Amazon Web Services is discontinuing the Alexa Site Thumbnail service. The service has been providing developers with programmatic access to thumbnail images for the pages of web sites that were stored in Alexa’s index. New subscriptions are no longer being accepted, and existing subscribers will only have operational access until June 12, 2009.

Alexa Site Thumbnail was a paying service (developers were charged $0.0002 / thumbnail URL returned i.e. $0.20 per 1,000 thumbnail URLs) but in an e-mail sent out to developers Amazon admits that it never really took off and that the company will do the smart thing and focus their resources on more popular services.

The best alternative out there is PageGlimpse. It provides an easy to use API, a Wordpress plugin,  .NET library and many other tools and features for FREE.

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