bashed Microsoft... FAIL
- Bashed **AA... FAIL
- Referenced "Good Technology (tm)", eg. Linux/Google/GNU/GPL... Check
- Referenced Geek Toy... FAIL (Close, but "PDA" is not "Zaurus")
You had a good post, but it could have looked like this:
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Regardless of what you think about Amzaon opening up it's API and inventory data, this is a nifty product. Scan something anywhere and get the Amazon data on it. Now I comparision shop Amazon with BestBuy, Circuit City, or B&N while I am at the store. (Ha! I bet the bigwigs at M$ would LOVE if I comparison shopped Linux vs. XPee, let's not even MENTION SCO!)
This would be great if they guy hooked it up to Froogle and made it work on a Zaurus - you could buy anything you saw, anywhere, for the cheapest price you could find on the web, while you were in a real store! (I bet the RIAA would object, though, what with their PRICE FIXING WAYS. Bastards.)
(runs off to fill out a patent form... before Amazon does!)
Oh, also, I HATE THE DMCA!!!! VIVA LA REVOLUTION!!
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Learn from the master.
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.
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...
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.