ReadWriteWeb

We're hearing of more and more startups using Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) for their storage needs; and this stat will please both them and their users. Webmetrics reported today that Amazon S3 maintained more than 99.99 percent uptime for the month of October, exceeding the performance requirement of its recently introduced SLA. Webmetrics monitored the response times and availability for the REST- and SOAP-based APIs for Amazon S3 during October, using its GlobalWatch Monitoring platform. Performance results for each API were as follows:

S3 has more than five billion objects currently under management; including for 37Signals, webmail.us, YouOS, ElephantDrive, adaptiveblue, and more. Indeed just this week PollDaddy, the poll app we use at R/WW, reported they'd switched to S3. Polldaddy told us that "the system [S3] is very stable and all polls will now be served off Amazon S3 so there should never be any lag."

Starting October 1st, Amazon introduced a new SLA for S3 guaranteeing users 99.9 percent service uptime. If uptime is less than 99 percent, customers can apply for a service credit of 25 percent of their total S3 charges for the month. If the uptime is 99 percent but less than 99.9 percent, customers can apply for a service credit of 10 percent of their monthly charges.

Once again we're seeing the benefits of Amazon's HaaS (Hardware as a Service) strategy. As Emre Sokullu said in his article, Amazon is leveraging its deep scalability know-how and expertise. It's making web publishing even easier and cheaper - and reliable. This is a real game changer on the Web, especially in this new age of utility computing.

NYTimes.com has today launched a new version of its technology section, which includes more aggregation of news from around the Web. Of most interest perhaps is that its Techmeme-like news aggregator, Blogrunner, has been fully integrated into the Tech frontpage. It has the headline "Technology Headlines From Around the Web" and is positioned in the middle of the page. Blogrunner links will also feature at the bottom of NYT articles. Finally, two new feature content providers were announced today: IDG Media Brands and paidContent.org.

NYTimes.com/Tech Editor Saul Hansell told Read/WriteWeb in an email that Blogrunner "is our answer to Techmeme, integrated with our main site. It is technology we've built ourselves, based on Blogrunner, a company we bought last year." Further, Hansell said that "unlike Google News and Techmeme, we aren't trying to prove machines can be better editors than people. We have a hybrid model, with Web Crawlers and Editors both helping find and ranks posts."

Blogrunner.com is a news aggregator that was acquired by the Times Company in 2005. NY Times has been building on the service since then - at one stage it was called "The Annotated New York Times". In February 2006 we wrote that Blogrunner offered an "interesting way to remix the NY Times and bring in external citations"; although we didn't think it was one of the top news aggregators at that point.

It's taken a long time for NY Times to integrate external news aggregation technology into their website, but kudos to them for doing it now. It provides opportunities for leading tech blogs - such as Techcrunch, PaidContent and of course Read/WriteWeb - to distribute their content to a wider audience. It also exposes NY Times readers to the more social - and arguably much faster - news cycle of leading blogs.

Blogrunner itself still seems behind Techmeme in some areas. For example Techmeme provides an easy-to-scan look at all related stories, on its frontpage. Whereas you only get the top story on Blogrunner's frontpage - you need to click the "related" link to see all the coverage. Also, and admittedly this could be seen as a pro rather than a con by mainstream readers, the publications tracked by Blogrunner are chosen by New York Times editors (thankfully R/WW seems to be among the chosen ones!).

So there is a strong editorial focus with Blogrunner, which NY Times states in its press release "enables readers to get a thoughtful overview of the day's top print and online coverage, all on one site." I think this is a sensible move, as a key part of the NY Times experience is its reputation for editorial quality - so Blogrunner should leverage that. As noted above, Google News and Techmeme by comparison are automated (although with both, the initial news sources were editorially selected).

All in all a great move by NY Times - tell us what you think in the comments. Will you use the NY Times Tech frontpage more because of this new feature?

The big news of the day is that MySpace, the leading social networking platform, has joined Google's OpenSocial project as a partner. OpenSocial is a set of common APIs for building social applications across the web - and it will be officially released tonight here. The press release today states that the MySpace/Google partnership "spearheads an initiative to standardize and simplify the development of social applications." It also states that MySpace will continue building out its own MySpace Platform, which will support OpenSocial.

We will have a deeper analysis of the news later today, but for now here are the main bits from the press release. That is followed by a screenshot showing Flixter in MySpace, and a video that Robert Scoble did with Chris DeWolfe, CEO of MySpace, and Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google.

“Our partnership with Google allows developers to gain massive distribution without unnecessary specialized development for every platform,” said Chris DeWolfe, Chief Executive Officer and co-founder of MySpace. “This is about helping the start-up spend more time building a great product rather than rebuilding it for every social network. We’re pleased to collaborate with Google to establish a landmark standard for social applications.”

As a founding member of OpenSocial, MySpace will provide critical user mass and platform guidance. The OpenSocial standards are designed to evolve through contribution from the open source community and as new features are developed by various partners. Global members of the OpenSocial community include Engage.com, Friendster, hi5, Hyves, imeem, LinkedIn, Ning, Oracle, orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, Six Apart, Tianji, Viadeo, and XING.

“As the most trafficked website in the country and the most popular social network in the world, MySpace is one of the leading forces in the global social Web,” said Dr. Eric Schmidt, Chairman of the Executive Committee and Chief Executive Officer of Google. “We’re thrilled to grow our strategic relationship with MySpace by joining forces on this important initiative.”

Here is a screenshot of Flixster integrated within MySpace (click for full-size image):

For the most recent episode of Read/WriteTalk I sat down with David Karp, the founder of Tumblr. Tumblr is a platform that makes it easy to create Tumblelogs - which Wikipedia defines as:

A variation of a blog, that favors short-form, mixed-media posts over the longer editorial posts frequently associated with blogging. Common post formats found on tumblelogs include links, photos, quotes, dialogues, and video. Unlike blogs, this format is frequently used to share the author's creations, discoveries, or experiences without providing a commentary. One of the many tumblelog sevices is tumblr.

Tumblr is announcing a number of new features today. We touch briefly on these features in the podcast, but also discuss David's vision for Tumblr. We also discuss how his service is specifically different than two competitors (Twitter and FriendFeed). In this post, I'll quickly cover how Tumblr is different, as well as put the spotlight on the new features being announced for Tumblr.

WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg was at WordCamp Argentina yesterday where he announced the forthcoming launch of a new product offering - the WordPress Theme Marketplace.

As liveblogged by Leo Prieto of the popular Spanish blog FayerWayer, Mullenweg told conference attendees: "The idea is that designers will be able to upload themes, we put a price (Automattic takes half), and users can navigate the directory and quickly select, pay and install a template, everything from the same place and without major expertise." (Thank you, Google Translate. And thanks to San Francisco based consultant Antonio Altamirano who Twittered about the announcement.)

The Theme Marketplace will provide an incentive for developers to build high quality WP themes and provide a frame work and distribution channel for those already interested in selling themes. No time frame was announced and the options for the WordPress.org community aren't clear yet.

With the rise of social networking and online photosharing, more and more people are putting their likeness online. But often, it's hard to get a perfect shot of yourself. Holding a camera out in front of your body and looking in a mirror (how I took the photo below), you often end up with something crooked, poorly lit, with a distracting background and messy hair -- not really the way you want to represent yourself on social networking sites perspective employers (or love interests) might be looking at!

Enter Pixoo.us, a new service based in Spain that employs a network of graphic designers to fix profile photos to people to their specifications. Pixoo.us, which styles itself as a "beauty salon for social networking sites," is currently running a close beta test of its services. When it opens, profile picture touchups will cost $19.95 each and files are delivered within 24 hours.

MSN launched its sustainability focused content portal, MSN Green, this week and the announcement looked good enough. MSN will distribute videos and articles on environmental news from a wide variety of partner sites including heavy hitters TreeHugger and Grist.org.

Now that the site has been live for a few days, it's clear that MSN Green is nothing more than an object lesson. If you think that big company acquisitions of small technology innovators lead to stagnation - wait until you see what a content partnership like this looks like.

MSN Green is a classic example of cynical crap; a super low-investment way for big media to sell ads against ostensibly important content.

According to New York-based rmbr, which is currently operating in closed alpha, organizing photos is a pain. When you get back from vacation, tagging, sorting and organizing your 400 vacation photos is a lot of work -- and no one wants to associate vacation with work! Instead, many people just dump their photos in chronological order into a photo sharing service like Flickr or Webshots. And most of your friends likely don't want to click through your entire vacation slide show just to find the small handful of photos that might be of interest.

To make the process of tagging, organizing, rating, and sorting photos less work and more fun, rmbr has developed a series of games based around photosharing. This concept is called funware, and according to rmbr co-founder and CEO Gabe Zichermann, a veteran of the computer game industry, funware is already employed all over the web. Yahoo! Answers, he told me, is really just a research game, i'm in like with you is a flirting game, and so on.

A virtual stripper named "Melissa" that promises to progressively remove items of clothing for viewers who solve online CAPTCHAs is actually part of a scheme by spammers to crack web site registration traps meant to keep them out, reported security researchers this week.

Every time a user correctly enters the text on a CAPTCHA, the user is rewarded by Melissa removing another item of clothing. The catch is that the CAPTCHAs are being fed from real services, like Yahoo! Mail's signup process. So users looking for a free skin show are actually helping spammers and scammers thwart online security measures that usually keep their robots out.

Over the past 10 years, Corel, Sun, IBM and others have tried to compete with Microsoft in the office software business, but thus far none of them have been able to take a significant chunk of Microsoft's large market share, which generates revenues exceeding $15 billion each year. These companies have tried everything; including Sun open sourcing their StarOffice suite and releasing it as the free OpenOffice. Yet, even this very compelling move has not been able to make a serious dent in the market.

However, with web 2.0 and the rise of Rich Internet Applications there are renewed hopes for entrepreneurs to be able to compete with Microsoft's Office juggernaut. Now these smaller players can leverage the sharing & collaboration capabilities of the Internet, remove installation & maintenance frictions, and provide globally accessible office software.