subtitle: “But To Everyone Else, They’re Petty Wee Things And Don’t Really Matter In Life”

#1: people who can’t be arsed deamazonising URLs.

Example: “Hey, that Photoshop 7.0 is pretty neat!” Roll over that link for a second. That URL is huge. HUGE. It’s got the Amazon ASIN (their SKUs), which here is B000063EMG; it’s been linked to from a feature or search, hence the tg/detail/-/; the feature reference is still retained — ref=bfl_software// — and somehow has erroneously been given a double //; there are random extra parts to the query string after the ?; and there’s an Amazon user SID in there too (the long string starting 103-) …

Corrected: “Hey, that Photoshop 7.0 is pretty neat!” Where did all that cruft go? It’s been deamazonised. All you need in an Amazon URL is the site portion (in this case http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/) and the ASIN (B000063EMG). If you want to be really smart, you can put your Amazon Associates ID at the end of that URL, and you’ll start earning too.

Of course, deamazonisation need not stop with mere Amazon URLs … other sites have extra cruft on their links which can easily be removed to shorten the length of URLs — even removing index.html, which isn’t always needed, saves 10 characters on the length of a URL, which could be the difference between a URL wrapping (or not) in an email. Hey, I’m a geek, I care about these kinds of things.

Remember that term — to deamazonise. You heard it here first. Except for Gareth Branwyn at Wired. Who didn’t put it in the Jargon Watch column years ago. Git.

Subtle Google catchall: deamazonize.