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).

"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.

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.

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.

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.

It is also noteworthy that Stanza has been a proponent of open eBook standards like EPUB, while Amazon has always kept its system relatively closed. Indeed, just a few weeks ago, Lexcycle announced that it was working together with Adobe to develop an open standard for eBook catalogs, which would make it easier for smaller publishers to offer their books through applications like Stanza (or even the Kindle, if Amazon incorporated this standard).

Overall, this seems like a curious acquisition by Amazon. With the Kindle iPhone app, its hardware eBook reader and its content partners, Amazon could easily compete with Stanza. It will be interesting to see how Amazon will manage to bring the two teams together and what it plans to do with Stanza in the long run. We can only assume that Amazon won't be interested in developing and supporting two different eBook readers.

The digital living room market is fiercly competitive and extremely lucrative. On the one hand there are devices like the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, TiVo, and Apple TV, not to mention TVs, DVD players, and countless other bits of hardware. On the other hand there is content; the music, movies, games, and television shows that make the living room the entertainment hub of the typical home. Then of course there is the marketplace that bridges the gap between the two.

When it comes to the digital living room, Microsoft, Sony, Apple, and a handful of others seem to garner the majority of headlines. However, there’s another company that deserves a closer look. Amazon could also become a powerful player in the battle for the digital living room. Yes the company sells furniture, but Amazon also has an impressive list of digital living room-related assets. Let’s look at some of these and how they work together.

Read full story on last100...

The implications of this announcement for Lulu could be large. Until now, Lulu has been, to my knowledge, the only print on demand publisher that offered books, CDs, and DVDs with no set up fee and offered syndication to sites like Amazon.

CreateSpace beats Lulu on price as well, and doesn't charge for ISBN numbers for books (required for books to be sold on Amazon and listed in the Books in Print catalog) and UPC numbers for CDs and DVDs. Lulu, however, still offers far more printing options (such as hardcover and saddle stitch bindings), and offers the potential of selling products through Amazon competitors like Barnes and Noble -- something that I tend to doubt Amazon will help authors with.

Lulu was one of the companies I had marked in my mind as being ripe for acquisition by either Amazon or eBay. Amazon, it seems, has decided to build instead of buy by relaunching their CustomFlix site as a full-service on demand media publisher.

Via WebProNews.

Just like Amazon's S3 and E2 shook up the market for online storage and cloud computing, this new CDN solution will surely drive down the prices for content delivery. At first, however, Amazon's new service will not support streaming video or live broadcasts. Because of this, Akamai and Limelight don't have to fear the competition with Amazon just yet, but we would be surprised if Amazon did not add more video specific features to its CDN in the future.

Preemptive Move

Interestingly, as Om Malik points out, New-York based Voxel just announced a CDN solution based on S3. Amazon rarely pre-announces new services, so we definitely agree that this announcement today should be seen as a preemptive move by Amazon.

AbeBooks has generally stuck to its roots, by creating a thriving marketplace for rare and used book sellers worldwide. It is not clear if there will be any direct benefits of this acquisition by Amazon for the merchants on AbeBooks, though chances are that Amazon is going to start integrating the AbeBooks inventory into its own store. This will give the AbeBooks sellers access a far larger market to sell to than just the AbeBooks community, though many of them were already listing their inventory on Amazon (and other services like Alibris and Biblio.com anyway).

Currently, there are over 110 million books from over 13,000 sellers available on the site. Besides AbeBooks, the company also runs the book search aggregation site BookFinder and provides a sales and inventory management through Fillz.com.

AbeBooks also has a very active user community. Judging from the email AbeBooks send out to its sellers, it would seem that nothing much is going to change on the site for now and that the management team at AbeBooks is also going to remain in place.