Innovation is what the industry is all about, and I am always amazed at the creative people I meet. Last November I spoke to Amazon Camp in Toronto, and after the presentation one developer stuck around for a few minutes. “I’d like to show you a site that I built”. He proceeded to show me a beta version of www.zoomii.com, which was simply amazing.
Zoomii just launched! Check it out for yourself: especially the user interface. Zoom in and out, pan around, and try clicking on the arrows in the headers of each book shelf. Chris Thiessen wrote this to resemble a physical book store, and even displays book images in a manner that shows their size in relation to the books next to them.
All this thanks to the power of Web Services: imagine trying to accomplish this in the bad old days of JavaScript feeds. Chris told me “I'm pretty sure I wouldn't even have tried to build Zoomii without Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3; it would have looked too expensive, too daunting. And, of course, Zoomii couldn't exist without access to a dataset like that. It looks like Amazon is growing a good business with its web services, but it's providing far more value than it captures--you changed the equation for a lot startups and other projects.”
Thanks Chris! I’m certain that others will find your site as engaging as I do.
You can read more about Zoomii in detail in Chris’s blog at blog.zoomii.com.
-- Mike
That is awesome! The interface is sweet, and it's not in Flash as I first thought.
Posted by: jack | June 16, 2008 at 06:51 AM
It is impressive innovative big black box. It is all what I can see on http://zoomii.com/. Or I'm not using The Right Web Browser(TM)? I'm using "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.1.14) Gecko/20080404 Iceweasel/2.0.0.14 (Debian-2.0.0.14-2)".
Posted by: Hynek (Pichi) Vychodil | June 16, 2008 at 09:48 AM
Mike, thanks so much for this post. I've had about 1000 people show up on the site already.
Jack: Yep, it's all Javascript and DHTML.
Hynek, thanks for the bug report. I updated my browser checking code. Does it work for you now?
Posted by: Chris Thiessen | June 16, 2008 at 11:18 AM