Amazon follows Google, becomes a dev platform

Now this is cool: Amazon rolls out a free web services suite for developers. Browsing the documentation indicates that they provide a SOAP interface and an “XML over HTTP” interface that takes a URI as the call and returns an XML doc as the response. Cool tricks: “enable your Web site visitors to add products to Amazon.com shopping carts, wedding registries and wishlists directly from your site”; XSLT transforms at Amazon, meaning Amazon will return the result of your query in the format you supply; integration with Amazon’s associates program (earn money off your webservice? a unique idea)…

This opens some interesting opportunities. If I become an Amazon associate and embed my associate ID in a tool like iTunes2Manila, is it ethical for me to keep associate revenue that is generated by people who use my script on their website? Probably not, but it’s a fun thought… 🙂
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