Matt Cutts on Amazon
So Matt Cutts (of Google seo fame) recently blogged about a topic near and dear to my heart, Amazon. It isn’t SEO related at all, just general thoughts on Amazon. Now you know I love Amazon and that I also love Amazon Prime, so it warmed my little heart to see that Matt also gives a little love to the guys in Seattle.
I agree with pretty much everything he says, except for his love of William Gibson. I think it would be really great to be able to build alerts and RSS feeds containing explicit author information such as new books and new amazon posts by the author. You should definitely be able to opt out of getting the recommendations. With the explosion of RSS based tools, I find it surprising how little Amazon is on that bandwagon - given what I think of as generally very savvy technical features throughout the site.
He has some other smart thoughts on the UI, I’ve definitely been annoyed at the inability to add a credit card without making a purchase thing. But what I think is the real insight in the piece is his suggestion for S3 (Amazon’s storage solution) to be scp compatible. I think this is a brilliant idea - file this under the “make the interface as simple as possible and hide the complexity from the user.” Move all the complexity of getting data into S3 into the backend - leaving the users able to use all their basic tools. If I could use scp, and sftp and rsync over ssh for S3, I can pretty much guarantee that I’d probably be using it for something already. I suspect a lot of other people would, too.
It’s not that it’s super difficult to get things into or out of it. There are already many tools that one can grab to work with S3. It’s just that I’m already familiar and happy using scp (and family). Giving me the ability to continue using them let’s me easily integrate them into my existing workflow. It’s funny how these little barriers to entry can really have a huge effect on uptake (although I guess with over 5 billion objects stored, maybe they aren’t too worried about uptake). I really hope that Amazon reads his blog and takes that suggestion to heart. It’s an excellent one.
I wonder if there’s an S3 backup plugin for Wordpress. That’d be something I’d like, too. :)
