Useful Amazon Web Services?

June 24, 2005 4:45 AM

Anyone have any good (== interesting|useful) examples of uses of the Amazon Web Services?

I'm disappointed with the options available within Amazon for enquiring, sorting and displaying your wishlist (amongst other things); for example, I'd like to be able to group by item type, then sort by price; I'd like to be able to compare the Amazon price against the lowest marketplace price, etc.

I'm not a developer, but I suspect that the Amazon Web Services functionality would enable one to do things like this... but the only things I've found that make use of the interface is the WatchCow.net price feed thing. (Note that the site appears to be down at the minute...)

Google gives me lots of links to developer examples, books, etc. but no sites that actually *do* anything.

So - have you built one, or found any interesting ones?

posted by Chunder to computers & internet (6 comments total)

This is a question for kokogiak, the creator of Amazon Light and, I think, an Amazonian.

Why I'm answering, I don't know.
posted by yerfatma at 9:46 AM on June 24, 2005

Well, I don't know if it counts as useful, but there's always Bile. (At least, I'm pretty sure it uses the web services.)
posted by Johnny Assay at 9:51 AM on June 24, 2005

I use Amazon web services to automatically suck in book descriptions for my reading list software.

It's a pretty easy API to work with, and I would be happy to email you source code that shows how to work with it.
posted by cmonkey at 9:58 AM on June 24, 2005

This is Amazon's list of products that offer extended functionality built on top of AWS. Take a look at Mr. Rat's Amazon Products Feed for a free product that has a greatdeal of depth and configurability.

Please note these are merchant-oriented products.
posted by mwhybark at 10:05 AM on June 24, 2005

Yeah - (I'm actually a former Amazonian now). There used to be more lists out there of cool apps built on AWS, but aside from mine (linked above), and allconsuming.net, there's a pretty nice list on the AWS blog of recent AWS apps: http://aws.typepad.com/aws/cool_sites/index.html
posted by kokogiak at 10:07 AM on June 24, 2005

I presume that the MP3 tagging in Tag and Rename, the feature where you get the data from Amazon, works using AWS as well to suck in the album data, track list, cover art.
posted by matildaben at 10:21 AM on June 24, 2005