Aaron Swartz points to Bandwagon, an OS X app that seamlessly backs up your iTunes library to a service built on top of Amazon S3. It'll be available on Feb 22, and bloggers can get a free account for posting about the service before it launches.
Technorati Tags: Bandwagon, iTunes, Apple, OS X, music, backup, Amazon, S3
Almost every Amazon page has it (correction: had it), but not many actually know what "obidos" really means. Luckily for the curious, the now defunct Google Answers has the answer.
According to someone who supposedly worked at Amazon:
Obidos is the area where the Amazon is "concentrated" - it narrows to
a point about a mile wide and a couple hundred feet deep. It's the
chokepoint of the Amazon. A wry sense of humor turned that to the
naming scheme.Amazon wrote their own web serving environment because the selection
of scripting/webcontrol languages when they got started was so lousy.
They had to call it something, so obidos it was. :)
So there you have it…
Technorati Tags: The More You Know, Amazon.com, Amazon, obidos, Brazil, Portugal, Google Answers, web development, programming languages, TMYK
I'm jumping on this meme after seeing it on TUAW blogger (and fellow Philly blogger) Scott McNulty's personal blog. According to Amazon.com, my first order was on Feb 28, 2001. I ordered Slaughterhouse 5 by Vonnegut and A Farewell to Arms and The Sun Also Rises by Hemingway. This was in 10th grade.
I also remember ordering an Intro to Linux book sometime prior to 2001 (in 99 or 00), but that was using a different email address, so it doesn't show up. I remember they sent me an Intro to UNIX book which I had to send back.
What was your first Amazon.com order?
Technorati Tags: Amazon.com, bubble, books, Web 1.0, meme
Rumors has it that Facebook is on the block and looking to get $2B.
I just heard a Knowledge@Wharton podcast by my former professor and Supernova founder, Kevin Werbach, entitled, "What Makes An Online Community Tick?" featuring Craig Newmark of Craig's List, Julie Herendeen of Yahoo, and Bill Flitter of Pheedo.
Scoble and others are raving about Second Life. They're going as far as claiming its an OS.
Social networks are on everyone's minds these days. Can they last? I'm not too sure.
Amazon believes it had a sound business model. They make money by selling stuff. If people can find things more easily they are more likely to make a purchase. So Amazon released an API. Take the load off the company's shoulders and let others make Amazon better.
Google: same thing. AdWords is a solid business model. It helps everyone make money! Advertisers don't waste ads on people they can't reach; Google takes a bit off the top. All this is funded by people buying things from the ads they see. AdWords has an API. It's in advertisers' best interests for AdWords to be as good as possible. "Fine, do it yourself", says Google. Google provides an excellent service, and advertisers make it even better for themselves. Most of the products Google puts out has an API. They say, "we don't need you to come to our site to make money, we do just fine on other people's sites."
MMORPGs are a different kind of social network. They have some bonus activity attached that only makes the network stronger. Blizzard/Linden can and do charge for this value-added. They also allow scripting of the game. They let others make their software better, driving more people to pay for the service.
What about Facebook and MySpace? They have no APIs. The "software" is closed off to tinkerers for fear that an API could do away with the need to visit the site and feast our eyes upon lovely banner and click-thru ads. Pretty much anything I could imagine wanting from a Facebook API would bring me alternate ways of getting information available on the site, ways that are far away from ads. Tom Carden's brainstorm of uses for a MySpace API mostly deal with getting data off of the network in a different way. He wants podcasts, RSS feeds, etc, just like I do. And I'm sure many others do also.
So will a lack of an API drive Facebook and MySpace into the ground? Probably not. MySpace is already owned by News Corp and Facebook will get bought out any day now. But the lack of an API does signal that these networks are scared and that their revenue models may be a bit flimsy.
Technorati Tags: MySpace, Facebook, social network, Wharton, Knowledge@Wharton, Kevin Werbach, Supernova, podcast, Craig's List, Yahoo, Pheedo, WoW, World of Warcraft, Second Life, API, programming, development, web services, Amazon, Google
Starting over has its merits. You've been working so hard paving the road that you haven't had a chance to take in the view. Take the opportunity to go back to the beginning and appreciate the view for what it is. The groundwork has been done already, it shouldn't be a difficult journey. At the very least you'll appreciate how much you've already done and reinvigorate yourself into finishing the path you've started.
I got the Pragmatic Programmers' Agile Web Development with Rails book yesterday from Amazon and I'm starting over with Ruby on Rails. I've started on page 1 and have done everything in the book up until the 2nd iteration of the Depot application. I should be done in a few days, but until then I'm not going to touch any other Rails code.
As I was checking out from Amazon, I was notified that I won a free 3-month trial to Amazon Prime, giving me $3.99 overnight shipping and free 2-day shipping. My greatest complaint about Amazon is the exorbitant shipping costs or times available. On many occasions, I have been gotten all the way to checkout only to cancel the order because I didn't want to pay 30% of my order total in shipping or wait 2+ weeks for my stuff. For the next three months, however, the impulse buy threshold has dropped significantly now that I know what to expect in terms of shipping.
Does that mean I'm going to subscribe to Amazon Prime once the trial lapses? Probably not. I don't make nearly enough purchases on Amazon (first-party at least) to warrant the $80/year. If I can get a couple of friends to share it with, though, then I'm sold.
Since I can share these benefits with up to four people simultaneously, if anyone needs something from Amazon right away and doesn't want to get killed with shipping, let me know and I'll hook you up.
Technorati Tags: Amazon, Amazon Prime, shipping, Ruby on Rails, Pragmatic Programmer, books, development, programming
