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…

There’s just something in me that goes off at the sound of someone claiming anything is “Web 2.0.” It’s downright indefinable, as I’ve stated clearly before. A Web site is a Web site is a Web site. A Web service is a Web service is a Web service. They grow. They change lives. But this is hardly something to stamp an number on. And now that we have a pseudo-versioning before, how long will it be before someone claims we’ve officially left Web 3.0 (as if that was a standard to begin with). It’s going… oh, wait. Microsoft to Invest in ‘Web 3.0′:

Seeing as it was late to the game with Web 2.0, Microsoft is making a preemptive effort to be ready the next time around. The company has pledged $500,000 in research grants toward what it calls “Intelligent Web 3.0,” in which the Web becomes more aware of where and how it’s being accessed in order to custom tailor information.

Microsoft (or anybody) can’t late to something that doesn’t exist. This is the Internet – it’s in a constant state of evolution (not intelligent design, as some might argue). I wound up with several threads in my inbox today regarding my admittedly knee-jerk reaction to Jobs’ announcement.

So, we can’t even agree on what “Web 2.0″ is, and already the term “3.0″ is being used. I agree that the future of software is not necessarily on the desktop – but why not just call it that? Why do we have to slap a label on something? I’m fully willing to be the idiot who doesn’t understand that which nobody can agree on a definition for.

But where do you draw the line?

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.

EC2 – the Elastic Computing Cloud – allows websites to offload computing needs, rather than storage needs. So, if your website gets posted to Digg, the spike in traffic can be accommodated, rather than slowing to a crawl due to a lack of computing power.

While both S3 and EC2 provide different features to developers, they offer the same basic service: being able to augment costly services (bandwidth, storage, and computing cycles) at a "pay as you need it" rate.

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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.

There are two primary costs associated with uploading and downloading files: the cost of the bandwidth itself, and the fixed cost of processing a request. Consistent with our cost-following pricing philosophy, we determined that the best solution for our customers, overall, is to equitably charge for the resources being used – and therefore disaggregate request costs from bandwidth costs.

Making this change will allow us to offer lower bandwidth rates for all of our customers. In addition, we’re implementing volume pricing for bandwidth, so that as our customers’ businesses grow and help us achieve further economies of scale, they benefit by receiving even lower bandwidth rates. Finally, this means that we will be introducing a small request-based charge for each time a request is made to the service. Below are the details of the new pricing plan (also available on the Amazon S3 detail page):

Current bandwidth price (through May 31, 2007)
$0.20 / GB – uploaded
$0.20 / GB – downloaded

New bandwidth price (effective June 1, 2007)
$0.10 per GB – all data uploaded
$0.18 per GB – first 10 TB / month data downloaded
$0.16 per GB – next 40 TB / month data downloaded
$0.13 per GB – data downloaded / month over 50 TB

Data transferred between Amazon S3 and Amazon EC2 will remain free of charge

New request-based price (effective June 1, 2007)
$0.01 per 1,000 PUT or LIST requests
$0.01 per 10,000 GET and all other requests*
* No charge for delete requests

Storage will continue to be charged at $0.15 / GB-month used.

The end result is an overall price reduction for the vast majority of our customers. If this new pricing had been applied to customers’ March 2007 usage, 75% of Amazon S3 customers would have seen their bill decrease, while an additional 11% would have seen an increase of less than 10%. Only 14% of customers would have experienced an increase of greater than 10%.

We don’t anticipate making further structural changes to Amazon S3 pricing in the future, but we will continue to look for ways to drive down costs and pass the savings on to you.

P.S. Please note that the reduced bandwidth rates shown above will also take effect for Amazon EC2 and Amazon SQS. The bandwidth tier in which you will be charged each month will be calculated based on your use of each of these services separately, and could therefore vary across services.

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?

Mechanical Turd