Monday, March 20, 2006

Vastly, Hugely, Web2.0

It’s been a busy week. Amazon’s S3 – standing for ‘Simple Storage Service’ – launched; and it’s supposed to be a ‘scalable, reliable, fast, inexpensive data storage infrastructure’. Great news for developers looking for a storage service backend – just take a look at their costs: something $15/month for 100GB of storage, and $20 for transfer!

It looks like a lot of sense for front end services who don’t want to spend too much on back end, but the question is this: will businesses, even small ones, actually want their infrastructure core (mostly apps bulging with data) to be dependent on 3rd party interfaces? The worries are obviously about pricing/service consistency and, of course, quality. A march has definitely been stolen on Google Drive, though…

ZapThink analyst Ronald Schmelzer feels that Amazon is “building a system to sell digital goods”. A step beyond retail it is for Amazon, and it may be as Schmelzer says – “They want to be seen as a platform for Web 2.0 applications”. Now that’s a vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly big thing (as Douglas Adams would have said), coming from the ‘world’s largest selection’.

Speaking of Vast, that’s another launch – this time of a search service that extracts and structures classified ads all over the web, and then (hold your breath) makes them available via an open REST API for commercial and non-commercial uses. With over 15M listings already available for cars, jobs, and personal profiles, Vast already has one of the largest databases. For more, check CEO Naval Ravikant’s blog, startupboy.com. Will it be able to give the bigger job boards a case of jelly knees? The user experience at Vast is still to be improved, apparently, if you take MikeH’s word at smashfly.com

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