Booklists, webservices, million dollar ideas and sloth

I've been playing with Amazon's webservices since this afternoon, and I've got myself a little plugin to my website that makes me a booklist when I feed a list of ISBNs, my comments and my scores.

I've got a demo app at http://cheeni.net/ws/isbnLookup.php for the curious among you. So much nicer than yesterday, eh?

( See screenshot here )

In a way this marks my return to hobby programming after a l-o-o-o-o-o-ng while.

I figured that there must be a lot of killer apps for the web reseller, powered by webservices.

Two examples:

1) A palm devide w/ barcode scanner + camera plugin and a web service app along w/ a data service gets you an on-the-go "pricing + web listing + inventory management" tool. A while back, I read a story about a laid off programmer who now makes a better living selling books on Amazon. Perhaps he uses such a device? See the iPilot scanner

2) A brick n' mortar storekeeper who also syncs his inventory w/ eBay or Amazon using a webservice that removes and relists items as and when the inventory empties and replensihes.

A majority of ideas for webservices seem to be on the reseller end of things. In the userspace I could think of surprisingly few solutions. A price comparison site like http://isbn.nu/ is one of the few end user solutions. eBay has an enterprise API membership that's $5000 a year. There seem to be a lot more people making a living professionally off eBay than I'd expected.

Human beings are forever living between a better future and the good old days!
HENRIK TIKKANEN