TicTap Contextual Ads

Early this morning I received an email from Alex Choo over at TicTap.

Alex wanted me to be among the first to know about TicTap's new Contextual Ads. The new system uses ECS to show very attractive contextually relevant ads in sidebar form.  Each ad block can display up to 50 products, supplanted by a very stylish mouseover popup for each product:

There are lots of options and customization hooks, and the code is available for free download here.

Every time I talk to an industry analyst or to a journalist, I like to mention the fact that our developer community is creative and innovative. This is a perfect example of what I mean.

Do you have an application, tool or site built with one or more of our services? Do you want to see it featured in this blog? Send me some email -- awseditor@amazon.com .

-- Jeff;

Comments

[Alex Choo]

Hi everyone,

You can see a working demo of TCA by visiting this link.

http://yws.tictap.com/web?q=web+service

Alex

[Alex Choo]

Sorry, I meant http://yws.tictap.com/web?q=web+services

Alex.

[Mark Potts]

Just a comment about Amazon S3 simple storage service. I use Amazon's US and UK websites and quite frequently find data retrieval extremely slow. I wonder why anyone would be interested in using an already sluggish service that is likely to become even more overloaded.

Mark

[Steve Hartwell]

Creative and innovative? How are these 4-inch-wide, in-your-face flyouts any different from the annoying pop-ups that plagued the web and cause browser developers to add special features to block them?

Just because someone is using our web services (yes, I work at Amazon too) doesn't make them automatically golden in my eyes.

If you really think there's anything 'cool' about TicTap's annoyanceware, it's time for you to change flavors of Kool-ade.

[Alex Choo]

Steve,

Thanks for your input. Just want to point out that we did not invent that popup. It's actually Amazon's technology, I believe it's called Product Previews.

And don't you find it useful when you can get some info abt an Amazon product without having to load the whole page? I believe this was your colleagues' motivation when they created the Product Previews technology, and it increased click-thrus for Amazon during testing. Hopefully, this translated into sales too.

Damon and I are grateful to Jeff for his encouraging words.