Amazon's newest patent

Wed, 04 May 2005 comments

I read Bezo's patent on Information exchange between users of different web pages. Amazing technology here.

Client side - "monitors a user's access to web pages. When a web page is accessed, the client-side component sends an indiciation of the accessed webpage to the server-side component"

Hmm. Let's build that using Greasemonkey:

// ==UserScript==
// @name          Information Exchange Client
// @namespace     http://overstimulate.com/userscripts/
// @description   Monitor user's access to webpages and report to mother ship
// @include       *
// ==/UserScript==

  GM_xmlhttpRequest({ method:"POST", url:motherShipURL+
      "?location="+document.location.href, data:"",
      onload:function(result) {
        /* add returned results to floating div on webpage */ 
      }
  });

Server side - the server sends users annontations, categories, ...

People will be creating more advanced server projects on rail's days.

I guess people like google are going to get sued---ad servers are a form of "information exchange servers" according to this patent - they try to match the content to categories/ads then display them *gasp* inside the webpage.

Good quote: "Also, the information exchange server may comprise any combination of hardware or software that can support these concepts".

The only non-trivial portion of this project is that your information exchange server can be doing some heavy-duty data-mining. Also, if you have users hitting your server every time they visit a webpage, you are going to need a massive server farm.