The three main supermarkets in the UK, Sainsbury’s, Tesco’s and ASDA, all provide internet users with the means to order groceries online and have them delivered home.

Each online store is complete with an extensive database on all products available online and their prices. The question is, why don’t they provide web service APIs?

The beauty of the Amazon web services is that Amazon becomes a platform as much as they are an online superstore. Any website that has anything to do with books can become an affiliate by using the Amazon database to provide details on books and referring users to Amazon.com to get a percentage of any products sold.

The possibilities for supermarkets with regards to web services are enormous. Think of all the sites that focus on recipes, diets or health programs. Each one of these could become an affiliate so that with the press of a button, all the ingredients for next weekend’s dinner party or next week’s diet are transferred automatically into an online shopping chart and delivered to a customer’s door.

Providing an online store is not enough to change the way people shop. Giving third parties access to supermarket databases so that they can come up with ways to save people time and trouble is how it should be done. The first supermarket that realises this has the potential to become an industry leader within one or two years of implementing the idea.

Opera software recently released the Opera Mini, a J2ME web browser that runs on almost any mobile phone. Russell Beattie raved about it recently and amongst other things, mentions that this could even become a platform in itself.

The “Opera Platform” is already meant to supply just such a service and is based on the standard Opera browser which is available for download on many mobile devices. The browser requires a lot of resources however and isn’t available for as many browsers as the Opera Mini.

Developers catering for the mobile device market have the constant headache of making their sites or applications comply with the myriad of inbuilt mobile browsers. With the Opera Mini, a web page can be created, tested with the Opera Mini simulator and made accessible to almost anyone with a Java capable phone. The Opera Mini might indeed become much more of a platform than the product Opera calls the Opera Platform.

We mentioned the social lending platform Zopa in a previous post (see: “Zopa: Disruptive technology par excellence“) as en example of an interesting and possibly disruptive technology.

Zopa operates in the UK and in early February it got an American counterpart: Prosper.com. We decided to add the two to our Trend Tracker to see how much buzz each one is getting in the blogosphere according to Google’s blog search engine. Currently, Zopa’s head start has them well in the lead.

Check out the buzz on Zopa vs. Prosper on the Trend Tracker. Zopa’s reaction to the newcomer in a post on its blog is also interesting.

In a previous post (see: “How should newspapers price online content?“) we noted that because micropayments have not yet emerged, old school media companies cannot provide competitively priced online content.

For the past few years, PayPal has been uniquely positioned to provide micropayments to masses of online retailers but have so far failed to deliver. Instead, they charge a fixed 30¢ for every transaction made, limiting retailers’ options for competitive pricing.

Now, according to the Wall Street Journal, Google might be entering the field with their own payment service. Is this the beginning of the micropayment era?

Ebay has one advantage over Google: the trust model. Ebay users give each other a “trust score” according to how trustworthy they have been regarding a transaction. Millions of Ebay users have put much effort into gaining a high trust score and will be reluctant to switch platforms. Google does not have this “sticky” factor but is constantly trying to build one by integrating GMail, GTalk and other services into their personalized home page.

Competition from Google in the electronic payment space might prod Ebay into expanding their trust system to all electronic business transactions - not just auctions. Furthermore, the newly aquired Skype can provide Ebay users with an extra trust factor: personal contact. If Ebay has the courage to take this step, they might eclipse players such as Google in the next ten years.

Lets at least hope that competition from Google will provide content providers the means to charge a reasonable price for online content. A feasible platform providing micropayments for the masses is long overdue.

When TechCrunch posted a link to the FireAnt web site, we expeted people to start blogging heavily about the site. To track this buzz, we set up the Trend Tracker, which monitors how many links to the site Google’s blogsearch finds at the end of each day.

This image is only a snapshot, but the Trend Tracker has an image that is updated daily according to results from the Google blogsearch tool.

We might start tracking other trends for fun and suggestions are welcome via comments.

Update: Subscribe to the Trend Tracker RSS feed to see when we add new sites to the tracker.