Just kidding… but now that I have your attention, here are some interesting Web Tech tidbits:
- Amazon aStore is a new product from Amazon that enables you “to build a dedicated shopping area that can be embedded within, or linked to from, your website.” Mitch Ratcliffe and Nick Carr have examples and good thoughts on this. As Nick said, this is essentially a retail store widget. Hat-tip Emre Sokullu for sending me a copy of Amazon’s email announcement.
- Never mind Amazon elastic computing, GData/Base is where it’s at – so says Nick Lothian, who notes: “…the possibility of integration of data feeds from Base with Google Spreadsheets is an application feature that intrigues me.” I agree and it’s where Google could be at it’s most dangerous in the ‘Web Office’ game – by mixing in APIs with online office apps.
- Garett Rogers wonders if a Personalized start page is coming to Google’s new hosting service.
- Shopcasting – Fred Wilson has a knack for coining terms (or at least popularizing little known ones) and this is another beauty. The idea of ‘social shopping’ has been knocking around for a while, but with the increasing popularity of widgets – its time may be here.
- Speaking of widgets, check out Hooman Radfar’s new blog Widgify. In his latest post he says that Widgets are the New Web Pages.
So the theme of this little mashup post (with a misleading title) is that online shopping, widgets, Web Office and structured data are beginning to churn out some interesting developments in the Web world. Watch these spaces…
Originally published on ReadWriteWeb (archived copy)