How Amazon
Opens Up And Cleans Up
Just yesterday we had an article about how Amazon's technology
was becoming their biggest
product, but that could soon change as people continue to
innovate around
Amazon's web services offering, letting just about anyone
access Amazon's vast database, and built interesting and useful
applications on it. When they originally launched this offering a
number of developers thought it was cool, but weren't sure what
could actually be done with it. However, given some time, data, and
an open API, creative developers are always going to come up with
interesting solutions. I don't know if any of these are really a
"killer app" yet, but Amazon now has a vision of being the
"e-commerce platform" for the world. There's something appealing
about that notion. If, anytime you wanted to sell something on your
website, you could easily hook into Amazon's catalog, transaction
processing, and fulfillment process, there are some interesting
possibilities. Right now, it's just simple things, such as creating
a way to automatically match up the top song titles being played on
the radio with those CDs at Amazon. In the future, though, you
could see how an even bigger and more powerful Amazon could become
something of a central "bucket of e-commerce" which many other
sites pull from in creative ways. So, then, the question becomes
how big is this opportunity, really? As I said, it's an appealing
idea, but how many people actually buy through these sorts of
applications vs. those who just go to Amazon and buy it themselves.
The "killer app" built on top of Amazon would need to have really
compelling reasons to buy directly through it - and I don't think
anyone's gotten that far yet. [via Techdirt]
There is nothing wrong with embracing Open Standards. Amazon is
demonstrating