In the past week, I've had three sightings of xmlhttpreq..., er AJAX in the wild at large sites (that are not Google). And, thankfully these instances are A. useful, B. well-done. (And C. thankfully not hyped as "AJAX-ified")

As Scott Andrew points out, Amazon.com has got a groovy little (well, not so little) Diamond Finder widget now that uses both DHTML and remote script requests (apparently uses iframe as communication path).

Next, Hacking Netflix points us to Netflix's use of mouseover Pop-ups with movie info (using xmlhttprequest). If you are a netflix member, you can sign in and see it in action on your Queue page (among others). They even have beautiful faded-transparency dropshadows... nice. Netflix has long been a pioneer of what is now being labeled AJAX, nice to see them continue to do good things with it.

Lastly, I discovered this last one myself while fiddling about with Yahoo News' latest redesign. If you go to the link above, and mouseover any of the headlines in the boxed sections below, like "Top Stories", you'll get a mouseover pop-up with a mini-preview of the story (some with images). Very cool, delightfully surprising, and useful.

As far as execution on these, I've only really glanced at the code. Amazon's appears to be the largest and most obfuscated by far, Netflix has the design/visual edge, as their info-boxes look sweet, and Yahoo News gets the utilitarian award for being fast, compact and useful (if a bit drab), just like I like them.

This appears to be indicative of what Anil Dash and a some others have been saying - that the largest uptake of AJAX will be in small bits here and there (value-add, easily degrades to lesser browsers), not necessarily in the continued appearance mega-projects like Google Maps and GMail (though they are both still cool).
 

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