Backup of David's Livejournal

It really frustrates me to have to follow up Amazon Still Hates Your Life(stream) with more poor decisions by the eCommerce leader and giant.

In late October 2010, Amazon removed the ListLookup operation from the AWSECommerceService Service. When I noticed it, I tweeted about it. I was sorta late to the game, though. Amazon announced they would deprecate the service in June 2010. The thing is, they didn't deprecate the service. They removed it. Trying to call it now results in an HTTP Error 410, and the text, "Gone."

What's that mean? Well...
That's the function to access your wishlists at Amazon. Some people wrote blogging engine tools or phone apps that access Amazon wishlists. The more people that make easier access to wishlists, the more items that get purchased. You'd think Amazon would like that, right?

You'd be wrong. Amazon unplugged the mechanism they wrote to programmatically access their wishlists. I really can't see a justifiable reason behind it. It may have been "little used" by their standards, but it couldn't have been that hard to maintain.

You can blame Amazon for making their own wishlists even less accessible and useful now.