Amazon Misremembers

Feb 24, 2009 at 8:54 PM
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Amazon.com's iPhone app has an interesting feature called "Amazon Remembers" where you can take a photo or something, wait a while, and then it magically tells you what the product is and what the best price they could find for it was. The idea, obviously, is you can go to the store, take a photo of something you're interested in buying, and see if there might be a better deal on the same product online somewhere. And for this, it works pretty well. But what happens if you abuse it? Amazon has at least to an extent anticipated the kind of misuse I'm thinking of here, as you're forced to take a photo, rather than take one from your existing library -- meaning you can't just put some silly photos in the library and pump them to Amazon to see how it handles them. On the other hand, taking a photo of a computer monitor works just fine. Yay analog hole. Just to see if Amazon loves a good scam as much as I do, I decided to "buy a bridge". I took a photo of Wikipedia's entry on the Brooklyn Bridge. Sure enough, Amazon identified it as the Brooklyn Bridge, and helpfully found a book called "Brooklyn Bridge" that could be bought for just $12. Not bad! Tried the Golden Gate Bridge next, which produced a photo of the bridge, along with a link to a poster of it. Two for two! Well, kind of, it's not selling me the actual bridge, but just products that mention it. Still, pending someone putting up the actual bridges for sale online somewhere, this will have to do for now. Trying more famous bridges, I try Scotland's Firth of Forth bridge next. This one responded with a poster of the New Hope-Lambertville Bridge in Pennsylvania. A fine bridge, to be sure, but not the landmark I was shopping for. Then I tried the Charles Bridge in Prague. Amazon responded with a rather dull poster of a bridge in Minneapolis, Minnesota. So now Amazon is down to 2 for 4 success rate on selling me bridges. Not even that, it's 2 for 4 on representations of the bridges, and 0 for 4 on the actual bridges themselves. Disappointing, I'd hoped for better from them.

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P.S. I Hate Vox's WYSI[sorta]WIG page editor.

Why can't we just have a plain text / raw html mode? Or Markdown maybe?

I can never get the finished output to look like what I wanted. The annoying bit is that what I "want" is almost invariably simpler than what Vox is trying to do -- in this case, I [a] want to delete the half-dozen blank lines at the top of the post, and [b] I don't want all the padding around the image.

Sometimes, the WYSIWIG editor lets me (sort of) get this kind of result without fighting. But today, today Vox feels like fighting, and I don't feel like fighting back.

Maybe there's something to switching to Tumblr after all...

I know what you mean. But unless you write your own blogging software (I did that about 9 years ago), there will always be limitations.Sacrifice control for simplicity. Looks good enough.

That's just it though -- this is an example of "simplicity" actually making things more complicated.

I'd be perfectly happy with the level of control that the comment box here provides: you can set bold, italics, underlines, links, and indentation; also, implicitly, line breaks imply paragraph breaks. The only additional thing I'd want in the standard post editor would be a way to add images, or the ability to just put in <img src="http://www.flickr.com/photos/cdevers/..." alt="foo" />.

It doesn't really seem like a control vs. simplicity tradeoff. I'd be perfectly happy to be using WordPress or Tumblr instead, ceding publication control to them, but not having the same "so simple it's actually harder" tradeoff.

(That or I could just start using an external editor, I suppose. Hmm, must go take another look at MarsEdit...)

Amazon Misremembers

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