Zoomii: Hey, Amazon? Instead of Blogging About Them? Buy Them!

I am in love.

I realize that most of the apps that I absolutely go nuts over tend to have nice visuals. Use those nice visuals as an overlay on something I'm already loving and you just may have yourselves a hit. I'm a big Amazon fan, but I never browse there; I visit the site for specific things and then buy them. I may look at the suggestions they give once I've added an item to my cart, but even the "recommended" links are just too kludgy to page through.

Today is Zoomii's grand opening, and if you are an Amazon shopper who likes the convenience of online shopping, but misses the fun of browsing shelves, you'll probably be excited, too. Zoomii puts an amazing interface on Amazon, letting you virtually browse the shelves from bestsellers to different genres. Zoomii allows you to zoom in on a shelf to see the titles, then click a title for more information, which includes price, sales rank, a link back to the book on Amazon, and summary information. You can add the book to your wishlist, or buy it right then through Amazon. I'm assuming Zoomii is monetized via an Amazon affiliate account. The application works for both U.S. and Canadian users, and this U.S. user spent about 20 minutes browsing the stacks this morning before she realized she had to actually get some work done.

So they have a cool app, and they have a monetization scheme, but do they also have an exit strategy? I found Zoomii through the Amazon Web Services blog, where they seemed as excited about the application as I am. Zoomii is running on EC2 and S3, which puts it in a very nice spot for acquisition BY Amazon. They may not need to have such a snazzy interface, but it sure does make shopping that much nicer. I'll probably be doing at least my book shopping through Zoomii from now on.