nonsmokingarea.com

one of my current reads is The Big Switch by Nicholas Carr (whose blog roughtype is a recommended read - and the place where I sponged off a advance reading-copy - thanks!). the book is all about utility-computing, drawing parallels between the surge of the electric grid in the early 1900’s and the rise of cloud-computing we are seeing today (or since the early days of the WWW, if you want).

I’m mentioning this, as of today, Amazon’s Web Services (AWS - E3 Storage, EC2 cloud-computing, and the transaction service whose name I forget all the time) has seen it’s first major outage (1-2 hours according to Sitening). sure, this happens all the time. I can’t think of many (any?) web-services which don’t have at least 1 outage a year (even Gmail breaks from time to time). but if clouds like AWS go down, it affects hundreds or thousands of sites at once. bad experience, if all your major services break down alltogether ;)… on the other hand, the numbers still speak for AWS: 1-2 hours downtime in 2 years (S3 was launched in 2006, I believe) is not too bad - a degree of availability most companies couldn’t provide themselves in a profitable way.

Update: Nick Carr has got a post about the outage already, as do lots of others (check Techmeme).

Amazon’s the latest iPhonized webapp I accidentally ran into… there are some flaws though…f.e. while you can certainly buy products while on-the-go, it’s not possible to maintain your wishlist for future consideration. deep-links to products on the amazon-mainpage aren’t redirected to the mobile version, which I think they should.
interesting that - though the iPhone does a pretty good job on making standard-websites usable on a mobile - most major players see value in offering a customized version of their offering…keep ‘em coming!

fowa2007 - day #1

11.40 - Simon Wardley on commoditizing of IT: “there’s no sense whatsoever in setting up your own IT-infrastructure. maintaining your own web- or database-servers is what we call yak-shaving“. Zimki offers “pre-shaved yaks”, meaning a fully hosted, server-side javascript environment for rapid application development (not to forget Amazon S3 & EC2, which commoditizes web-infrastructure on a lower level).

13.45 - Matthew Ogle & Anil Bawa Cavia talk about attention data, tag cloud moderation and past, presence & future of Last.fm. they also shared some stunning usage numbers:

15mio tracks are scrobbled each day (that’s 1575 174 /sec or 6billion tracks since 2003). there are 190mio artists, 70 mio tracks, 700k tracks available for streaming, 145k artist wikis.

14.45 - CTO Amazon Werner Vogels sells us on S3, EC2 & SQS (Simple Queueing Service) and encourages companies to compete on ideas, not on technology. currently, the 30/70-switch rule demands 70% resources spent on the technological “heavy lifting”, while only 30% go into the product/idea. posterboy S3-implementations include SmugMug, SecondLife (just for client-downloads), YouOS; renderRocket (a virtual renderfarm) is one of few current EC2-users. interesting detail: Mechnical Turk’s not internationally available because of conflicts with labour-laws.

16.20 - according to this post, Kevin Rose is about to make an announcement regarding digg later today. stay tuned for real-time updates

17.20 - Rose enters the stage… his talks’ topic is “the future of crowd generated media”…talking about the Digg-ecosystems, motivations for users to digg & submit content - Digg trys to buid incentives for users on every level (frontpage-exposure, traffic, networks of friends etc). he’s mostly summarizing what Digg has been doing the past two years. enhancing Digg (stuff they’re working on): how to manage a user-community of 900k, how-to implement fact-checking on stories (Digg does community-based, since a paid employees a la netscape.com won’t scale). Digg wants to enable/create connections between users based on several numbers - Diggs, buries, comments, word-strength etc. showing some slides on development of Digg-usage since 2005 + summarizing their flash-tools + announcing a “Flash Toolkit” later that year, which should help publishers monitoring their stories. commitment on APIs & export of user attention-data. finally the announcement: Digg is going to support OpenID in the future (also see TechCrunch)

that’s it for today…Wifi didnt really work very well, plus it’s not free maybe we’re more lucky tomorrow.

endless.com - Amazon’s speciality shopping site for handbags and shoes is the eCommerce giant’s answer to niche-site like.com - though it lacks adavanced features like visual search.

two years ago, Technorati was one of the first sites to introduce the concept of tagging (aka ‘folksonomy’, a term relating to taxonomy). a good time for an update of their tag-pages…

earlier than probably expected by most, Linden Labs released the source-code of their SecondLife client under GPLv2 today. while this move already earned a lot of praise among the community, the biggest steps towards an open virtual world - i.e. opening up backend-services and grid-servers - is yet to be done. on the downside, it remains to be seen how this affects the already shattered stability of SecondLife in the short term.

rumours of Yahoo! aquiring MyBlogLog seem to get a second rehash…bloggers seem to remain more skeptical this time

more news from Yahoo! at Read/WriteWeb: Yahoo! Go 2.0 is the company’s answer to Google’s latest mobile efforts like their mobile Gmail-app. the java-based mobile client integrates various Yahoo!-services like search, maps, mail, photos (flickr) and news.

while Apple is almost certainly quite likely going to announce feature-movie downloads for the iTunes Music Store on next tuesdays special event, Amazon is first off the mark by having launched their movie download-service Unbox.com tonight. Unbox offers TV-episodes for $2 USD and movies in the range from $8 to 20$ for download, movies are also rented for $2 - $3 (that is for one playback!). according to TechCrunch, video is delivered in both a DVD-quality hi-res-file and a low-res version suitable for portable devices (both using DRM’ed Windows Media). Unbox.com is currently available to US-customers only.

Amazon broke todays biggest news (via TechCrunch) by announcing EC2 (’Elastic Comute Cloud’) - a hosting service allowing customers to instantly add virtual servers on-demand.

using a locally executed java-tool, system-administrators can configure individual server-images (nicked ‘AMI’, Amazon Machine Image) or customize default-templates. currently there is no definite info on which operating systems will be supported, but I’ld suspect a variety of linux-based systems (though the concept should also work fine with Microsoft-systems). the image is deployed to S3 (Amazon’s Simple Storage Service launched earlier this year) and instantly booted up & ready for action. EC2’s virtual servers equal a physical system equipped with 1.7Ghz Xeon CPU, 1.75GB RAM and 250MB/s bandwidth.

cost structure for running an AMI is a bit complicated: $0.10 per running hour (= $72 per month), $0.15 per GB/month (that’s the usual price of S3) and $0.20 per GB of traffic (S3-price, again).

I compared EC2’s pricing to server4you, one of germany’s most significant low-cost providers. for monthly EUR 40,- (=$51) you get a slightly weaker virtual machine (2Ghz CPU, 0.75GB RAM) including 60GB Harddisk and 3.000GB monthly traffic (additional traffic comes at EUR 0.29 = $0.37) at these metrics, EC2 would cost $72 (CPU) + $9 (storage) + $600 (3.000GB traffic) = $681! phew!

in a nutshell: if Amazon wants to compete with low-cost providers aiming at small/medium-traffic sites (which they probably don’t want to, anyway), they will have to grant large amounts of free-traffic. for high-traffic servers (6TB and beyond), EC2’s pricing already is competitive. there’s no doubt that virtual servers ondemand is an intriguing concept with the potential to shake up IT-infrastructur - for now EC2 is only available to a limited number of Amazon Web Services-customers.