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Amazon creates its own URL shortener for products
Amazon.com has quietly created its own URL shortener for products sold on its sites. People can now type "amzn.com/" and a product number to create a short URL, without the need for sites like tinyurl.com and bit.ly. Amazon appears to be positioning itself to take better advantage of popular microblogging service Twitter and mobile texting to generate buzz about merchandise.
It works like this: If I'm looking at Dan Brown's upcoming book "The Lost Symbol," and want to tweet about it, I take the book's ISBN number (listed on the product page) and put it on the end of amzn.com/. "The Lost Symbol" ISBN number is 0385504225. So the short URL would be amzn.com/0385504225.
For other Amazon products that don't have an ISBN, you use the ASIN number (Amazon Standard Identification Number), also on the product page. The tool also works for Amazon Wishlists. You type "amzn.com/w/" plus the Wishlist ID number, which is usually at the end of a person's Wishlist URL.
Thanks to Mike Koss of StartPad.org for alerting us to this. Mike himself blogs about the Amazon URL shortener, writing, "As Twitter becomes more popular, I think more sites will be incorporating URL shorteners into their applications, enabling their users to share their pages without resorting to 3rd party services."
As far as I can tell, Amazon hasn't officially announced this tool, though a few people are using amzn.com short URLs on Twitter. Amazon spokeswoman Patty Smith didn't respond to questions on the subject.
Various Amazon business units have their own Twitter accounts. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos was an early personal investor in Twitter, and Twitter uses Amazon's cloud compute storage service S3.
About Eric Engleman
ERIC ENGLEMAN is senior technology staff writer for TechFlash and the Puget Sound Business Journal, covering online retail giant Amazon.com. Engleman tracks Amazon's increasingly complex business, spanning ecommerce, Kindle, cloud computing, and more. He's been covering technology and other industries for the Business Journal since 2003.
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