Today I read a post on the AWS Blog by Jeff Barr that was particularly of interest to me.  An idea that I actually had early in 2005…  Using the sales rank of Amazon products as a type of “stock market”, where users could trade stock and the stock price is based on the +/- of the sales rank. Well now I know I wasn’t the only one with the idea!

Here is the site description:
Smarkets is a stock market for Amazon products. It turns Amazon products into “stocks” you can buy and sell.  Smarkets was created by Steve Odom as an experimental prediction market.

To the left is a screen shot of what viewing a product (Chronicles of Narnia boxed set) looks like at Smarkets.

One part that wasn’t in my original thought was that it allows users to add tags to items for easy identification and locating similiar items.  Looks like Steve setup a nice, easy to use site.  Congrats to him.  I’ll definitely be keeping an eye on this one and shoot him an email when I look back at my notes to see if there is anything else he might want to add.