In tough economic times like these, it helps to know how to find a good deal or to see if your item of interest has dropped in price. A recent web service called Ookong lets you track price history for anything on Amazon. As Lifehacker described it, "If you frequently shop at Amazon, Ookong is invaluable for keeping an eye on prices." Personally, we love how easy it is to use and its intuitive layout for price tracking. Best of all, you can set alerts for when a price drops! Here's an example showing a graph of the price history, which includes the highest/lowest/current price:

While the website is a good way to get a feel for what Ookong does, the most powerful feature is that it also comes packaged as a Firefox extension, which integrates right into Amazon, adding a "Follow this item" button to product pages:

Since the developer, Jay Wang, uses Apigee, we took the opportunity to ask him to share some of his experiences.

What do you wish the Amazon API would do that it doesn't do today?

Jay: Allow developing mobile apps by default (without asking for written request).

If you could send one message about working with the Amazon API back in time to yourself, what would it be?

Jay: Read the limitations in License Agreement carefully. For example, you cannot use it to develop a product for mobile phone without a written approval.

What insights into your app or other benefits have you gotten from working with Apigee?

Jay: Apigee builds a secure layer over the real APIs and helps identify the offenders.

What new features would you most like to see from Apigee?

Jay: Block the users if they use up their assigned quota. The users can be determined by some factors, such as IP.

It can make a world of difference for your wallet when you can buy what you want at the best price all the time. Ookong is really a must have tool for any online shopper!

Apigee isn't only for API providers - if you use APIs in your mashup, mobile, or social app you can monitor those APIs as well.

Why?  You might want to find out before your users if an API is slow or down, leaving big holes in your app where content should be.  Or verify any terms of use or bill you get from an API provider.

For example, if you're an iPhone developer you know nobody will use a slow iPhone app.

Shorepoint systems is one iPhone shop using Apigee for this purpose on their iPhone apps. Their mLocal app is great for creating and sharing local listings.

mLocal makes heavy use of RESTful APIs for content and especially to communicate to a back-end content app hosted on AWS. Shorepoint uses Apigee for monitoring and debugging of these API calls between the iPhone client and AWS (in both QA and production), and especially to monitor response times and proactively find out if any API call is slowing down iPhone app performance. 

Thanks to Rajan of mLocal for all the feedback on Apigee and check out mLocal here!