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Amazon's API pisses me off (again)

As much as I love to shop at Amazon as much do I hate their attitude towards 3rd party developers.

After making my life harder with requiring cryptographically signed requests, they just dropped an important part from their API: the wishlist support.

I used my DokuWiki Amazon plugin to embed my wishlist here. This no longer works – here's what Amazon has to say about that:

Due to low usage, the Product Advertising API operations and response groups listed below will not be supported after October 15, 2010:

Operations: CustomerContentLookup, CustomerContentSearch, Help, ListLookup, ListSearch, TagLookup, TransactionLookup, VehiclePartLookup, VehiclePartSearch, VehicleSearch.

Response Group: ListmaniaLists, MerchantItemAttributes, PromotionDetails, Subjects, Tags, TagsSummary, VariationMinimum

Great. Now what? Since Amazon does not even provide RSS Feeds for their wishlists (really? in 2010?) the only solution is to embed a wishlist is to use their stupid Widgets. Of course using their >100kb JavaScript mess isn't really an option, but accessing their own JSON based backend seems to be easy enough.

Too bad that their widget doesn't return any Universal Wishlist items. Gah! Their own fucking widget does not support what makes their wishlist so good!? What the fuck is wrong with you Amazon?

Tags:
webservice, amazon, api, rant, wishlist
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