A9 toolbar

A9 is an Amazon subsidiary that opened about 6 months ago. I'm testing out their toolbar (download here), which looks like a useful blogging tool. The Google toolbar is a favorite of mine, so I can't help but examine A9 under Google's steady beam. It holds up decently, with only a little sweating and throat clearing, entirely because of new features it provides.

Nifty feature 1: the toolbar is integrated with the common-interest features on Amazon (the part that says "People who bought 'Marat-Sade' also bought...."). That means you can see what other sites are popular among A9 users who visited the site you're looking at. You can also see reviews of the site and submit a review, which will be posted on Amazon. Pretty cool.... This is under the "Site Info" menu, which has little overlap with the Google toolbar's "Info" menu.

Nifty feature 2: the "Diary" feature - for a particular website, you can record notes to yourself, which you see again when you revisit that page. This is the relevant idea to me, since it means I can push back the blogging session to the end of the day without worrying that I'll lose track of my thoughts.

The web search seems to be their own - the style is not very attractive (orange on khaki), but the search is functional. DHTML tabs provide search results under Amazon's book list, as well as a recent-search history. This is imperfect: if you search for the same thing with only minor query variations, it's a pain to scroll through fifty similar entries. Interestingly, it looks as though the A9 toolbar reads the Google toolbar's searches and stores them as well!

A9 only really falls down in its popup-blocker: the Google blocker knows that clicking a link could legitimately open a new window, where A9 asks "is this OK?" and defaults to "no" (and to "never ask on this site again"). For this kind of behavior, these defaults are too harsh.

Overall, a good little tool - we'll see if I still want to keep it in a couple of weeks.
- posted by Scott @ 5:56 PM