Blogging

Amazon on Thursday announced that it is releasing its persistent storage option, called Elastic Block Service (EBS), to its suite of Amazon Web Services cloud computing options. The company announced this direction in April.

Previously, data associated with jobs running on Amazon’s cloud computing platform, EC2, were attached to the jobs themselves; developers did not have access to their files and information except through EC2. With EBS, developers can create cloud-based file systems that they can access from whatever applications they wish. Amazon’s other cloud storage systems, S3 and SimpleDB, don’t offer this low-level access.

Based on the scalable Amazon Web Services infrastructure, EBS will be tolerant of most failures, but “not as redundant as S3 storage,” according to the RightScale blog. However, Amazon customers will be able to back up snapshots of their EBS installations into S3.

EBS volumes will be available in sizes from 1 gigabyte to 1 terabyte. The service will cost 10 cents per gigabyte per month.

Further reading:

Werner Vogels: Elastic Block Store has launched.

AWS blog: Bring us your data.
RightScale blog: Amazon’s Elastic Block Store explained.

Excerpted from:
Amazon launches hard disk in the sky

The fun browser add-on PicLens has incorporated YouTube and Amazon.com into the short but hopefully soon-to-grow list of supported Web sites. Compatible with Firefox on Windows and Mac, Internet Explorer, and Safari, PicLens recreates your surfing experience with a futuristic graphical display.

PicLens now supports searches on YouTube and Amazon.com.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

As Rafe talked about in February, PicLens highlights the image content of a site and allows you to whip back and forth using mouse gestures instead of conventional static browsing. If you’re familiar with how it works with an image site like Flickr, the YouTube interface is identical. The PicLens plug-in will install a grid button on your Toolbar, which you click to activate the PicLens full-screen interface. Click a thumbnail to start playing a video, while the search box lives in the upper right of your screen. As video starts playing, standard YouTube controls appear at the bottom of the video. One potential drawback is that if the quality of the video is low, then the not-quite-full-screen playback will probably appear pixelated.

On Amazon, the experience is slightly different. The main Amazon.com page doesn’t support the PicLens button, but if you click on the button anyway it will open up the PicLens UI. From there, change the Web site search to Amazon, type in your search term, and images of whatever item you searched for will zoom past. The Amazon interface responded slower than other, more heavily-image based Web sites like Picasa.

PicLens currently supports YouTube, Flickr, Picasa, Facebook, MySpace, Fotobucket, deviantART, Google Images, Yahoo Images, and about a half-dozen others. The slideshow mode makes PicLens more accessible for users who are worried about the vertiginous effects of the add-on. There’s also a plug-in for WordPress users to add the feature to their site, and instructions for any webmaster to add PicLens support to their self-hosted pages.

More here:
PicLens adds YouTube, Amazon

Amazon.com quietly unveiled on Tuesday new online-payment services it will offer to other online merchants–a move that puts it in direct competition with eBay’s PayPal and Google’s Google checkout.

The Seattle-based e-tailer describes Checkout by Amazon as a “complete checkout solution,” with features such as Amazon’s “one-click” payment option and tools for managing shipping charges, sales tax, and promotions. Google introduced a similar online payment processing system called Google Checkout in 2006, but analysts say it has been slow to catch on with merchants and consumers.

Amazon also unveiled Amazon Simple Pay, a service that allows consumers to use their Amazon account information to pay for purchases on other Web sites. However, as a competitor of PayPal, it’s unlikely that Simple Pay will be accepted for purchases on eBay. In 2006, eBay banned its customers from using Google Checkout, according to its accepted payments policy.

Originally posted here:
Amazon unveils new online-payment services

It’s time to review the week that was on ReadWriteWeb. On the product side we compared Nokia and Apple in the Internet mobile phone market, explored the new-look Facebook, checked out MySpace’s moves to open up, and reviewed new products from Google and Microsoft. On the trends side we looked at what’s beyond the API, asked how much downtime is too much for Amazon’s online storage service, and analyzed the DRM implications of Yahoo! Music closing.

Web Products

Nokia vs Apple in The Internet Mobile Device Market

We’ve been as excited as everyone else about the iPhone 3G. But it’s easy to forget that the iphone is just a tiny player in the mobile phone market. Even if it hits Steve Jobs’ target of 10 million iphone sales by end of 2008, that will still be less than 1% of the mobile device market. To put it into perspective, Nokia remains the world’s biggest mobile handset maker with an estimated 40% of the market. Impressively Nokia has a very healthy lead over its competition. However if you look more closely, Nokia is slipping behind in the all-important Internet mobile device market.

See also: Blackberry is Not Microsoft (Sorry Apple)

Like Its Users, The New Facebook Is All Grown Up

Early this week, we told you that Facebook would be launching a new design and we briefly highlighted the coming changes. On Monday we received the official word from the Facebook team that the new profile had gone live. According to the company, access to the new design will be limited at first as it gradually becomes available to all of their more than 80 million users over the coming days. What’s most interesting about the new Facebook design, though, is not just the change in the aesthesis. Instead, the new look reflects the changing needs of their core user base.

See also: Facebook Keeps Growing - Still Far Behind MySpace in US

MySpace Aims to Win Developers’ Hearts With OpenID and User Data Caching

MySpace announced this week that it will become an OpenID authenticating party and offer developers a deeper level of access to user data than was previously available. As Facebook prepares to mark the one year anniversary of its heralded application platform and the new iPhone App Store lures developers with groundbreaking features and customers willing to pay for applications - competition for the attention of the developer community is heating up. Once again, when platforms compete for developers - users win.

Knol: Google Takes on Wikipedia

This week Google opened up Knol, its Wikipedia competitor, to the public after announcing a private beta of the service last December. Unlike Wikipedia, Knol puts a stronger emphasis on authorship and even encourages users to start different ‘knols’ for the same subject. Google is also serving up AdSense advertising on the site, whereas Wikipedia stays away from any advertising on its site.

See also: Take a Walk With Google Maps

Microsoft Makes Calendar Sync Work

For anyone who uses multiple calendars, you know that one of the big issues that’s being addressed by numerous applications is getting your calendars to sync up with each other. We’ve covered some solutions to this problem before, but we had not seen a truly integrated offering that allowed you to sync up a work calendar in desktop software with an onlne calendar without need of a third-party app of some sort…that is, until this week. It seems that Microsoft has finally given the people what they want and have provided a calendar sync tool that actually makes all of Microsoft’s calendaring programs work together.

See also: Live Mesh Goes Mobile and P2P - Mac Version Coming Soon

SEE MORE WEB PRODUCTS COVERAGE IN OUR PRODUCTS CATEGORY

Web Trends

Beyond the API: Why Companies Should Have a Presence on All Major Platforms

Much has been written lately about the rise of the API.
Offering a programming interface to an online service is now standard practice amongst this generation of web companies. Through APIs, we get to enjoy a range of innovative Twitter clients, wide
availability of maps and location information, custom search engines, and more. However, delivering superior user experience
on major platforms should be as much of a priority as opening up via an API.

See also Alex’s other post this week: Top 10 Concepts That Every Software Engineer Should Know

More Amazon S3 Downtime: How Much is Too Much?

Earlier this week Amazon’s S3 online storage service experienced significant downtime. Allen Stern, who hosts his blog’s images on S3, reported that the downtime lasted over 6 hours. Startups that use S3 for their storage, such as SmugMug, also reported problems. Back in February this same thing happened. At the time RWW feature writer Alex Iskold defended Amazon, in a must-read analysis entitled Reaching for the Sky Through The Compute Clouds. But it does make us ask questions such as: why can’t we get 99% uptime? Or: isn’t this what an SLA is for?

Cartoon: Cloud Computing

The Final Days of DRM: Yahoo Music Store Closing, Will Eat Your Purchased Music

Digital Rights Management technology is dying, it’s becoming understood that hobbling tunes to enforce scarcity isn’t the best way to monetize the music business online. What about all the suckers who bought DRM laden music in recent years, though? When the Yahoo! Music Store closes its doors this fall, the company announced this week, past customers dependent on their music “phoning home” to get license approval before playing are out of luck. They’ll be able to continue playing purchased tracks on a single computer, until they make any changes to their operating system. The rise and fall of the Yahoo! Music Store will make for an interesting story some day, but for now the DRM story is particularly important.

See also: Three Hot Mixtape Services That Are Remaking the Art Form and eMusic Goes Web 2.0

SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY

That’s a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.

View original post here:
Weekly Wrapup, 21-25 July 2008

Of the 20 or so demos set out to bake in the afternoon soon on the August Capital patio for the TechCrunch party Friday, my award for the most interesting goes to Plista, a social recommendation service that follows what you like and don’t across sites.

Plista currently uses a Greasemonkey script. Once you install it, when you go to a site in the Plista system - CEO Domink Matyka told me there are about 30 so far - you’ll find the page has new Plista pieces on it: A rating box on each element at the least, and possibly more content additions too.

Plista adds rating features and feedback to sevaral sites.

(Credit: Plista)

By way of example, Matyka showed me Plista working with IMDB. I could rate movies on the site, and once I did, the service would show me other things it thought I would like based on the preferences of other people who liked what I did. What’s cool about Plista is that the recommendation engine works across sites, so it’ll recommend (in theory) books on Amazon based on movies you’ve rated on IMDB. And - also cool - it shows you your ad-hoc network of Plista members who have compatible tastes, so you can explore their recommendations.

Think of it as Aggregate Knowledge meets MyBlogLog meest Sphere, with a dash of Matchmine (review).

I like the concept, and I like how easy it is for site managers to implement the system: They don’t have to do anything. Plista does the lifting.

Unfortunately, I don’t get how this service is going win wide adoption. There’s a chicken-and-egg problem, for one: Getting a site Plista-enabled is a manual process, and while Plista can create the scripts for major sites, it can’t reach into the long tail to code them all. Plista will need site owners to do some work themselves. And there’s the egg: You can’t use Plista unless you have Greasemonkey installed. While it’s a popular engine for browser modification scripts, it’s not a mainstream add-on, so the potential audience is limited. And who wants to bother coding a site for such a small number of users?

Worse, many of the most important sites that Plista would work on - blogs, commerce sites, and databases - already have their own rating systems that Plista would compete with. I don’t see Amazon or Netflix adopting this system, for example.

I still like the concept here. Plista lets you rate products and content, gives you a lot in return for your rating activity, and it makes all your rating data yours; it doesn’t lock it away deep in some secret database on the sites you visit.

Plista does have a fighting chance, I believe, if it drops the Greasemonkey tactic and instead focuses on developing a way for retailers and content managers can port their rating data to the service, in return for cross-site recommendations and the affiliate revenues that would come with them.

Plista isn’t available yet, but you can sign up for the beta on the site.

More here:
Plista: Ad-hoc social networks for product recommendations