Interesting: news bit about Alonovo.
This is one of the beauties of the web and the aggregation capabilities that more sites are starting to expose. You can create a specialized front end to someone else’s services, without having to build the whole world yourself, and everybody wins (Amazon gets the sales, Alonovo gets their cut, anyone who wants the service can use it, and anyone who doesn’t can just use Amazon directly).
It seems a bit odd, when I think about it, that I am praising the fact that middlemen can thrive on the web :-), given that I’m usually not a big fan of middlemen. I guess the middlemen I’m not a big fan of are the ones who insinuate themselves inextricably and/or don’t provide very visible value. That’s a dying breed in the webbed world anyway…