Archive for April, 2011

Best Buy Open Products API

Friday, April 22nd, 2011

The api set provides a REST based interface for Best Buy retailers entire product catalog which is updated regularly and access to information like pricing, availability, specifications, descriptions and images for nearly a million current and historical products.

Products can be searched using some 70 different product attributes like: productid, name, type, sku id, regular price etc. There is a search function using keyword which is in beta state.

It also has a bias function where the user can specify how important or unimportant a particular search attribute is to him/her by attaching certain weight to the search results.

The api can also be used to search the availability of stores within the specified distance with a particular product in stock. It also includes Napster’s product catalog.

Another important feature which can be used by Shopster is the review api which allows retrieval of review information like reviewer, rating, date submitted, and review commentary.

Disadvantages:
* only access to best buy company info- not necessarily a disadvantage.
* popular only in US.

Amazon – product advertising api

Friday, April 22nd, 2011

Amazon provides product advertising api for users to advertise amazon products. It provides details like items for sale, customer reviews, seller reviews, as well as most of the functionality that we see on www.amazon.com, such as finding items, finding similar items, displaying customer reviews, and product promotions.

The api is free.

The function (itemsearch) takes a range of parameters to specify the customers requirements to view a set of items. The api provides access to the Amazon database which is called catalog. The results can be narrowed down by specifying search indices(eg:- to narrow the search results to just books category).

The search results are returned in XML format.

Using the service requires the user to register for an AWS access ID.The web service supports both REST & SOAP request. It supports languages like: JAVA, C#, PERL, PHP.

The Amazon api provides customer reviews as part of their api which could be integrated into Shopster so that the users can view reviews for their selected products. Reviews hosted by a trusted host like Amazon will add value to the application.

Database Diagram

Wednesday, April 20th, 2011
Database Diagram

Database Diagram

Rewards and RateFriendPerCategory tables pending, waiting for decision

Social Networks, Personalized Advertising, and Privacy Controls

Saturday, April 16th, 2011

The author of this paper focuses on how people react with Personalised Advertising in regards to the level of Privacy control they have in a social network. For the needs of this study data from a randomised field experiment to optimised advertising campaigns on Facebook is used. In the middle of the experiment, Facebook improved their privacy policy. Even though Facebook did not chang the way advertisers targeted and personalised ads, users were twice as likely to click on personalised advertisments.

This paper can help us understand that Shopster has to be concerned about privacy issues. It is a crucial issue how we are going to keep private data safe from other users. We can see from this study that even the effectiveness of personalised advertising is directly related to the privacy controls that each user will have in the application.

Reference : Tucker, Catherine. Social Networks, Personalized Advertising, and Privacy Controls. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), 2011.