Lobster in a Bucket

Hacking Amazon

One of the salient advantages of the much-discussed web 2.0 rucuss centers around the concept of user-customization. A web 2.0 user has the theoretical ability to customize the appearance and content of a website around what they want to see. Several companies have already been running with this idea. Google now offers a customizable homepage where you can blend elements of their services (gmail, gcal, reader, etc) with other modules (last.fm, or anyone else that takes the time to make a module).

But as exciting as cool companies with cool innovations are, users working in similar directions tends to produce even more helpful tools for users. Going off of the Firefox browser platform, users have created an extension to Firefox called Greasemonkey. Greasemonkey is an extension that lets you run little bits of code called scripts that fiddle with a web page when you bring it up to view on your computer screen. These scripts can do cool, small things like remove annoyings ads from a favorite site, or even more powerful stuff like display bits of one website on another so that you can easily compare content between the two.

My favorite Greasemonkey script so far is called Book Burro. Book Burro interfaces with Amazon in a really powerful way. Once installed, BB appears like a translucent tab whenever you come to a book's page on Amazon. If you click on the tab, Book Burro quickly does a search of other online book sellers and displays their price for that same book while you still have the Amazon screen up. This potentially could save students hours of clicking through different sites to find the cheapest price for a used textbook.

Something like Book Burro is a serious challenge to the existing commerical model for the internet. Currently, sites generate a lot of profit through advertisements, which are seen through the user visiting several pages of a single site in order to complete a task. Something like BB cuts out all of the intermediate steps in the process, steps that generate a lot of revenue, in order for the user to have the quickest, easiest experience possible. Furthermore, it seems unlikely, that any company would make such a script, as it is so anti-establishment.