Amazon Web Services UK Blog

Merry Christmas and an API New Year

Well its Christmas time and I can be forgiven for a terrible pun. 2005 has definitely been the break out year of web services, though to many it may seem as if AJAX and RSS were the big things of 2005. Well in many ways they were the heralds to a greater revolution taking place under our noses, namely the web services tsunami.

2005 saw sites such as Flickr and Delicious  grow in popularity, not only for their utility but  also because of the easy to use web services they both offered,  their popularity was so much indeed they were both acquired.

AJAX not only brought a more dynamic look and feel to a web page, it offered for many a new way to get snippets web service data via the XMLHttpRequest Object

And RSS became the “web service” of choice for the internet

This year also saw the release of Amazon's Mechanical Turk, an innovative concept that takes the idea of social networking and brings it to problem solving. Mechanical Turk allows people with problems to find workers willing to help solve their problem on the internet. In many ways its a marketplace for the labour to solve problems

Finally I leave you with the thoughts of Richard  MacManus  and his view of Mechanical Turk from his top 10 web 2.0 moments  of 2005 blog post.

9. The return of Amazon - Mechanical Turk and Alexa web services. Towards the end of the year, Amazon.com threw a couple of curve balls - showing they haven't lost their innovative touch

See you all in the New Year

Don

Good behaviour

This posting has been a while in coming, it wasn’t until I was at the geek dinner this weekend that I thought I would post this, the contrast between the two dinners was quite interesting, but I won’t go into that now.

At a previous geek dinner I found myself talking with Jeremy Keith of Clearleft and author of the book DOM Scripting (definitely worth a look), what was interesting was how the conversation focused on the good design and engineering principles for web page design. I was struck as to how the MVC ideas (mentioned previously) in the Client server world had found themselves similar concepts in the world of the browser.

One of the great ideas behind DOM Scripting is the separation of content from Behaviour, and design. This conversation seemed all the more relevant as having just standardized on an elegant way of doing this; we are faced with the problem of how to integrate  AJAX into this methodology.

In the world of  AJAX there seem to be three distinct approaches namely:

1 The use of Stubs – so examples would be SAJAX and DWR

2 The use of pure JavaScript libraries, e.g. DOJO and Prototype

3 The use of JavaScript generators like Ruby on Rails (or the PHP clone CakePHP)

All these methods currently seem to mix Behaviour (or Code) with the structure, very much in the old way. I’m hoping this changes in the future, and I’ll be keeping my eye on DOM Scripting and unobtrusive Java Scripting techniques where we can hope for a clear separation between, design, content and behaviour

Don

The Value of Free

Recently I was reading about Web 2.0 Business models, an article Web 2.0 Business Models breaks down the business models used in web 2.0 to two kinds, namely technical as in Skype and Network effect as in MySpace. I find it quite interesting that there is no mention of the tried and tested retailing model. This model exists and this Christmas many people will be grateful for the existence of it. I wouldn’t bracket internet retail ( etailing ) as either a network effect based business model or a technology based business model, Amazon customers are loyal because Amazon offers better service at a lower price than its competitors, there is no tie in owing to network effect the tie in is pure and simple service. So I would say there is a third category “good old fashioned business” or E-business where I would mostly place Amazon.com.

Some of the areas of improved service are things like search inside the book or the Amazon market place where the same book maybe found in used form and purchased there. So there is a strong initiative for Amazon to keep on innovating and offering these innovations as the exposed guts of its technology enabling people to further innovate on top of that

Check out Amazon improves Web Services

It’s interesting to note that Ken Yarmosh ended by saying

“If Google, Amazon, or Craigslist, would charge even a nominal fee for access to their data, they would make a killing.”

The ECS Service amongst other Amazon web services are offered free of charge, so there is exceptional value being offered free of charge

For further in formation on Web services check out AWS 

Don

Mechanical Turk Training

Amazon Mechanical Turk – A Technical Overview.

In 1 hour, the audience will learn about:

• Creating and submitting Human Intelligence Tasks (HITs)
• Qualifying workers
• Approving HITs
• Getting up and running with your first request

Check out this link for more details

Is search a commodity ?

Alexa is changing the world of web search and making it available to everyone. Today Alexa opens up its search API and gives access to the data stored in their archives since 1996, this data is estimated as being somewhere between 5 billion documents and 100 terabytes of data, I’m sure this is going to be a mashup developers delight.

Check out these reviews:

“Alexa totally gets it “

from Tech Crunch.

"Anyone can also use Alexa's servers and processing power to mine its index to discover things - perhaps, to outsource the crawl needed to create a vertical search engine, for example. Or maybe to build new kinds of search engines entirely, or ...well, whatever creative folks can dream up. And then, anyone can run that new service on Alexa's (er...Amazon's) platform, should they wish."

From Writer's Web.

Wikizon

Wiki derives from the Hawaiian word for easy, and now it would seem it is easier for customers to write reviews on products using a Wiki.

For more information check out Customer Evangelists

I’m a great fan of this idea, and I hope Amazon roll out this beta to a wider audience. To me this is a way of getting better and deeper book reviews, and product information 

Don

Too good to hurry

It’s just over a month till Christmas, now’s the time people start thinking about buying presents for their friends and family, often these days when wondering around a department store you can see people stopping and thinking so hard you can almost see the bubble above their heads, what should I get uncle Jake for Christmas, will my sister in law really like this? Wouldn’t it be nice is some smart fellow came up with a way to help us solve this dilemma?

Well someone has! http://givetothem.com/

This is a site which takes what you know about friends and family and suggests things they might like, its really simple (just what I need for this time of year), all it needs to know are 3 things that the person you have in mind has, and from there is recommends things to you. Having tried it I can say my sister is in for a nice treat this year.

http://givetothem.com/ Is a good example of how services are being built on the modern web, data from a web service (AWS) is taken and when combined with user Meta data in this case what their friends have bought, creates a unique and helpful service.

Don

Tag, you're it

Earlier I wrote about the wisdom of crowds  a blog about StoryCode I never really developed the theme to cover Folksonomy. I may talk more about folksonomy later, but for now the take away is this; one of the key features of web 2.0 offerings is the use of a collective intelligence, think of this as audience participation if you like. Web 2.0 services really try to involve its users in the development of the service, and in many cases cannot exist without user participation. Tagging is one of the leading methods for doing this. So it was with enormous delight that I noticed Amazon are now trialing Tags.

Here’s the announcement

“Dear Amazon Community,

I’m posting this note on behalf of the Amazon Tags team.

We have another new feature for you today: tags. By the end of the day today, about 50% of you will see tags.
Tags provide an easy way for you to "remember" and classify any item on the Amazon site for later recall. For example, you might be shopping for holiday gifts and tag items with the names of the people on your shopping list. At any time, you can review the items you've tagged and make final gift decisions. You can add tags from the detail page for any product, and the items you’ve tagged and tags you’ve used are displayed on Your Profile.

You might want to tag items you've purchased in the past. This allows you to organize your collection in any way you wish. You can also use tags to help you remember items you're considering for purchase, e.g. if you are planning to buy a digital camera, you might tag several makes and models so that you can look at them side by side, organized the way you wish. Don't like the way Amazon has organized its science fiction or cookbooks? Tag the items you care about with the categories that matter to you. Because people's tags are (by default) visible to others, a great side effect of tagging is that you can navigate among items through other people's tags. What items have people tagged "gift" or "

Tuscany

" or "robot?"

Feel free to give tagging a try post your questions / comments here. The Amazon Tags team is reading this discussion board and is very interested in your feedback. “

Obviously the feedback will be via the forums, signup to participate:

Click the link for an Amazon Web Services developer token.

You should also apply for an Associates account. (so you can make money on your service)

I’m excited by this and I wonder how the tags will develop, will they help people create new trends in best sellers or will they be like listmania or the wishlist and help people find new articles on Amazon? 

Stay tuned there are exciting times ahead

Don

Oh we do like to be beside the seaside

Last Friday I took a train down to Brighton to attend the d.construct conference hosted by my good friends at Clear:Left. While there I met a couple of familiar faces including Simon Willison and Ben Metcalfe who I had met previously when presenting at the BBC Backstage event earlier this year.

Normally I try to avoid the web 2.0 hype, I was there in Web 1.0 with Netscape and Sun so I get the strong feeling of history repeating itself here. However there are some substantive benefits coming from the way technology is being used in web 2.0 and for that reason I don.t think there will be a bubble as such, just an explosion in entrepreneurs and the delivery of a much richer and ( eventually) more intuitive and seamless world for the end user than ever before. Darwinian law will determine whose ideas or which companies survive.

I listened delighted to the presentations which talked about how web standards was enabling this richer user interface to be delivered and found myself thinking for the umpteenth time REST and AJAX really are a marriage made in heaven.

There is an elegance in the way the XMLHttpRequest object allows the use of REST there can be no surprise that most of the mashups that I know of use their respective REST API.s and even here at Amazon where we support both REST (Amazon REST) and SOAP (Amazon SOAP) we are finding there is a preference for the use of REST

When I was young a trip to the seaside meant two of my favourites fish and chips with the sea air, these days two more favourites can be added  REST  and AJAX

 

Podcasts available

 

Don

Ruby Tuesday

Missed a meeting at the London Ruby club the other night as I was quite ill, however in order to make amends I thought I would talk a little about why I think Ruby is so interesting.

One of the greatest things to ever happen on the web was when Mosaic shipped with the view source button. That one initiative gave rise to millions of web developers, (I know because that’s how I started). The problem is, however, that after a while your markup (HTML/XHTML) code becomes cluttered with server side code and/or JavaScript what is needed is a way or organize the web page more effectively. This becomes even more apparent the first time you start on a large project where there are specialist players i.e. designers, coders etc. What’s needed is a functional way of separating the code from the design, Ruby does this quite well, so well in fact its one of the fastest growing web development languages at the moment. Another one of the reasons for Ruby's rapid growth is that it arrived at about the same time as AJAX and consequently has been able aid the rapid building of sites with AJAX style interactivity.

So what is Ruby  ? Well it’s just another scripting language, only this time with a nice framework (the rails in Ruby on Rails) that helps you separate out the code from the design, as it’s a programming language at its core, it can also be used with web services such as those of Amazon via the REST (XML over HTTP) based Amazon Web Services . Ruby works with AWS via a package called Ruby/Amazon it’s definitely worth taking a look if you’re interested in either web services or Ruby. 

Before using Ruby and AWS you need to obtain an Amazon Web Services developer token.

You should also apply for an Associates account.

Here are a few links for beginners with Ruby

http://www.rubygarden.org/ruby

http://wiki.rubyonrails.com/rails/pages/StartAtTheBeginning

http://wiki.rubyonrails.com/rails/pages/Tutorial

Good luck

Don