Introducing Amazon's Windowshop.com | Hacker News Reader

Introducing Amazon's Windowshop.com

windowshop.com

41 pointswave28 comments

Zoomii.com is a nice completely javascript version by a friend from a canadian startup. Focused completely on books. Zoomii's really impressive. Its speed makes google maps feel slow.

yep that was the first thing I recollected as soon as I saw this. I even commented on zoomii blog that this would get propagated to lot of shopping websites. good news really

I'm not sure how practical it is, but it's really cool anyway. I felt like I was actually browsing a bookstore.

I think it's practical actually. Or it could be given a little more.

It's fast that's the main thing. As long as it works that fast, I think there can be practical applications

It is surprisingly practical. It's fun to browse through. They propagate a lot of the most important Amazon information through, so that you can look at more than just the covers. And I'm sure it makes the designers of book covers, who work really hard at their art, very happy to see online stores like this.

Having said that, here are some reasons why I prefer Amazon's usual interface:

* Used book prices

* links to other editions (including Kindle, audio, etc.)

* "Customers who bought this item also bought" (with ratings) -- I use this to get a quick grasp of the popular titles in any given genre.

* The customer ratings, which are of course being gamed these days, but which continue to provide additional perspective in some cases.

And, of course, what this is really missing is the ability to open up the book and page easily through it. That's the real killer app for a physical bookstore, and zoomii seems to have less of it than Amazon.com, not more. Amazon offers "Look Inside" for many books, which I don't think is really a great substitute for looking inside a physical book, but it's better than nothing.

Is Amazon's interface cluttered? Yes. Is it so cluttered that I'm willing to give up these bits of it in exchange for less clutter? No.

Very impressive. How long has it been out? Could be great to implement in a store.

That's much easier to use than windowshop.com.

I wish I could see my Amazon wishlist with that interface, Amazon's UI for the wishlist is terrible.

Very nice indeed, excellent speed, unique presentation; I don’t accept the comparison to Google maps.

Zoomii deals with a total of less than 200k items in its inventory compare that with how many geocodes and frames are necessary to represent a street chunk.

You should tell your friend that it does not seem to work in Opera 9.61.

A nice design. Looks familiar with CoolIris. But, it is much harder to view more items since there are limited spaces for large, nice poster. There is no search bar for accurate search, no auto recommendation. It is something like best sell book on nytime or top50 on billboard. I can not get any sense about its usability.

I just tried CoolIris, what a pain -- both to install (a 13mb download) and to use (the sweeping scrolling animation lasts way too long, very impractical).

I actually enjoyed windowshop... for me, it captures the experience of walking through a bookstore, finding random stuff along the way, but even better, with music and video playing automatically. I agree that auto recommendation would be a 'plus' but as for search, when I want to find something I would use their normal interface (much faster).

It's nice, but I find it unintuitive that the left/right arrows take you to the top of the next column instead of to the poster immediately to the left or right.

It's a very nice design. It's been up for about a month now.

All style no substance.

This identifies a larger trend that will just continue to find more uses online. Web pages are fundamentally high latency pieces of information.

Expansive coverflows like windowshop make it easy to explore information spaces very fast. If you add that plus more aggressive caching of metadata and content on a user's computer (something that was lost with the web) -- there are some really great scenarios out there to be created.

Nice to have preview of music and film, but I have to admit that i prefer zoomii.com for windowshopping books. Zoomii got more books and a gives a better overview. Besides, zoomii gives you the feeling of beeing in a physical bookstore.

Couldn't this be made in javascript? My fan just started (stupid first gen macbook).

yes it can! see my other comment about zoomii.com

sorry but it can not. Obviously, amazon's website involving with some kind of 3d transformation of covers/images. That is one thing existing javascript can not do. zoomii.com is impressive, but there is no 3d transformations though I think it is a minor difference.

Well to be fair, you CAN do 3D with JavaScript, it's just not as practical. ;)

See some of the posts at http://blog.nihilogic.dk/search/label/3d

Mine too. 3 month old macbook.

Nice. This could be combined with a "thumbs up" and "thumbs down" button to learn your tastes and recommend personalized things, just like Pandora.

They're Amazon. They already know what most of us like from our purchasing history, but for some reason they aren't using it here.

They're probably working on it. They probably thought it would be a good idea to get the default version up and running and then worry about personalizing it later.

It's like getting a free trip to the Great Wall of China but only being allowed to explore it 2 feet away through a magnifying glass.

I almost never like Flash-only sites but this is pretty awesome. I love the simplicity of the UI... just arrow keys!

This is up there with ConnectNow and Buzzword as some of the best-designed and most innovative Flash apps I've seen.

I like browsegoods.com better. gives a feel of being in a store.

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