TechCrunch (and others -- including Rob Hof of BusinessWeek and Mike at Techdirt) is reporting the launch of AWS S3, Amazon Web Services' new product - Simple Storage Service. Essentially, Amazon wants to make building scalable web apps easy by taking the pain out of building an infrastructure for data.

Unfortunately, they've done two things wrongs so far.

Problem 1. It still requires infrastructure

The first problem is fairly simple to explain. But, it's a problem that's really hard to solve: Transferring all this data requires a lot of infrastructure. Amazon made it easy to store the data, keeping it safe and redundant and reliable, but you still have to get it to and from Amazon. Adding in the traffic of getting the data to and from users, and this still requires some infrastructure.

This isn't an Amazon specific problem, but it is a big problem. Unfortunately, Amazon's pricing model may have made this problem worse.

Problem 2. Data silos still exist

In my opinion, this is where Amazon got it really wrong (and Openomy got it really right). With Amazon's S3, you can specify Access Control, meaning "this file belongs to this Amazon customer and no one else" (as identified by email address). That's nice, but it's then up to the web app to make sure that people who register on their site use their Amazon email. Meh, that's annoying.

The large hurdle is that S3 doesn't allow the intertwining of each user's data from all the different web applications they use. That means that your data is still totally locked out and unavailable to you!

In short, Amazon just moves the problem down a level, to their servers -- organizing files by application, rather than by user.

This means that your data is yet again not made available to you when you want it where you want it. You're still locked in to the application. If the web app doesn't want to give you access to your data, you have no access to it. If the web app shuts down without notice, your data is gone.

This is where Openomy shines. Rather than store files based on applications, Openomy stores files based on the user. This gives the user access to his/her data at any time, ever. As a user, you own your data on Openomy.

By doing so, Openomy completely eradicates Problem 2. There are no more silos of your data. And, in the process, Problem 1 becomes less interesting because the benefit outweighs the harm.

Conclusion: Amazon S3 is very, very interesting. It just happens to fall short in a couple areas. It'll be really fun to watch how this space turns out over the next few months and years.

Tags: web 2.0, Amazon, AWS, S3, TechCrunch, Openomy

I'm fuming right now, so if you don't want to read a rant, please move on.

A few days ago, our ISP -- Coloquest (who gets a rel=nofollow because they don't deserve the Google Juice) -- informed us of a notification they received about a file being uploaded and made publicly available via our new public feature which was a virus and was circulating through email. We told our ISP that we would notify the user, give them 36 hours to remove the file, and if they didn't we would remove their account. They didn't remove the file (because they're scum), so we removed their account.

Over the next couple days, apparently a few more of the same files appeared through more fake users. They continued to spread via email, and apparently (though we never received notification again) our ISP was again notified. Rather than telling us, our ISP decided to simply block the IP address of our web server. Of course, this means we were "down" even though we weren't really down.

It took us a bit to figure out what was going on (and why we could access our web server from within our internal network, but not externally) and sent our ISP a mail. They responded with a forwarded complaint, and then stopped responding when we told them we took care of the issue. They also didn't respond to repeated phone calls. These guys are class acts, right? (I'm just glad we don't have any virtual servers through them and actually administer the servers ourselves in a data center we have controlled access to.)

Now, I understand our ISP was just doing their job trying to keep malicious content off the network. But, so are we. If you simply notify us, we'll take the appropriate action. And when you notified us the first time, we did so. But, it's pretty hard to know if it's continuing to happen if we don't ever receive a complaint. Now that we know, we've temporarily disabled public files and we'll build a virus scanning component which will run before a file is made public.

Anyway, I think Coloquest (also DBA Gigenet so don't be fooled) performed really poorly today. And it's the second time in as many weeks that I can say that about them. Luckily, they don't own the physical data center (StarPoint Digital owns it, who I have nothing but praise for) so I don't have to deal with them too often.

What GDrive could be
Since the Google Analyst Day, there has been a lot of speculation about an apparently upcoming Google project: Google Drive (GDrive).

Greg Linden found this gem within Google's presentation, where it says Google's goal is to provide as much storage as possible to user's so it is accessible globally.

With infinite storage, we can house all user files, including: emails, web history, pictures, bookmarks, etc and make it accessible from anywhere (any device, any platform, etc).

We already have efforts in this direction in terms of GDrive, GDS [Google Desktop Search], Lighthouse, but all of them face bandwidth and storage constraints today.

ZDNet's Garett Rogers followed that up with a post about what he thinks GDrive will be:

The GDrive service will provide anyone (who trusts Google with their data) a universally accessible network share that spans across computers, operating systems and even devices. Users will no longer require third party applications to emulate this behaviour by abusing Gmail storage.

This all seems awesome, I must admit. However, there is a lot of speculation here, and unfortunately, no hint at what may actually come. Perhaps Google wants to make a walled garden of your info, without providing APIs. Then your data is only as good as Google allows it to be. If they have great applications to use (say, Google Office) then it might be a great idea. But if they don't (like, say, Google Base), then this project is pretty lame, in my opinion. It essentially becomes any other online file storage program.

GDrive already exists
The great thing about GDrive, however, is that it already exists in the form of Openomy. Openomy isn't a Google product, but it is almost exactly what GDrive is being speculated to be.

By providing a web site to upload your files, we're offering free online storage for up to 1Gb. But the real meat of Openomy is in the open APIs. It's something we continuously preach, but that's because it's something we really believe in. By providing our users with a single place to store their data, and giving them the ability to use that data anywhere in the world through our APIs, we hope to be helping users kick ass.

Notice the difference as compared to GDrive, which may not have open APIs: We no longer have to create the Openomy Office suite -- others can create individual parts of the suite and integrate them with Openomy using our APIs. This is how the web should work -- loosely coupled parts brought together to form a whole network.

So while you anticipate the launch of GDrive, consider registering for Openomy as well.

Tags: GDrive, GoogleDrive, Openomy, FileSystem, APIs

Maurice and I will be presenting next weekend (Saturday, 3/11) at the Techdirt Greenhouse workshop.

This is going to be our first ever trip to Silicon Valley and we couldn't be any more excited. We're looking forward to presenting (our first presentation), meeting people and starting conversations, and experiencing the craziness that we know simply as "the Valley."

If anyone would like to meet up, we're going to be around Friday and Saturday nights, so we'd love to hang out with as many people as possible (we'd love to get a big group of people together to hang out). Email me if you're around and I'll give you my cell phone number.

Also, I want to thank Mike at Techdirt for giving us the opportunity to present -- hopefully we'll do a decent job for our first time.

Tags: Greenhouse, Techdirt, Openomy