web-services

I’m sorry I lashed out at Steve Jobs – but I just can’t stand it when people ask me how they can upgrade their Internet to this 2.0 thing they keep hearing about…

Read more on Okay, Maybe I’m the Idiot……

http://live.pirillo.com/ – Most people don’t realize that Amazon has been a pioneer in the web services frontier: they have services which developers can interact with to help develop applications.

S3 – the Simple Storage Service – is an expandable storage service which allows other websites to offload their storage needs to S3. So, websites can store images, videos, and other files which cost a large amount of money to store and transmit this data.

Read more on Amazon Web Services…

Changes are afoot:

This is a note to inform you about some changes we’re making to our pricing, effective June 1, 2007.

With Amazon S3 recently celebrating its one year birthday, we took an in-depth look at how developers were using the service, and explored whether there were opportunities to further lower costs for our customers. The primary area our customers had asked us to investigate was whether we could charge less for bandwidth.

Read more on Amazon S3 Web Services Pricing…

I don’t really wanna poop on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk) program, but I have a huge problem with it: you can’t sign up to deploy the service unless you give them your bank account information first! Are we living in 1990 or something? Have they ever heard of PayPal – or a credit card, at least? Undoubtedly, Amazon is trying to verify that I have the proper funds. I do have adequate funds, but I’m not going to give them access to my bank account to prove it! If Amazon doesn’t want to use PayPal because it’s eBay’s brand, they’re cutting off their nose to spite their face. FWIW, PayPal has a Web service, too! I really want to test some ideas with MTurk, but not if I have to jump through a flaming hoop to do so. Jeff, can you please smack some sense into your employer?

Read more on Mechanical Turd…