So, back in 2003 I developed a site called dataSift.net which was a subscription service that provided Amazon.com product demand information to sellers on Amazon.com. Eventually this site was effectively shut down by Amazon with no warning despite my attempt to contact them.
Five years later, here’s the story of dataSift.net.
By “product demand” I mean that if there is a certain product that is not stocked by Amazon.com or any other seller on Amazon, as a buyer, you can register to be notified if that product becomes available. Once you register for that product, Amazon.com places a note on the product page similar to this: “3 buyers waiting.”
I had written an “engine” using the language Perl which, using the Google API, searched for the term “buyers waiting.” Once a database was compiled and duplicates were removed, the engine then checked the products against Amazon’s site (using screen scraping) to verify that the product actually had buyers waiting to purchase it. The same process was also run against other search engines including Yahoo, MSN, AltaVista and some other now defunct ones.
Once all this was complete, reports were generated for the subscribers in HTML, CSV and Excel formats.
Well, everything was running along just fine, Amazon sellers were very interested, the number of subscriptions was increasing, I was rolling out new features and then….
Amazon.com, with no warning, stopped publishing the number of buyers waiting on their product pages. This was after many attempts to contact them about the service. I attempted to contact them hoping to avoid a situation exactly like this and to make sure they were OK with what I was doing.
Fast-forward to current day: Recently I checked the domain dataSift.net and saw that it was unregistered. I’ve always wanted to build a data analysis service and so coming soon will be dataSift.net 2.0. I’m not sure what form the service will take but just in case I re-registered the domain name.
Stay tuned.