Amazon starts warehousedeals.com, a site that sells open box, used, and refurbished products.

Kindle is Amazon's New Wireless Reading Device. The electronic paper device is a wireless electronic media reader that delivers content to you with EVDO, so you don't have to connect to a computer. After hearing about electronic paper years ago while I was working in Bell Labs, I've been curious to see what kinds of products make it to consumers and this is one of the interesting ones.

Price needs to come down a little in my opinion to make it worth while, but this may have some advantages over using mobile phone if you're doing a lot of reading. First and foremost is the industrial design factor. Controls for this device are specifically tailored to make book, magazine, and newspaper reading as effortless as possible. Will be eager to try one out one day. At first glance, the buttons, jog wheels and odd bevels seem appropriate, but it's not sexy. Someone on Engadget commented that it looked like a calculator and should have a TI logo on it.

I'm wanting this kind of experience on the iPhone. I keep thinking of the little tablets I used to see on Star Trek. Hopefully someday.

More info from the liveblogging coverage of Jeff Bezos' presentation at TechCrunch.

Got email today about The Amazon Affiliates aStore Beta, which will let affiliates create quick and dirty stores using Amazon's inventory. Their design tool lets you select featured products and then use keywords to add categories of products. Then you can modify the colors and point people to the store or serve in an iframe.

Here's the nice design interface. Looks a bit like a wireframe.

I'd been thinking about separating my cycling blog and events calendar from urlgreyhot, so I quickly threw together a cycling aStore to see how it works. Check it out at LOVE+SPROCKETS.

Pretty quick. Took me about an hour to throw that together.

I like the sound of Amazon's new S3 Simple Storage Service. I'm thinking this could be like a small/med business or consumer version of Akamai's Media Delivery service. With Amazon's model, you pay for what you use -- the amount of storage and bandwidth -- and you get access to Amazon's storage facilities, which should give you world class delivery speed and uptime.

Large business sites often use a service like Akamai's to handle the delivery of Media because the company can help offload the server demand for large bandwidth-consuming media, thus making sites load quicker. The "Akamized" site can then focus on delivery of content while Akamai's beefy and super fast servers fill in the media. The Amazon S3 service can be a boon to popular independent sites that are delivering rich media including audio and video, e.g. podcasts and streamcasts and you only pay for what you use. Very good stuff if you become popular and your little web host doesn't give you the bandwidth, storage and delivery you may need.

Just noticed this new wiki feature today. Broken in Safari at the moment. They must have been adding this as I was trying it, because when I added the link to the wiki on Lou and Peter's book page, the URL wasn't clickable initially. When I revisited the page a short while later, the link was clickable. Strange. Wonder how this will be abused.

I noticed the citations feature today as well. Don't know how long it's been there. These are the citations for Lou and Peter's IA for the WWW book

Talk about feature creep. Amazing how much stuff they're cramming into these pages. Peter pointed out to me that they removed the sidebars, a detail I actually didn't notice before he mentioned it.

On Amazon at least, a tab per store or category hasn't been possible for a long time. We have the strange break-out menu tab for "See All n Product Categories" instead. When you're browsing within one store, that store label is shown as the selected tab.

Not terrible. But, the tabs have lost their usefulness and the evolution of Amazon's tabs shows how they're a pretty poor metaphor in terms of scalability. Today it's probably nearly impossible for them to discard the tabs given their association with Amazon's brand. The trade off of having chosen tabs from the start is that they're pretty limited in how they can innovate their handling of navigation. There's a lesson to be learned bout navigation design in observing Amazon's evolution.

Strange thing, incidentally, is that on Netscape Navigator 4.x and Safari, the navigation seems to show the old tabs -- their seemingly arbitrary selection of featured stores.

Amazon's a9 is an interesting search idea. The new search engine allows you to search the web and their books database (using their "search in the book" functionality) and view the results in one place. If you log in using your Amazon account, they also save and display your history of previous searches. Users of Windows IE will find that they have a toolbar and that the widths of the multi-column results display is resizable. Neat.

Going to start playing with Amazon's XML interface for Amazon Associates using this Perl application called amazox. Amazox makes a call to Amazon Associates XML interface, displaying the results in a table, suitable for inclusion in a Web page. Very cool.