

Introducing Amazon's Windowshop.com - wave
http://windowshop.com/

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anand
Zoomii.com is a nice completely javascript version by a friend from a canadian
startup. Focused completely on books. Zoomii's really impressive. Its speed
makes google maps feel slow.

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tlrobinson
I'm not sure how practical it is, but it's really cool anyway. I felt like I
was actually browsing a bookstore.

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mechanical_fish
It is _surprisingly_ practical. It's fun to browse through. They propagate a
lot of the most important Amazon information through, so that you can look at
more than just the covers. And I'm sure it makes the designers of book covers,
who work really hard at their art, very happy to see online stores like this.

Having said that, here are some reasons why I prefer Amazon's usual interface:

* Used book prices

* links to other editions (including Kindle, audio, etc.)

* "Customers who bought this item also bought" (with ratings) -- I use this to get a quick grasp of the popular titles in any given genre.

* The customer ratings, which are of course being gamed these days, but which continue to provide additional perspective in some cases.

And, of course, what this is really missing is the ability to open up the book
and page easily through it. That's the real killer app for a physical
bookstore, and zoomii seems to have _less_ of it than Amazon.com, not more.
Amazon offers "Look Inside" for many books, which I don't think is really a
great substitute for looking inside a physical book, but it's better than
nothing.

Is Amazon's interface cluttered? Yes. Is it so cluttered that I'm willing to
give up these bits of it in exchange for less clutter? No.

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liuliu
A nice design. Looks familiar with CoolIris. But, it is much harder to view
more items since there are limited spaces for large, nice poster. There is no
search bar for accurate search, no auto recommendation. It is something like
best sell book on nytime or top50 on billboard. I can not get any sense about
its usability.

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h34t
I just tried CoolIris, what a pain -- both to install (a 13mb download) and to
use (the sweeping scrolling animation lasts way too long, very impractical).

I actually enjoyed windowshop... for me, it captures the experience of walking
through a bookstore, finding random stuff along the way, but even better, with
music and video playing automatically. I agree that auto recommendation would
be a 'plus' but as for search, when I want to find something I would use their
normal interface (much faster).

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zasz
It's nice, but I find it unintuitive that the left/right arrows take you to
the top of the next column instead of to the poster immediately to the left or
right.

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aneesh
It's a _very_ nice design. It's been up for about a month now.

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richcollins
All style no substance.

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rantfoil
This identifies a larger trend that will just continue to find more uses
online. Web pages are fundamentally high latency pieces of information.

Expansive coverflows like windowshop make it easy to explore information
spaces very fast. If you add that plus more aggressive caching of metadata and
content on a user's computer (something that was lost with the web) -- there
are some really great scenarios out there to be created.

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thomasfl
Nice to have preview of music and film, but I have to admit that i prefer
zoomii.com for windowshopping books. Zoomii got more books and a gives a
better overview. Besides, zoomii gives you the feeling of beeing in a physical
bookstore.

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lpgauth
Couldn't this be made in javascript? My fan just started (stupid first gen
macbook).

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anand
yes it can! see my other comment about zoomii.com

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liuliu
sorry but it can not. Obviously, amazon's website involving with some kind of
3d transformation of covers/images. That is one thing existing javascript can
not do. zoomii.com is impressive, but there is no 3d transformations though I
think it is a minor difference.

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mike_branski
Well to be fair, you CAN do 3D with JavaScript, it's just not as practical. ;)

See some of the posts at <http://blog.nihilogic.dk/search/label/3d>

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lunchbox
Nice. This could be combined with a "thumbs up" and "thumbs down" button to
learn your tastes and recommend personalized things, just like Pandora.

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natrius
They're Amazon. They already know what most of us like from our purchasing
history, but for some reason they aren't using it here.

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maximilian
They're probably working on it. They probably thought it would be a good idea
to get the default version up and running and then worry about personalizing
it later.

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llimllib
It's like getting a free trip to the Great Wall of China but only being
allowed to explore it 2 feet away through a magnifying glass.

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nickb
I almost never like Flash-only sites but this is pretty awesome. I love the
simplicity of the UI... just arrow keys!

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markbao
This is up there with ConnectNow and Buzzword as some of the best-designed and
most innovative Flash apps I've seen.

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jyothi
I like browsegoods.com better. gives a feel of being in a store.

