Has anyone else noticed this?

Amazon Web Services Developer Re, Athabasca (147, 75, 73)

Coincidently I was just wondering if some people were planning
to start selling RL stuff in SL.

However this looks quite a bit bigger than that.

I personally do not understand how to handle all the code references. However it looks like Amazon has some big plans
as a data storage business.

Also web application services, api's for Open Sourcing aspects
of Amazon I assume. From what I could make of it, it sounds
like a fairly egalitarian and yet comprehensive business strategy. Did I say innovative?

There is a idea about mechanical turks, some kind of AI, that
offers simple jobs to humans that computers suck at.
This one made me smile, lol.

The tiny anytime job thing reminded me a bit of "Snowcrash".








These are just a few example shots from the info board.

Almost posted this in the Land and economy forum, but
I know that there are a ton of smart tech people who check this one possibly more often.

Just thought I would see what people have to say if anything about this.

Sounds pretty cool to me.

I think it is clever, but I find most things in SL clever.

What would be cool is if a 3rd party site like Amazon.com could act as a middle man site for those in SL who DO want to sell RL stuff. They could implement some system where the RL names and addresses were kept confidential.


But I'm not sure what to make of that. Does it actualy say Amazon.com or is it just some company is SL named Amazon. That's not the Amazon.com logo is it?

Yeah it is the logo.

The only thing I was not sure of was whether the guy with the
shop was some sort of contracted agent or something.

But both names sounded curiously like variations of JB.
(Jeff Bezos)

Go check it out, cuz I want to hear what you guys made of the technical data.

You made me wonder for a moment so I did a quick web search.
And yep it is.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/browse.html/002-1268270-0200855?ie=UTF8&node=3435361

Translation please?

Amazon.com is now in SL?

Planning to do something, having to do, or not having to do, with data storage in SL?

coco

Looks like SL is selling web storage for cheap.. so in theory, you could hook into it from SL for all your storage needs...

Yeah, I saw that Amazon Mechanical Turks article on Salon today, too.

It's a little messed up.

Someone already taking advantage of it here.

i guess this is only for amazon US?

Well, I still don't understand it.

coco

At first I did plan to invest a lot into SL to create my RL business and services inworld... but I've found that SL and LL are so shotty there's no way in hell I'd take that kind of risk. I'd rather have a store on top of an active volcano.

"What if the computer could coordinate many human beings to perform a task?"

Scaaaaary.

I know this store - hell, its my neighbor (so ... dont forget to visit my store afterwards!)

Well .. i thought about this "store" too ... and thats my personal conclusion: Its a simple Meeting-Room for a small company, which works with the Amazon-API, done by freelancers. No more, no less. No warranty, though.

I could upload some of my bussiness-plans too, just to make my store/home more comfy ... will do so, i guess.

LG,
Velvet Tripp
(and dort forget to visit my store, right across the street!)

talking about the "machnical turk": That idea is about one year old, and it was by amazon: they paid humans for tasks, computers could not do - like pinpoint stores on maps. I read a article about it, and never heard about it again - so, no big bargain for normal people.

omg I just put my mouse over that picture waiting for it to rez

*Hangs head in shame*

What planet have you been on that you've missed all the hoohaw about LL working to get Amazon and other webmarketeers into SL? That's why they had to import browser capability, so that they could shove FLASH ads at you and sell RL junk in SL.

I read about that amazon stuff earlier. I leave the tech buzz out, it is more interesting what they wanna do and not how.

To come to the point: They dont wanna sell here. They buy the workforce of people here (who are yet to come).

The basic idea of Amazon is to engage humans to do little tasks for others that can't be done by the computer (or humans are still better with it) and pay for this with little fees.
And in between the task orderer (rl people/companies) and people who do these tasks sits something like a web interface connected to sl with a scripted task giver and some sort of task receiver.

SL as plattform for the worldwide access to human capabilities provides already most of the basics for this service. A builtin micropayment system means people are business enabled right from the start, come from everywhere in the world means easy access to a lot of human ressources all more or less anonymous
(and therefore without being ashamed doing low level tasks probably underpaid). And furthermore a user created entertainment surrounding suitable to draw new people in.

Just somewhere inbetween camping, sweatshop and low skilled quick task jobs but in my eyes highly dangerous for sl because it draws down the whole culture to become some sort of 3rd/4rth world job/task market for rl companies. It draws down because the payment for a task has to compete worldwide and can be done without skill.

The view from outside is: They put open tasks and money in and pull out the results and the box is sl with anonymous people in it.

And the other thing is: A money supply for more consume oriented people beyond being a sl creator.

I read about that amazon stuff earlier. I leave the tech buzz out, it is more interesting what they wanna do and not how.

The basic idea of Amazon is to engage humans to do little tasks for others that can't be done by the computer (or humans are still better with it) and pay for this with little fees.
And in between the task orderer (rl people/companies) and people who do these tasks sits something like a web interface connected to sl with a scripted task giver and some sort of task receiver.

SL as plattform for the worldwide access to human capabilities provides already most of the basics for this service. A builtin micropayment system, people here are anonymous and come from everywhere in the world means easy access to a lot of human ressources all of them business enabled (and without being ashamed doing low level tasks probably underpaid). And furthermore a user created entertainment surrounding suitable to draw new people in.

Just somewhere inbetween camping, gold-farming and low skilled quick task jobs but in my eyes highly dangerous for sl because it draws down the whole culture to become some sort of 3rd/4rth world job/task market for rl companies.

Thats how I see this.

Your choice. Considering the history of those who were not willing to risk the internet, due to it being "shoddy", were suddenly being out-distanced by those that did.

Then again, the dot-com crash is the other side of that coin.

Overall, I think those that invest in SL now have minimal risk due to it being unstable when compaired to having trained staff who understand the concepts of such an environment. This place is just too useful, even now.

I opened my amazon.com affiliate store today in the Big O! Mall in Baekje - I'm using Second Life as an interface to real life via Amazon's web services.

And I've already had two orders placed...

For those that haven't been paying attention, Tabatha's store has been gathering some attention:

http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2006/07/life2life_ecspo.html
http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2006/07/amazon_in_second_life.html

I'm biased (because I wrote the code behind it), but the way the search engine is done is pretty sweet, an idea I'd never have thought of.

This is Supercool!

I applaud your efforts the future of the types of interactions and interfaces
seem unlimited.
It does not seem too far off the day that I can buy a pair of jeans or something
in RL while simultaneously buying a virtual version of the same article for my AV.

And vice versa in SL, or "Buy this pair of Virtual Jeans and receive a free pair
of real jeans! lol. More likely in the reverse.

I think I got an idea about how I can utilize this concept. Was it very difficult to set up your connection?

Hi, I can explain and even take credit for the little presentation space in Athabasca!

My real name is Jeff Barr and I work for Amazon.com as Web Services Evangelist. In that position I travel to conferences and user groups all over the world and give them presentations about out services.

My personal "reality", if you will, is that I spend an awful lot of time walking into rooms that look pretty much like the one I built in Second Life: a podium, a projector, a bunch of seats, and an audience. I fly into a city, do some presentations, and then move on to the next one. That's the life of a technical evangelist.

My thinking (which I must emphasize is mine personally and not yet officially shared by the company) is that I should be able to do some presentations in-world to some virtual developers. The presentation space that I built should be considered to be a proof of concept at this stage, something to experiment with and to learn from. It was built on my own time and with my own funds.

The actual PowerPoint that's loaded into the screen is one that I delivered at Linux World earlier this year. I saved it as a series of JPEG files, uploaded each one to Second Life, and then wrote some script to show them on demand. There's also some more script in the podium to handle restarting, and stepping (forward or backward), and controlling the lights. This code is protected and will respond only to my magic touch. As you have noticed, you can also click the screen to advance to the next slide.

I am still working to get official approval to present in this space. I will take full credit/blame for the lameness of what's there -- I am a software developer, not a city planner.

So far I am very encouraged by what I have been able to do. There's a certain realism that comes into play when you sit down and then Alt-zoom to make the presentation take up most or all of the screen.

Now let's talk about the Amazon Web Services themselves. For the last 4 years we have been exposing (or externalizing) many aspects of our technology platform -- access to the product catalog, data storage, queueing, and much more. You can read all about this at http://aws.amazon.com if you would like. My job is to get developers, regardless of what development tool or environment they are using, to build cool and innovative applications on top of our services. Second Life is a very cool environment and I think that our services have a lot of relevance therein.

A pair of my recent entries to the AWS blog (http://aws.typepad.com) should illustrate what I mean:

* Life2Life - http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2006/07/life2life_ecspo.html
* Amazon Search Inside of Second Life - http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2006/07/amazon_search_i.html

The llHttpRequest function makes it possible to call any web service to bring external data into Second Life. There is a limitation of 2048 bytes of returned data per call, so you'll probably want to make requests to an intermediate server which in turn calls the web service and returns only the data needed, in a form that's easy to parse in LSL.

I do think that there are a ton of interesting ways to integrate RL and SL, and that we'll see a lot of amazing things happen in the next 6 to 12 months.

I would be happy to discuss(in-world or out) any of our services, and to give a presentation. I am presently stuck in a hotel with an ISP that won't let me get to SL, but I will be back at home soon enough.

The Mechanical Turk is alive and doing just fine at http://www.mturk.com . People in over 100 countries are doing work through it on a daily basis.