Personally I’m not into getting up at zero AM and staggering to the mall. I’d rather stay home and shop online. I don’t have to worry about a place to park, and I don’t have to worry about someone smacking me in the head with a shopping bag.
Amazon is aiming for people like me with its online Black Friday deals. You can get a list of the today’s shopping deals — one every hour — at the hourly lightning deals page.
Amazon is also doing its Amazon votes promotion, which allows customers to vote on items they want to see heavily discounted. (The product with the most votes gets the deep discount.)
And finally, as this is a Web 2.0 Black Friday, Amazon has a widget for today’s deals. Check it out, and happy shopping!
I am spending a lot of time with the Amazon ECS service — it’s the good twin, I’ve decided, and the Amazon search engine on the Web site is the evil twin. (Kidding. The frustrating twin, perhaps.) While I was going through the documentation and doing experiments on the site I noticed a couple of things of interest.
First: Jeff Bezos has reviews on the site. Not many, but some. Apparently he hates The 13th Warrior and loves milk. He prefers very expensive cheese straws, very expensive binoculars, and Cory Doctorow.
If you’re not into Jeff Bezos, you might want to check out Amazon’s new video review features. Yup, Amazon is now inviting customers to post video reviews of products. You can browse around looking for the reviews, or you can try searching inurl:videopreplay site:amazon.com on Google to see the half-dozen it has indexed.
I think I’ve made it fairly clear by now that Amazon.com’s search engine makes my skull hurt, but I’m really digging almost everything else they’re doing. Today Amazon launched new “Amazon Widgets,” an interface for building — yes! Widgets that have to do with Amazon! You can start building and implementing widgets at http://widgets.amazon.com/ .
Currently Amazon has sixteen widgets available. Most of them require you logging in with an Amazon account, but a few of them don’t. Some of the widgets look really familiar (a widget banner, a widget search box), but some of them look like fun content (like the Amazon Unbox Video Previewer, which is available only in the US. All other widgets are available for any Amazon site that offers the Amazon Associates program. Yes, many of these widgets allow you to use your referral code.)
I took a look at the Product Cloud Widget, one of the few widgets that doesn’t require a signin. You can specify an Amazon product category (or use the whole store), customize titles and colors, and use sliderbars to change the size of the cloud. Amazon says the items in the cloud will be relevant to the content of your page. I have a cloud below; I leave matching judgment up to you.
For the multimedia fan in you, Amazon has a slide show widget, wherein you can search all of Amazon for product images and add them (with your comments) to a widget slide show. I see potential for unbounded silliness but I shall restrain myself and show you a demure slideshow of books by some of the people at Web Search University. (Oh, and one book by Barbara Quint to see if she’s paying attention.) This one has two steps — find the images and then specify widget size, transition type, speed, etc. This one I had problems seeing in preview, so I’m not sure if it’s going to work or not.
These are just two of the widgets. Other widgets include Wish List, Favorites, and Product Reviews. I think I’ll spend some more time playing with the product cloud…
