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."

Comments

Nice place. To store encrypted backups, that is

[Idaho]

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....

Re:Nice place. To store encrypted backups, that is

[alvinrod]

Personally, I wouldn't trust facebook to begin with. I haven't read their policy in regards to this storage, but almost anything else that you put on facebook, whether it's pictures, a blog, or anything else that you could they claim that they own it. You're still allowed to repost that material on other websites, but only for non-commercial purposes. So in other words, if you or I were to write the next great American novel and post chapters of it on facebook, they now own it.

I don't care whether they offer ulimited storage or offer any storage for free. If they maintain that storing my data on their servers grants them some form of ownership over that data, then I will never use their service and won't encourage that anyone else use it either. This kind of thinking and corporate greed disgusts me, but there's no law requiring me to use it. Caveat emptor, I suppose.

Got my attention

[Creamsickle]

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.

Re:Revolutionary?

[realthing02]

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.

Hardware?

[LSD-OBS]

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.