Amazon has been slowly and subtly changing the way orders are viewed by users. The new order management page (in beta) gives a lot more information on one page and gives more information on page through AJAX updates. Nice for the user since information can be viewed for multiple orders without the old submit -> load -> back shuffle that happens with non-interactive pages (and admittedly, Amazon’s previous incarnation which is still available).
But today I noticed an addition to the tracking package page. Apparently Amazon has included the ability to get text messages delivered based on the status of a package being delivered (they’re calling it Text Trace).
Text Track allows you to track your Amazon.com packages via text messages (SMS) sent to your mobile phone. When you sign up, important tracking updates for that package (also visible in Your Account) will be sent to your mobile phone.
So as not to annoy users, alerts will apparently be delivered only from 10am until 11pm (mine says Eastern time but I wonder if that adapts to the local time zone of each user).
On looking at this I thought it was pretty cool. Unfortunately, I don’t do text messages (although I suppose I could get them at my GrandCentral/Google Voice number). So I tweeted that it would be nice to get DM’s about package updates. This has been done by other services like Remember The Milk (@rememberthemilk) although given the scale of Amazon, it is definitely a different issue (@rememberthemilk has just over 3,000 followers) and would probably require some coordination with the folks at Twitter (the number of DM’s that Amazon would likely need to put out would probably overwhelm the initial API limits that Twitter has even for whitelisted developers).
The response by some was that SMS is much easier to do than Twitter DMs, which I can definitely see. But if Twitter is becoming a new Internet protocol, then shouldn’t everyone be planning for it and figuring out how to leverage it?
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Why don’t they just make it an RSS feed that you could subscribe to via whatever means you see fit? You could implement that with DM/SMS/Email/Twilio or anything…
Wonder how many of Amazon’s customers understand RSS feeds and all that jazz. SMS/Text on other other hand, that’s a different story altogether!
Knowing Amazon – they are already planning for this and figuring out how to leverage it, its just taking a little longer than SMS. Amazon product is usually 2 steps ahead of any blogger.