May 11, 2008 at 2:06 pm · Filed under: amazon web design
Amazon have redesigned their website.. My first impressions have to be “Where’d the books go?”. I still really only shop at Amazon for books but the only things I see is their credit card, cameras and gardening (?!). After that, I noticed Amazon search. They have given it much more priority overall in the site, and are definitely looking to have people navigate around using the search functionality. I like it, it seems to work and is quick. Thinking about it, I used to click the area and search before anyhow. Now I can just search.
Overall it does feel weird but I think given a bit of time I’ll like the new layout. It has emphasised Amazon’s shift to things other than books, which had been obvious by the number of tabs that kept having to be added in the old website. What I would really like is a customizable front page that lets me see the type of items I buy at Amazon now (yes I mean books. 
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May 1, 2008 at 4:59 pm · Filed under: browser delicious magnolia online bookmarks sphere
So I am finally using Firefox 3 and it looks like its third time lucky. Having installed it twice before, the lack of plugin support made me uninstall it very quickly, I just lost too much productivity. It has been an easy way to identify the addons that I cannot do without.
The one addon that I could not do without was delicious from Yahoo who finally released a version for Firefox 3 a few days ago. The delicious addon allows me 2 crucial things:
First I can see all my bookmarks in the browser, replacing (or co-existing with) firefox’s own bookmarks. This means that I can search delicious and go to my bookmarks without going to the delicious website and then searching. Removing that single step turned me from a rare delicious user into one that uses it almost daily.
The second is that it allows me to add sites I want to bookmark at the click of a button, in a similar way to you would normally inside a browser. Again, this saves me having to go to the delicious website and adding it there. During this step I can also share the link with my friends or choose to make the link private and not visible in my delicious profile.
There has been a huge delay to delicious rolling out the Firefox 3 addon. It has taken them months. But, and this amazed me, none of the other online bookmarking services seemed to have the same level of integration with Firefox. They all offered me the second ability to add bookmarks to their service but none allowed me the first - letting me view them inside within Firefox. Over the course of recent months, I could have switched to Google Bookmarks or Magnolia without any regrets if they had let me have this functionality, especially Magnolia. I really like their site (though of course with the integration I’d be unlikely to ever go there!).
On a side note this is the sort of connected services that I think is going to really take off in the future. Not sure yet how you make money from it though. Maybe by paying a fee to use the addon in the browser? Or the more traditional web route of suggesting other paid for links similar to the one you are bookmarking at the time of saving it. Something akin to Sphere which I am using at the end of posts to suggest similar links.
