Holiday Shopping Spree: Pirates 1, Amazon 0
Yesterday, Amazon released an experimental feature to its iPhone app, Amazon Mobile, that makes it easier for iPhone users to shop at Amazon simply by taking a picture of a real-world product.
The feature is called Amazon Remembers. You take a picture with your iPhone camera, of let’s say, a pirate costume. The Amazon iPhone app then analyzes the image and then returns a list of similar products at Amazon. A few taps, and a few days later, the product arrives in the mail. Awesome, aye? Unfortunately, this iPhone app was released after Black Friday. At least it’s here before Amazon’s busiest time of the year, the holiday shopping season.
And speaking of pirates… Also arriving just in time for the shopping season, is a browser plug-in for Firefox called Pirates of the Amazon. This plug-in shows up at Amazon’s door just before the holidays like an unwanted relative fresh out of prison who needs a place to crash. And even worse, this plug-in brought a few friends, like tens of thousands of them, brazen and ready to steal Amazon blind.
Once the plug-in is installed, Firefox users just go to the Amazon web site and start browsing for products as usual. If the user is looking at a product page, and the product also exists at The Pirate Bay bittorrent web site, a link appears at the top of the page allowing the user to download that product for free. This doesn’t work with bikes, toys, or other tangible products. Of course, we shouldn’t have to even tell you that but we’d like to avoid all the email asking us how to download free Kindles.
Yesterday, the link to this plug-in made it to the front page of Digg prompting tens of thousands of downloads before the hosting site crumbled from the crush of traffic. But by then it was too late. The genie, er pirate, was out of the bottle. The plug-in was posted on mirror sites, then quickly and predictably, it ended up on hundreds of torrent sites available to everyone.
While the Amazon Remembers is a cool feature, it can take up to 24 hours to get matches back. Say what? This is because humans are analyzing the images and then returning related products to your iPhone. At least Pirates of the Amazon is instantaneous with its results. If there’s a free download available, it shows up right on the Amazon page for you. Sad to say, we’ve got to give this round to the pirates.
Pirates of the Amazon must be more than just a bit worrisome to Amazon. Sure, bittorrent has been a favorite of software and music pirates for years, but this plug-in brings it to the masses, tempting Amazon’s visitors to illegally download free products before hitting that famous 1-Click buy button. We have to wonder how this might take sales away from Amazon, one of many retailers already trembling in the shadow of dismal consumer spending forecasts.
For the rest of us, we still have Amazon’s iPhone app to simplify our holiday shopping.
- Amazon Mobile – Free [app store]
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