Facebook Opens New Storage Service to Testing
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The social networking site's Data Store API beta program may indicated plans to offer a data storage service to developers.
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A new DVD-based storage appliance is aimed at making archiving data faster and retrieving it easier.
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I've not made much of a secret of the fact that I've been working on a new product, and am getting close to offering it as a public pre-alpha thing for Mac users only.  It's fairly Flickr-centric, sucking photos down from Flickr in a variety of ways and pushing up photos in others. Like Radio 8 and Google Reader, it has the ability to maintain an output feed of stuff you want to pass on to friends and associates. As I was developing this I wished that Flickr had the ability to store simple text files, because I needed a place to put an RSS 2.0 feed with enclosures on behalf of each user. Of course I used Amazon S3, but I had to implement my own lightweight identity system so that Juan couldn't accidentally or intentionally replace Alice's feed. If only every user had a place where they could store stuff that's net accessible so that once and for all we could stop inventing new places. I was inspired to write about this when I read an Uncov review of Pownce where they reminded me that they were reselling S3 storage at a big markup. What if the users had their own S3 storage that they paid for themselves?  Then it occurred to me to ask if people thought S3 could be an end-user thing. I'd like to find out, so if some non-technical users who have Amazon accounts would like to try setting up an S3 account, I'd be interested in hearing how it goes. Here's an idea of how you get started. 1. You must already have an Amazon account. Nothing special about it, if you buy shirts or books or stereo equipment from Amazon, you use the same account for S3 storage. Already that's pretty easy, millions of people have Amazon accounts, right? 2. Visit this page on Amazon, ignore all the stuff about objects and buckets. In the right margin is a big button that says "Sign up for this web service." Click the button. A very familiar page appears, asking you to sign into your Amazon account as if you were going to buy something (you are!). 3. From there, I'm not sure what you see, because I have already enabled my account. But the end result of signing up is that you get two strings with weird names: Your Access Key ID and Your Secret Access Key. Any software that would save a document in S3-space on your behalf would need these two strange strings. In return each document would have a URL just like any other document on the web. Nothing strange about that.  4. You could also use the space to store stuff using an FTP-like app that runs in Firefox called S3 Organizer. It's about as hard to use as the Mac Finder or the Windows Explorer, i.e. it's no challenge for a moderately geeky user. The cool thing about it is that you're able to share anything you upload into S3 space with anyone else. You can even use BitTorrent to access any file to save you bandwidth bills and distribute the load round the net. It's all very easy to do, imho. As a developer who has to pay for his users' storage needs I would very much like to see users learn how to use S3 to store their stuff, so I can focus on writing software and fixing bugs instead of paying to store your stuff.
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Check out a new free market data service.
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New device offers 1TB of storage, can record seven channels simultaneously.
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Microsoft tests photo sharing, hosted storage in Windows Live services.
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Facebook lands a Web-based operating system company with pedigree papers.
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Company hopes increased storage will boost its format's fortunes.
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Microsoft have made a beta version of their new music store available to the public. The store is entirely browser-based and does not require a separate client like iTunes.
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An increasing number of firms are offering web storage for people with digital photo collections.
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TechWeb - The new rack-mount storage devices can act as file servers hosting files, or as local print servers.
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The popularity of Web 2.0 applications is prompting top storage vendors to reassess their tools and services.
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On the Stubbles blog, Frank Kleine has posted about the release of a new wrapper class he's developed to go around a virtual file system.    Some minutes ago I released the first version of vfsStream. vfsStream is a stream wrapper for a virtual file system that may be helpful in unit tests to mock the real file system. It can be used with any unit test framework, like PHPUnit or SimpleTest.   The idea for the class came about when he thought about the use of real databases vs test databases and applied it to file systems. You can grab the latest version from their trac website as well as get more information about known issues and a brief example of its use.
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Two new Web services launched last week aim to help people tap their friends for tips about where to eat, shop and play. -Leslie Walker
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MicrosoftÂ is testing a new subscription Hotmail service that includes 2GB of e-mail storage and a copy of Outlook 2003 to access the service from the desktop.
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Invited testers evaluate 'next generation' network that allows friends to edit friends.
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Facebook wants to make the data its members enter into the social network&#39;s profiles portable, so that they can move that data to other online services if they want, the company&#39;s CEO said Wednesday.That Facebook doesn&#39;t let them do this today is &quot;a flaw in the system&quot; and something the company wants to fix, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco.&quot;It&#39;s the users&#39; data. We want to [make it portable.] That&#39;s the goal,&quot; he said during a keynote speech in which he fielded questions from moderator and conference chair John Battelle and attendees.However, when pressed to provide a timetable for when Facebook might do this, Zuckerberg refrained from making a deadline commitment. &quot;I don&#39;t know,&quot; he said.The massive response from outside developers who have built, to date, about 6,000 applications for Facebook has been &quot;incredibly humbling,&quot; he said.Because&#160;Facebook chose to open up the platform&#160;at an early stage of its development, instead of refining the program internally for several years, the company is learning as it goes along, he said.That is partly the reason why the wording on the terms of service for developers may be read as giving too much power to Facebook over the third-party applications on its platform.However, Zuckerberg said Facebook isn&#39;t interested in &quot;yanking&quot; popular applications so that it can build them itself.While Facebook has to reserve the right to build whatever application it deems core to its social network, it doesn&#39;t plan to trample on its developers and steal their thunder.&quot;It wouldn&#39;t be good for us if we did that,&quot; he said.Opened to external developers in May, the platform is seen by many as containing well-designed tools and offering developers generous revenue opportunities, despite the terms of service language that Battelle highlighted and that has concerned developers who are investing time and money in creating Facebook applications.Still, Facebook has already had to step in and curb the behavior of some applications which, designed with self-promotion features intended to spur their adoption, annoyed users with unsolicited e-mails and intrusive message displays.Zuckerberg said it may take many years for the Facebook platform to reach a level of maturity, and in the meantime, the company will work hard to continually improve and refine it.He remained tight-lipped when asked about rumors that the company is in the latter stages of securing financing from a major Internet company, like Google or Microsoft.&quot;How&#39;s the financing going?&quot; Battelle asked him. &quot;Very well. We&#39;re almost all wrapped up,&quot; Zuckerberg answered, declining further comment.Facebook will likely more than double its staff of 300 to about 700 in the coming year, growth that Zuckerberg acknowledged is intense. Many of the new hires are referred by employees, he said.Asked if Facebook is contemplating hiring an experienced CEO to run the company, as fast-growing startups often do, Zuckerberg said that the focus is on &quot;developing a really good team,&quot; in part because there aren&#39;t many seasoned CEOs experienced in social networking.Zuckerberg also suggested that the company may be developing its own advertising platform, but declined to offer details, keeping mum when asked if the ad platform will syndicate ads outside of the Facebook site, thus becoming a potential competitor to networks from Google, Yahoo and others.Asked about the investigations from some U.S. attorneys general offices into Facebook&#39;s operations and policies regarding objectionable content and the presence of sexual predators among its members, Zuckerberg said the social network gives users very granular control over what data they share, how they share it and with whom.However, he acknowledged that he&#39;s not very familiar with how the company complies with civil and criminal investigation subpoenas.Founded in 2004, Facebook&#39;s popularity has been ballooning for the past year or so. Its user ranks have increased to 47 million active users today from 12 million in December. Over half of its active members return to the site daily.Web 2.0 Summit ends Friday.&#160;