You will be able to apply tags to any item on the Amazon website and your tags will be collected under your profile. I like Alan's term for that - a taglist, like a wishlist. I can envisage Amazon adding RSS feeds later, so you can subscribe to tags and your friends' tags. For now Amazon has the whole "customers who used this tag also used..." thing going on, as a tie-in with their existing personalization features.

Here's an example page for the tag "money" - if you can't see the tags yet then Alan has some screenshots. Mike Arrington also has a screenshot and more details.

As Anil pointed out, these new tagging features point to the influence of The Robot Co-op's 43Things.com. Robot Co-op is made up of ex-Amazon folks and Amazon has a stake in the company.

"Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.

Just as Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) enables storage in the cloud, Amazon EC2 enables "compute" in the cloud."

For the tech skinny, check out Sergey Schetinin's write-up.

Interestingly Alex Iskold predicted a compute service from Amazon in a R/WW post just a couple of days ago!! If you haven't yet read Alex's Web Platform Primer - what's available via API?, then I thoroughly recommend it. He really captures the high level of why products like Amazon EC2 are increasingly important in today's Web landscape.

Note that Amazon EC2 is currently "a limited beta", available only to "a select group of developers [...] who have been making Amazon Web Services requests in the past month." Thanks Sergey and Alex for the heads-up (they both got the email announcement).

Just as in the French, each of the new stores is opening with the new basic Kindle reader available for 99€. The international stores also support Amazon's new Kindle Direct Publishing service, so independent authors and publishers can make their books available in these new stores.

The Italian store is available at amazon.it/kindle, and the Spanish store is at amazon.es/kindle. For Kindle Direct Publishing, visit kdp.amazon.it for Italian and kdp.amazon.es for Spanish.

Do you have an e-ink reader, or do you prefer books?

"Monitoring cloud assets, scaling capacity automatically, and balancing traffic efficiently have been among the most requested Amazon EC2 features from our customers," said Peter DeSantis, General Manager of Amazon EC2. "Together, these capabilities provide customers more control of their AWS resources and enable them to architect for even better performance, resilience and cost savings."

CloudWatch gives Amazon customers visibility into resource use, operational performance, and overall demand patterns, including metrics such as CPU use, disk reads and writes, and network traffic. Auto Scaling ensures EC2 usage increases during traffic spikes to maintain performance and decreases during lulls to reduce costs, making it particularly appropriate for apps with frequent use fluctuations. Elastic Load Balancing allows for fault tolerance in applications, detects unhealthy instances within a pool, and reroutes traffic to healthy instances until the unhealthy instances have been restored.

Amazon hopes these features will improve application performance, lower costs, and make life easier for developers and entrepreneurs. Amazon CloudWatch and Elastic Load Balancing are available on a pay-as-you-go basis, and Auto Scaling is enabled by Amazon CloudWatch and carries no additional fees. Features are currently available in the U.S. and should be available in the EU shortly.

In a world of online fraud and flaky customer service, the prospect of having Amazon handle payment collection for apps sounds great to us.

A number of companies have been beta testing Amazon DevPay, from cloud monitoring service Hyperic to photo sales app SmugMug.

DevPay charges 30 cents per transaction plus %3 of costs to customers beyond the cost of the Amazon Web Services charged to developers.

To promote sales, Amazon will offer a Free Song of the Day and a Daily Deal album, which, like Amazon MP3's online counterpart at Amazon.com/MP3, will be priced very low. How low? Today's Daily Deal album is only $3.99, to give you an idea.

Social Sharing

Another feature in the new mobile music storefront is social sharing. Users can share their favorite songs via Facebook, Twitter, email, SMS, BBM (BlackBerry Messenger) or Social Feeds.

The service is integrated with the smartphone's features and functions, too, including Universal Search and Media Library.

To use the new Amazon MP3, users will need a BlackBerry smartphone running OS 5.0 or higher. If the device doesn't have internal memory, an SD card may be required. Interested users can download the app now from BlackBerry App World here.

Last night Amazon announced the newest addition to the Amazon Web Services suite: Amazon Fulfillment Web Service (AFWS).

Amazon has offered other businesses access to its fulfillment infrastructure for some time through the Fulfillment by Amazon service, but today's announcement means that the whole process will be automated. It's a webservices world!

As we discussed in our recent post on APIs and Developer Platforms: The Pros and Cons, an API is like an invitation to start a structured business development relationship on the fly, without lengthy technical or political negotiations. The Fulfillment API is what brings the Amazon Fulfillment Services to life.

Amazon Web Services have enabled a whole new class of web startups to offer storage and processing features far beyond what they could have in-house. At least in terms of bandwidth use, those webservices are now bigger than Amazon.com proper - itself one of the most visited sites on the internet.

We'll see if Amazon Fulfillment can do the same to small shops selling physical goods. The centralization of the infrastructure could be very interesting. Perhaps Walmart will buy Amazon someday for its webservices. I look forward to reading what Nick Carr has to say about this.

Amazon will continue to offer the pricing under the "pay what you use" model where there is no minimum fee or long term equipment required.

According to Alyssa Henry, general manager of the Amazon Simple Storage Service, ""The growth of Amazon Web Services has allowed us to become even more efficient and further lower our operating expenses. AWS remains committed to passing savings along to our customers. Just six months ago, we announced a reduction in data transfer costs, and today we're pleased to pass new storage savings along to our customers."

But it's clear that this pricing change is more than a simple "pass the savings on to you" move by the company. Since the company formerly had a flat pricing plan, the new tiered pricing and volume discounts makes it clear that Amazon is looking to edge out their competition. The service now also looks more appealing to the enterprise who may have felt that, before, there was not enough of a savings to use cloud storage as opposed to host-your-own storage behind the firewall.

The new pricing goes into effect November 1st, 2008.

Amazon Student, a new iPhone app that launched today, aims to help ease some of that pain by giving students a way to shop for textbooks and other items and sell them back via their smartphone.

The Amazon Student app will look and feel very familiar to customers who have used the company's standard iPhone app. It's essentially the same thing, but with a more student-specific focus and an emphasis on selling items through Amazon's Trade-In program.

As with purchasing items, the reselling process utilizes a barcode scanner so students can take a picture of the barcode of the item they want to sell and quickly add it to their queue of items to trade in. Students can then print a shipping label, send the item out and will then receive an Amazon gift card for the amount the item sold for.

The app isn't just for textbooks. Students can buy and resell just about anything, including DVDs, video games and electronics.

Currently, you can only manage your EC2 instances through the new console, but over time, Amazon will give users the ability to mange other AWS services like its S3 storage service.

Ease of Use

The new console makes it especially easy for first-time users to set up their instances on EC2. While you can choose from a bewildering array of community-created instances (think custom Ubuntu mail servers), Amazon will present you with a sane amount of 'quick start' instances and relatively conservative security settings.

Amazon also created a great screencast that walks you through creating your first EC2 instance. While using Amazon's web services was already pretty manageable thanks to tools like Elasticfox, this new console gives users an easy way to control their instances, while also allowing new users to start using EC2 without too much hassle. If you always wanted to experiment with EC2, but were intimidated by the set-up process, now would be a good time to give it a try.

Today, Amazon Kindle owners can look forward to purchasing the biographies of both Cindy McCain and Michelle Obama well ahead of their scheduled publication dates. Elizabeth Lightfoot's "Michelle Obama: Grace and Intelligence in a Time of Change" will be available starting today for only $9.99. Those without a Kindle won't be able to purchase the book until its release date, which has yet to be announced. "Cindy McCain: Elegance, Good Will and Hope for a New America" by Alicia Colon will be available to Kindle owners on Monday. However, this autobiography will only hit the shelves if McCain wins the election.

A Successful Continuing Trend?

The Amazon Kindle is currently available for $359, which is a pretty hefty price. The 190,000+ available books are available for download in less than 60 seconds according to Amazon Kindle Vice-President, Ian Freed. For political debaters and those that are focused on consuming everything about this year's election candidates and more, Amazon could see a huge increase in Kindle sales, but only if the trend continues. We doubt that just two exclusive books would be enough.

This isn't the first time Amazon has given exclusives to Kindle owners first. Just two days ago Amazon offered "Change We Can Believe In: Barack Obama's Plan to Renew America's Promise" to Kindle owners one day before its scheduled publication date. While this doesn't compare to what Amazon is doing today and Monday, the offer must have been relatively successful. With more offers like this in the future, we think Amazon has what it takes to make the Kindle a household name to surpass its current estimated number of owners of over 200,000.

Seeing this success, then, it doesn't come as a surprise that Amazon - the world's largest Internet retailer - is looking to make a subscription-based, streaming-only option of its own to compete with Netflix.

Amazon Prime is a program that gives "unlimited fast shipping" for frequent Amazon shoppers. It's interesting that Amazon would focus so much on the form of content delivery and package it together with traditional shipping. Will Amazon users really have to continue paying à la carte for most content and only get a Netflix-type option if they subscribe to a service meant for traditional shipping fees? The Business Insider points out that, at $79 per year, the service would beat out Netflix at its own game, which comes in at $95 annually "and doesn't include free shipping on purchases from Amazon."

What do you think about Amazon getting into the game? Will the heating-up of the streaming video space only lead to more expensive Internet plans? Or will competition lower the cost of streaming video to make up for it?

"With the clear success of the Kindle e-Reader over the past 3 years, and Kindle Fire possibly succeeding in the low-priced Tablet market, we view this as the next logical step for Amazon. We continue to believe Amazon has now set its eyes on the Mobile (and Tablet) Media and Product."

Just earlier this week, Amazon started shipping its Kindle Fire tablet, the device that officially catapulted the retail giant into the tablet wars. The Kindle Fire tablet is primed for media consumption, offering users access to the Amazon Appstore for Android, Amazon MP3 storefronts, Instant Video and the Kindle e-book catalog. It also runs its own browser, Amazon Silk. Developers have already started building apps specifically for Kindle Fire.

Is entering the smartphone market a good move for Amazon? Tell us what you think in the comments.

Note that this is a different wiki product than what Alex Iskold was referring to in yesterday's post, on Amazon's use of tags, ajax, blogs and wikis. In that post we were discussing the ProductWiki feature, but it states on Amapedia's homepage that "Amapedia is the next generation of Amazon.com’s ProductWiki feature; all of your previous ProductWiki contributions were preserved and now live here."

We'd like to see a bit more structure in the Amapedia pages, so that it is less chaotic when people edit it. For example add sections to pages. But the fact that tags are there already is fantastic - Amazon is calling this "collaborative structured tagging". Check it out and let us know what you think.