Just in time for Christmas, Amazon has released a new service via an iPhone app that let’s you snap a photo of an object you desire and sometime later in the day find out how you can buy one like it on Amazon.

Here’s how the NYT Bits blog described it in Amazon.com Invades the Apple App Store:

“There is, however, one unusual and noteworthy aspect of the app called Amazon Remembers, which Amazon is calling “experimental.” The tool lets users take a photograph of any product they see in the real world. The photos are then uploaded to Amazon and turned over to the far-flung freelance workers in Amazon’s Mechanical Turk program, who will try to match them with products for sale on Amazon.com. The results will not be instantaneous (between 5 minutes and 24 hours, the company says), but the idea is to entice consumers to buy products from Amazon instead of its offline rivals.”

Too bad we are in a recession depression.

The Washington Posts Security Fix blog has a post, Amazon: Hey Spammers, Get Off My Cloud!, reporting on allegations that spammers are starting to use Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) servers. It only makes sense — you can sign up easily without committing to a contract of any length, the price is low, and the IP addresses are drawn from a wide range, making it hard to block them all. Besides, if Amazon’s EC2 IP addresses all get put in a spam blacklist, it will be bad for their many legitimate users. It may be tricky for Amazon to police this.