This is a pretty killer feature. I utilize an Amazon wish list for my family but sometimes what I want simply isn't sold there. Instead of making my own custom list I'd love to use Amazon for it all.
Which, of course, helps Amazon figure out what it doesn't sell, but should. I'd say it's a brilliant idea, but I can't help thinking, what took them so long?
Have you never seen a feature implemented that was (a) kind of obvious, and (b) a long time coming?
I can appreciate that not everyone thinks this was an obvious idea. I'd appreciate it even more if you can respect that I think it was fairly obvious. Thanks.
My tool for eBay had an E-mail to a Friend feature before eBay did. eBay later added that feature, and these days it's prominent on top of every auction.
My tool also had tabbed web browsing before Internet Explorer did, a Microsoft product.
My tool also had a popup-menu where a user could scroll up and down via a mouse (to enter bids from a menu rather than having to type them in) before the iPhone even existed (with their calendar date picker), an Apple product.
It itself was a desktop app before eBay every announced theirs.
It's really not whether a feature is obvious in hindsight. I've done stuff that seems "obvious" right now (never mind just "thought it was obvious in hindsight without implementing anything"), and it was new. You can't think of it that way. Amazon's new feature is quite new and groundbreaking.
But I can see your point. It's because it's a big company, that when it finally got around to implementing something like that, that it's a miracle. In fact, it wasn't until very recently that users have been allowed to select quantities when adding an item, versus in the shopping cart.
And of course, they are a big company, and so part of the news is that they had the panache to allow tracking of other companies products.
Funnily enough, my tool did that exact same thing, earlier--the entire point was to track items a user was planning on buying from eBay, Yahoo!, and Overstock auctions; Amazon was the fourth but I never got around to implementing screen scraping for their auctions, for various reasons, though it had it's own ID reserved in my code/database, as it was originally a planned feature. I think my YC application mentioned creating something similar, but a web app.
Note that when these four or so companies added the features I mentioned to their own products, boy did they get tons of press and praise! :)
And regarding features that are "obvious" that I haven't created, it's not a useful metric. There have been many YC companies that have done something I've thought of, but didn't: an eBay seller tool, a program that runs on your computer and tracks your time and the apps you are using in a web app interface, a tool that backs up your files on your computer via a local network to other computers whenever two or more are running, encrypted and seamlessly, a hands-on survey app for the iPhone, an expense tracker, a work log, all before those companies started YCombinator or switched their idea to their current one. It's all obvious. It's all execution.
Off topic, but interestingly enough, some of the earliest users of my bidding tool for eBay were from San Jose, CA.
Nod. If I had a nickel for every web app I've thought of and could have executed on but didn't, only to see others take the same idea and launch...I might have a buck fifty.
I should qualify that when I say the Amazon feature is "obvious", it's only from my perspective as a user. I would want a site-independent wishlist for the simple reason that I wouldn't want to manage wishlists on multiple sites. Only now, however, is it clear to me what the business incentive is for that.
Make themselves look better in the consumer's eyes, but us business-savvy folk know just how smart this is.
Finding out what people really want - that they don't sell, or how much they should be charging for items compared to other retailers.