BuyItLater becomes a grid computer to help us find and get deals on Amazon

I talked about Joshua McKenty’s BuyItLater last week and I alluded to an upgrade that was in the works that was both innovative and potentially controversial.  Joshua wrote about the changes on Friday and with change, comes questions …

There are two questions that people have asked me, so far:

• What do your users think about that?
• What does Amazon think about that?

To the first one, I have no idea. That’s really what this post is about - what DO you think about it? Is it alright for Larry to be fetching data from Amazon, that helps Sally get a deal? Should I have made the whole thing opt-in, or opt-out? From a technical standpoint, BuyLater users were already visiting both Amazon, and the BuyLater site (albeit not once every 60 seconds), and there’s no personal info in any of this data, so what’s the difference?

On to the second question - again, I have no idea. But since there were a couple of @amazon.com email addresses in yesterday’s batch of users, I imagine if they have a problem with it… I’ll hear about it pretty quick. Source: How I Built a Free Grid Computer, In Less Than a Week | Cognition

Unrelated to this announcement was Sam Harrelson’s post on how grid computers are the future for all of us which is very timely, I think.

What of Josh’s innovation?  In short, each person who installs the BuyItLater also becomes part of a grid to help with lookups to Amazon for everyone else.  Josh and I talked about this and he details the tech reasons behind it in his post, but from a privacy standpoint, we’re cool.  Innovation wise I think this is doing what the P2P file tools wanted to do, but couldn’t.  Josh is doing something that all the users benefit from, we want to get frequent updates of price changes, but run from his servers alone he ran into a scaling problem, run from all our machines it scales beautifully.

While things like SETI@Home and others have tried to use “spare CPU cycles” for good, it turns out these aren’t really spare, since a computer would just switch to low-power mode if the screensaver wasn’t running.  I see potential here for clustered searches or related tasks, and as long as you stay away from uploads and downloads … things could be just ducky for a long time.