We certainly are not *there* yet when it comes to providing people a way to get the information they want - easily. I just bought Amazon Hacks. But, truly, I don't want to hack this myself.
Please hackers, come forward with better products. News aggregators may be going in the right direction. With NetNewsWire (NNW) I can pick webpages with an RSS feed and see what articles they've posted lately. But that's not what I want.
I want much smarter and better automation and personalization options. For example, with NNW, I asked for the ability to select a category and then view just the feeds for that category. Was that too much to ask?
At Amazon, I like the fact that they suggest books for me based on what? I don't know. The Amazon Hacks book is supposed to tell me how to hack things so that perhaps a better job is done in suggesting books or other products. How about square one? Just let me mark the books that I already own. Don't offer me books I already bought at Amazon or somewhere else. Give me an *Already got it* button. My wish list isn't even smart enough to notice when I acquire wish list items. Maybe I'm missing something, please let me know if I am.
We have a wealth of books, ezines, blogs and online music and we have great fast computers and great software to work with. This idea of recommending things based on analyzing what other people buy and the similarities between books, music, product isn't new. It's been around for *several* years now.
Of course, I prefer to have my own piece of desktop software that will do my bidding - like NetNewsWire except MUCH more powerful. I don't want to be dependent on what Amazon gives me. And I can't sit around and program this myself. And I don't want to have to use 20 different pieces of software and 20 websites and search engines to get the information I need and want. Anybody out there listening?