We're thrilled to tell you about two new Web services from AWS. Amazon E-Commerce Service (ECS, previously in beta as AWS 4.0) now provides you with more product categories, information, and images than ever before. In addition, Alexa Web Information Service (AWIS) is now available in beta, giving you unparalleled data on Web sites and their usage patterns generated by Alexa's 4-billion-page Web crawl.

One of the best things about having a community of over 65,000 developers is that we get a lot of great feedback on how to improve our offerings. We love it, as it helps us to build a better product--one that better supports your needs. That's why we're particularly excited about ECS 4.0. It's the result of a lot of time spent listening to your suggestions and addressing your issues. Here are some of the features we're most proud of:

* Detailed product and pricing information for virtually every product in every product category on our site, even our newest ones.

* Nearly all of Amazon.com's product images.

* All customer reviews associated with a product (previously, you were limited to just three reviews).

* Extended search functionality--the same "Advanced Search"

functionalityavailable on Amazon.com's Web site (previously, you were limited to a simple keyword search).

* Remote Shopping Cart improvements that allow you to offer all the functionality of the Amazon.com Shopping Cart on your own Web site, including the "Save for Later" feature.

* Improved searching of Amazon Wish Lists--you can now search them by name, e-mail, city, or state.

* Many usability enhancements, such as precise Response Groups (letting you specify and retrieve only the information you want), multi-operation and batch requests, detailed error messages, built-in help functionality, and more.

Over the past two years, we've exposed Web services used internally in our everyday business at Amazon.com, and have been amazed at how clever and innovative developers have been in deriving new business value from them.

We believe that the Alexa Web Information Service may be another one of those services. Our recently announced A9.com search is powered in part by AWIS, as are a number of other, internal Amazon projects.

AWIS provides five operations that leverage Alexa Internet's

* Access Web page and site information gathered from Alexa's Web crawl and Web usage analysis. For example, you can get popularity figures, related sites, detailed usage/traffic statistics, and supported character set/locales for any Web site or page.

* Search the Web using an index constructed from Alexa's extensive Web crawl data; return up to 1,000 results per page.

* Access metadata collected from Alexa's Web crawl. For example, you can retrieve page size, checksum, total links, link text, images, frames, and Javascript-embedded URLs for any page in the crawl.

* Get links-in and links-out information for any page in the crawl. For example, given an URL as an input, you can get a list of all links to or from that URL.

Again, please check it out yourself at

Thanks for being an Amazon Web Services developer, and keep those comments and suggestions coming!

Best regards,

The Amazon Web Services Team