A typical URL for a product at 109things looks like this http://www.109things.com/item/Tom-Cruise-Unauthorized-Biography/0312359861.

The benefit of this URL format is that you can actually see the title of the item in it. Therefore, it informs you what you are about to click.

But there are times when you just want to send the URL to a friend over email and are worried about broken strings. So is there a tiny URL?

All you have to do is to remove the words in the middle that describes the product and replace it with a hyphen (-), like this http://www.109things.com/item/-/0312359861.

That’s all there is

What a coup for Amazon.com! Warner has decided to make it’s entire music catalog DRM-free through Amazon’s MP3 store.

The best part? It’s going to be DRM-free! This deal boosts Amazon’s MP3 offerings to 2.9 million songs.

Walmart on the other hand has quit the video download industry. It’s clear that they’re not able to dominate this super competitive industry. This leaves Amazon’s Unbox as a dominant player.

109things has just been given a speed bump.

This is all due to XCache, a wonderful open-source PHP opcode cacher that is fast and stable.

Installation took about 15 minutes on the first try and everything went smoothly.

XCache even comes with a very useful administration panel that shows you how well (or badly) it is working. Just 10 minutes after using it, i noticed that about 80% of the PHP pages are being loaded from the cache!

Besides XCache, you can also try other open-source alternatives like APC, eAccelerator, php-accelerator and turck-mmcache. If you’d rather splurge instead, check out Zend’s PHP platform offerings.

109things mobile launches today.

The design was purposely kept minimal to enable a pleasant viewing experience on small screen devices.

I guess it’s very useful if you are at a physical store and want to get some reviews for the product you’re eyeing.

Reviews are not shown immediately. You get to read the summaries and see the total number of words in each review before deciding which review to read. This cuts down on screen clutter and should help you save on bandwidth and scrolling.

So head over to 109things mobile at http://www.109things.com/m

See a demo on a mobile emulator here.

One of the great things about online shopping is the wide variety of products for sale.

My mum just bought some cosmetics online, and one thing we did before purchasing was to ensure that the seller was of good repute. The star ratings system in most stores is useful, but it’d be even better to read comments given to sellers from their buyers.

Most sites require us to open a new page to read the comments. It got really messy after a while, I’m sure you know how it is like opening 5 windows.

So I decided to do it a little better with 109things. You can click on a link beside every seller that has been given feedback, and a maximum of 20 comments will be shown in the same window. Closing it is another click. The magic of AJAX

I hope this little feature will make your shopping much easier and enjoyable.

I’ve been notified by Amazon.com that 109things has violated their Amazon Web Services Customer Agreement.

The case in point was 109things’s historical price and sales rank charts. Although it was a super useful feature to buyers, sellers and authors, Amazon’s agreement stated clearly that users of their web services cannot cache sales rank and price information. I was gently reminded of this via an email today.

Therefore, I have removed this feature from 109things. Sorry folks, it’s history now.

It’s Christmas season again and while you might be eyeing your favourite Apple Ipod and other Electronics goodies or Amazon Kindle, it’s nice to know that there are ways to shop without blowing a hole in your budget.

109things has a nice feature called Email Alerts. You can set limits for new and used product prices. Once that limit is met, 109things will immediately notify you by email.

Producers of items, like authors and manufacturers can even set limits for Amazon Sales Ranks! Again, they will be notified when the limits are reached. The entire process takes less than 1 minute.

And if you’re not sure whether to buy an Ipod or Microsoft’s Zune, then 109things will let you compare both items side by side in the same browser window. In fact, 109things supports up to 20 side-by-side product comparisons, so you have no excuse for buyer’s remorse later

And because everything you buy is sold by Amazon.com and it’s merchants, you are assured of a wide selection of sellers and prices.