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March 23, 2010

Amazon Ships AWS SDK for Java

Amazon has shipped an AWS SDK for Java (announcement)

Immediate areas of interest for me are:

Now if they would just ship a version of the Product Advertising API (which lets you search Amazon’s ginormous product DB) for Java – it’s been broken since August 15, 2009 when Amazon started requiring signed headers:

Dear Developer,
We want to remind you that all calls to the Product Advertising API must be authenticated using request signatures by August 15, 2009. Please remember that calls to the Product Advertising API that are not signed will not be processed after August 15, 2009. For help on request signatures, please see the Resources section below.
The Product Advertising API Team.

Their Java library does not support this functionality and has not been updated, leaving Developers to follow long posts like this to try and use the Product API. Seems like Jeff Barr or another Amazon Evangelist would want to fix this problem. I’ve only been asking since November 2009 …

Posted by davehod at 02:31 PM | Comments (0)

March 15, 2010

Quora – A better FriendFeed/Aardvark?

Dave was kind enough to send me a Quora invite last week. After a few days of trying out the service, I am already hooked.

Quora has a lot of the elements of two services I love: Friendfeed and Aardvark. As Friendfeed is working towards a slow death, I’ve been on the lookout for a something to possibly replace it (I realize that  Quora does not centralize all my tweets etc etc but it *does* provide a place to engage in dialogue about topics of interest, which was always the true value of Friendfeed.)

I’ve made a n00b mistake or two, confused by some of the UI (like this):

Quora UI confusion

Now I’m hoping they expose an API so I can create a killer Firefox add-on like this (which I just submitted an update for 3.6 and up…waiting for approval)  Maybe I can talk sandosh into helping …

Posted by davehod at 03:25 PM | Comments (0)