Amazon.com Joins RSS Bandwagon

By Ryan Naraine | March 04, 2004
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Online superstore Amazon.com is rolling out hundreds of customized RSS feeds for use by e-commerce shoppers, a move that gives a big thumbs-up to the growth of the RSS content syndication format.

Amazon.com's embrace of RSS comes on the heels of similar support from Yahoo and is seen as a big boost for consumer adoption of news aggregators. RSS (Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary) is an XML-based technology used to push content to news aggregators.

For the most part, RSS usage has been limited to techies and early adopters for the availability of feeds on high-traffic consumers sites like Amazon.com and Yahoo .

In addition to making Yahoo News available via RSS feeds, the mega portal has also rolled out a new search engine technology that returns available RSS feeds within search results and integrates those results with its 'My Yahoo' news aggregator.

Amazon.com's RSS feeds have been programmed to deliver content by categories, subcategories and search results from its Web site. The company said the feeds would deliver a headline-view of the top 10 bestsellers in specific categories or set of search results.

Categories include books, music, DVDs/videos, electronics, toys and magazines.

The company's adoption of RSS is powered by Amazon Web Services, which was released in 2002 to give third party developers access to its database via XML and SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) standards.