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Facebook Quietly Offers Storage to Developers
Lucas123 writes "Facebook has quietly started offering beta testers access to the latest version of a new storage service, according to Computerworld's Brian Fonseca. The wiki does warn users that the page is still in development and that users should make sure that data used in testing the service is properly backed up. Nick O'Neill, creator of the blogsite AllFacebook.com, said it would be "revolutionary" if the service is free."
What, like Google offering Picasa users 1gb of free storage for their digital photos, or web hosting companies offering free sites to developers? I think they'll need to try a bit harder than that!
What, you mean like S3 was?
Or the "Unlimited" storage, or multi-terabyte storage, offered by budget hosts for $3.00 / mth?
It will only take a few thousand users to store their mp3/movie collection on this thing to make the provider cry uncle. The last time I checked, storage costs $$$$$$$$.
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...and slashdot quietly announces it to the world.
Facebook has quietly started offering beta testers access to the latest version of a new storage service--maybe they should have made them sign NDAs.
The funny part is the summary has the word "revolutionary" in quotes, and the blog post supposedly being quoted does not use that word. The phrase in the blog post is: "an even bigger revolution", which is stupid in and of itself, but they should at least get the quote right.
A problem with all these online services (no matter who hosts them), is that you (the user) no longer control your own data. This is problematic from both a privacy perspective, as well as an ownership perspective. For example, what if $nicecompany is taken over/bought out/etc. by $evilcompany and they decide not to let me access my data anymore? Even more if it goes bankrupt..
Privacy is a problem that would be even more important to anyone running (a/their own) company.
So I would not say it's going to be revolutionary. It might be a nice place to store well-encrypted backups, and maybe to copy/paste really unimportant files. But for anything else, no thanks, I'll use my own slow server (hosted on my home ADSL line).
That is a possible solution, if google etc. would start selling appliances that even an idiot could install, and offer the same service so I could host it myself, that'd be great. I know they are already doing this to some extent, but this is where I can imagine some real growth....
Every expression is true, for a given value of 'true'
Facebook Quietly Offers Storage to Developers
isn't any announcement made in text format, by definition, quiet?
I mean, unless you're using the Sam Kinison text-to-speech plugin for firefox.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
I use Amazon S3 through Jungle Disk. I can also access it directly with Perl, Python, and Ruby. At $0.15/gb/month, S3 is very affordable - especially considering you only pay for what you use with no need to pre-pay for a bunch of storage in advance. I like Amazon (in this case) - the cost is low and is dynamically obtained.
I'm actually thinking about starting a small hosting company. S3 is what I'll probably go with, but Facebook has definitely got my attention with this announcement (my kids are on the damn thing all the time). If they can indeed hit that "free" mark, or even just make it low, this could be a big success.
On the 0th day, God created C
yourname@facebook.com
I'm predicting it...
Also, what better way to target ads at users than to look through all of their stuff. Ok, so maybe it won't be that overhanded, but I'm wondering what the ulterior motive is here- especially if it's free storage, which TFA admittingly says it probably wont be.
Not sure why this is in the Hardware section, unless they mean Facebook will actually be sending flash drives and the like to their lucky users.
Actually, that would be a nice way to go one-up the current horde of online storage providers.
Today's weirdness is tomorrow's reason why. -- Hunter S. Thompson
It opens the door to more developers. Today if you write a facebook application that holds user data, then you'd better be ready to build out a large infrastructure to store that data if your application becomes popular. In a world where facebook will store end user application data the little guy developers have a chance.
Blogsite is an odd portmanteau. I would have gone with blagoblag.
i really think this story is missing the point...this doesn't look like an API for file storage, i think it's just going to enable devs creating applications for facebook to store any info in db's on facebooks servers rather than their own. my guess is just that it's been taken out of context. facebook won't be offering file storage at all, because that's not what this API is for
This is Facebook we're talking about. It's already loaded with images.
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
TFA doesn't really reflect what the new API is meant to do. Having done some work on Facebook applications, one of the major issues that tends to come up is the storage of user data. Previously, you would need to store any information you needed in your own database. For significantly popular applications, this presents a major load issue. With the new API, it looks like developing applications with a high level of persistent information should be simpler, and require less load on the applications server.
I'd also strongly suspect that Facebook would crack down hard on anyone trying to use this API to store large quantities of data.
Is this supposed to be better than those crappy $1 gifts they offer to users?
Yeah, I figured that as soon as they made it possible to send emails from the Compose Message page. It's about the one major method of communication on the net they've not got their fingers in.
What are you talking about? What do images have to do with this?
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