Storage
I’ve been thinking a lot about Amazon’s S3, which stands for Simple Storage Service. One of the barriers to entry in creating imagebear.com, a domain I registered a long time ago, is bandwidth and disk space. While I’m sure I’m capable of producing a far nicer image browsing experience than Flickr, the cost has been far too prohibitive to try. It’s not like forums, where the disk and bandwidth usage is low because all you’re doing is transferring text, images take serious hits to both. With the Amazon service, I could actually do it, charging users just slightly above what it costs me and make a profit along the way.
But image sharing no longer has the same attraction to me as it did a few years ago (although I still have ideas I’d like to try), so I’ve been trying to think of other things it’s possible to do with this service. There must be really interesting projects that become available once bandwidth and disks no longer become commodities, even simple things like proper integration of image uploading within Chatbear or backup solutions for servers. The flowers of these thoughts will hopefully bloom eventually.
And don’t get me started on the Mechanical Turk (and no, that’s not a robot version of a Scrubs character).
