See the details at the Amazon Web Services blog.

There there should be an XML feed for my order updates. If my order ships, I should know about it in my feed too. It would be even cooler to get updates every time my shipment moves forward, so the shipment tracking information should be integrated within this feed. Security will be an issue here. I don’t want Joe Schmoe looking at my order update feed.

Of course there should also be the ability to subscribe to an aggregate feed, personalized just for me. Instead of reading 15 different feeds, I want one feed with exactly the things I want. Of course Amazon should have a nifty config page that would let me set all of this up.

Why do I want XML feeds? What are the alternatives? I can visit the site every once in a while. But that’s so 2002. I’m lazy and I’m a power user. I could get email updates, and yes Amazon does send out nice product recommendations by email based on my purchase history, but I’m limited to a few emails a month, and I can handle a lot more volume in a “pull when I want RSS feed” as opposed to “clutter my inbox with emails, whydoncha”.

It would be nice to have all of these features offered by Amazon rather than depend on a third party to build these using AWS. Why? One click UI widgets on Amazon.com letting me add and remove pages and categories to my aggregate feed on the fly. And the security. Maybe it can be done by a third party anyway, using a Firefox plugin.

There seem to be a more than a few attempts to build RSS feeds for Amazon. I’ve yet to find one that’s close to what I need.

Amazon has a Syndicated Content page that supposedly has RSS feeds for product categories. As far as I’m concerned, it’s broken. It doesn’t update properly with new products, shows the same ones over and over again and the biggest sin: it doesn’t offer a full text feed.

There are other attempts too:

- Lockergnome’s Amazon RSS Feed Generator
- Weblog bookwatch
- Blogtricks
- Simple Syndicated Amazon Price Tracking at Watchcow

… but all of these combined are still not good enough. There should be a easier, more powerful XML feed solution for the geek poweruser.

However, it does miss out by not checking “used and new prices” from third party sellers. This A Camp CD seems cheapest on Amazon.ca if you don’t check out the merchant prices for it on Amazon.com.

Venture blog has a post on the death of the 80/20 rule and Wired has an article about something very similar. Credit goes to Amazon’s personalization team for pioneering the use of product recommendations.

We do really cool stuff. Honest. Take a look at this presentation on “Front Line Internet Analytics at Amazon.com“. It’s from a talk my boss gave at the Emetrics 2004 summit recently.

The official description states: “Broomball is played indoors on an ice hockey rink or outdoors on frozen ponds or lakes with rules very similar to Ice Hockey. Players wear special padded sponge rubber shoes, use a ball which is sized somewhere between a soccer ball and slow pitch softball, and use specially designed manufactured brooms which are made of wood or aluminum. The goal like hockey is to put the ball in the opposing net, a net which is larger than a hockey net but much smaller than an outdoor soccer goal.”

I’m told that here we play a modified version of the game at our yearly company picnic. Our homegrown variant combines aspects of traditional broomball and soccer. We play on a grass field, use a larger rubber “exercise ball”, and have goal lines instead of nets. After you toss in a dash of bloodlust usually reserved for the likes of rugby and back-to-school shopping, a traditional yearly broken bone or two, and voila!

I could use a little skeletal readjustment, I guess. Long overdue.

“It is not always possible to determine when a server instance failed with respect to the work it was doing at the time of failure. For instance, if a server instance fails after handling a client request but before returning the response, there is no way to tell that the request was handled. A user that does not get a response retries, resulting in an additional request.

Failover for RMI objects requires that methods be idempotent. An idempotent method is one that can be repeated with no negative side-effects.”

I found a good discussion of making services idempotent and the reasons for doing so at RunOfTheMillBlog.

It certainly looks very interesting, with a number of innovations in dealing with threads, mapping contacts to messages and searching. Take a look at some of their publications here:

Reinventing the Email Client
ReMail: A Reinvented Email Prototype
Email Thread Visualization

“Yahoo is fully committed to making the DomainKeys framework an open Internet standard and has accordingly submitted the DomainKeys framework as an Internet-Draft entitled “draft-delany-domainkeys-base-00.txt” for publication with the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force).”

For background… the incentive behind this project was to provide a practical solution to sharing videos on a hostel network. We had 10 Mbits to share, very little disk space and lots of movies flying around. CD burners weren’t cheap yet so it was common to share an MPEG1 VCD in a CD ROM drive and watch it via a UNC path. Needless to say two people attempting to watch the same video from the same CD brought everything to a halt. Multicasting MPEG video from a single point was our solution to this problem.

This open source product includes the key desktop applications, such as a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation manager, and drawing program, with a user interface and feature set similar to other office suites. Sophisticated and flexible, OpenOffice.org also works transparently with a variety of file formats, including those of Microsoft Office. It runs natively on Solaris, Linux and Windows.

I found two things interesting here. One, the brief and clearly stated anti competition message described for VARs and system builders. This is something we should be doing at least as well in my company.

Two, I’ve always been under the impression that reading and writing Microsoft Word files is difficult because the file format has been deliberately obscured. Now, here is an open source project that is file compatible with Microsoft Office. That’s a very good thing.

Digging around further, I found the file format description for Microsoft Excel. Where’s the doc on the Microsoft Word file format?

This part struck me as very relevant based on my current experience:

“Reason to Have a Sales Guy – #3:
Your product is no longer being improved
As a software product matures over the years, it tends to gain sales guys and lose developers. For a product that is nearing its twilight, it is not uncommon to see a company with lots of sale guys and no developers at all. The reason for this is reasonably intuitive: The product is no longer moving toward the customer. Closing the gap requires us to constantly be dragging customers over to the product.”