Amazon: March 2006 Archives

TitleZ is a new (Atlas-based) web application that uses the Amazon Historical Pricing web service to generate historical reports on an Amazon title or search.

TitleZ has a simple and clean interface, and generates good-looking reports (using data from Amazon ECS as well). It's free for now, but they plan to charge after the beta period is over. Also, links from TitleZ to Amazon products use TitleZ's affiliate code, so that's part of their revenue model as well.

This is a nice implementation of an application Amazon obviously had in mind when they made the Historical Pricing web service available.

Off the top of my head, here are ten ideas for applications one could build on top of Amazon S3:

1. virtual hard drive with web-based management UI


2. background automated backup application


3. historical index of items from favorite RSS feeds


4. photo storage vault


5. iTunes/mp3 library


6. generic virtual database with SQL interface


7. searchable email archive


8. Amazon product tracking database


9. automated web clippings database


10. clipart database

No doubt others have thought of many of the same ideas -- it'll be fun to see what folks do with this.

Amazon has introduced another new web service -- Amazon S3 (“Simple Storage Service”), which provides a web services interface to Internet-based storage and backup. This is very cool; it's easy to imagine a lot of great uses for this. Amazon provides the web service -- it's up to the rest of us to build the applications. I think a we'll see a lot of interesting applications for a variety of purposes (not just traditional backup). As usual, Amazon provides both SOAP and REST interfaces.