Ever feel compelled to buy a product based on less than 140 characters worth of information about it from a friend or tastemaker? Amazon's betting that you will, and it's launching a new service today to let you add items to your shopping cart straight from Twitter. After connecting your Twitter account to Amazon, you'll then be able to reply to any tweet that includes an Amazon link using the hashtag "#AmazonCart" in the US or "#AmazonBasket" in the UK for it to be automatically added to your cart on Amazon's website.

As with any other item in your cart, you won't have to buy items added through the hashtag — they'll remain there until you either check out or remove them, so the integration with Twitter can serve as much as a way to bookmark products that you might like as much as it's a way to easily buy them. It's unclear how closely involved with the integration Twitter itself is — Amazon may well just be making clever use of hashtags — especially since Twitter has been working to build out a shopping experience on its own. Twitter hasn't said what that experience will look like, but it'll probably want a cut of the sale as a way to open up a new stream of revenue for itself.