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GoGrid became the second cloud services vendor to offer dedicated intramural connections across its network today. Amazon has been offering a somewhat similar service called Direct Connect since August. Called CloudLink, traffic is sent over a private line inside GoGrid's network, making it useful for disaster recovery and fast data replication uses.

Last week, Amazon announced its principal format for electronic books distributed to its new Android-based Kindle Fire series of full-color, touchscreen tablets would "support," to borrow Amazon's choice of verbs, HTML5. Kindle Format 8 (KF8) will replace the Mobi 7 format that Amazon acquired through its purchase of Mobipocket in 2005.

"Supporting" HTML5 may have as multifarious a definition as "supporting" the Republican Party. It does automatically hoist the supporter to an exalted plateau in the public eye, alongside Apple, Google, Microsoft, Adobe, and Opera Software, all of which have also pledged their undying support for HTML5. But without exception, all of these companies support some unique aspect or concept which, in the absence of a hard standard, may successfully be characterized as HTML5.

Amazon just released its third quarter sales, indicating that net income is at $63 million, or $0.14 a share, down from $231 million, or $0.51 a share a year ago. This is a 73% drop in quarterly profit from the third quarter of 2010. Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S reports that analysts expected Amazon's third-quarter earnings to land at 24 cents per share on a revenue of $10.95 billion.

If you are looking for a textbook example of how not to design your website shopping experience, take a look at what has happened recently with Target.com. They left their partnership with Amazon earlier this summer and started using a bevy of consultants and VARs to create their own ecommerce site. It has been one mess, to say the least.

We aren't just talking about broken links, or pages that are slow to load, or problems with search, although there are plenty of all of these issues to go around. It is the totality of the screw-up that has gotten attention. The latest recounting of woe can be found here in AdAge.

Amazon has just announced the opening of the French Kindle Store, offering over 35,000 French-language e-books, all 28 L'Express bestsellers, hundreds of graphic novels and over 4,000 free classics. In all language, the store will offer French customers over 825,000 titles.

The first French-language Kindle is the non-touch model just released in the U.S., available for €99.00. It offers a 600x800, 6-inch screen with 1.25GB of internal storage. The release date is October 14.

As Netflix begins the process of spinning out its streaming business from its traditional DVD rentals, I wanted to examine the alternative streaming services that are currently available. I looked at Amazon Prime, Hulu Plus, Vudu.com and Justin.tv. Added to this mix is what is available on Comcast's Xfinity service to just show what can be found from a typical cable TV company. (Of course, if you don't live in a Comcast service area, you can't subscribe to their streaming service online.) I choose five random movies and five TV series to see what was available on each service.

With the announcements of Facebook's "frictionless sharing" and Amazon's Fire color Kindle, my colleagues Joe Brockmeier and Richard MacManus have both weighed in on their thoughts about where the modern Web is going. I think both opinion pieces hold some worthy points, but I have my own fears and thoughts. It comes down to whom do you trust more to own your data: Facebook, Google or Amazon. And while there are other choices (notably Microsoft and Apple, plus numerous smaller entities), my conclusion is that none of Big Three has the ideal set of circumstances here.

Alongside its Kindle Fire tablet device and new line of Kindle e-readers, Amazon introduced another new product today: Amazon Silk, a mobile Web browser that rethinks the way browsers have traditionally worked.

Silk essentially splits the architecture of the Web browser in half, relying on both the computing power of the hardware and on the remote servers that comprise Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). It relies on the cloud to call up certain elements of a page, acting sort of like a content delivery network built right into the browser. The company claims that this unique approach will offer a much faster browser experience to end users.

Today, the culmination of a summer of speculation and hype comes to an end. Amazon has announced its tablet, the Kindle Fire. It is a 7-inch little beast priced at $199 that will integrate all of Amazon's media properties and retail channels into a device that the company will push hard through the holiday season. With that comes the Amazon Android Appstore and the ability to tap into Amazon's resources to push premium apps to the Kindle Fire.

The Kindle Fire is going to be popular. So, what does this mean for the Amazon Appstore vis-à-vis the Android Market? Can Amazon overcome its ugly recent history with Android developers and create a go-to market to place premium apps? That is the subject of today's ReadWriteMobile poll.

In addition to the hotly anticipated Kindle Fire tablet, Amazon has announced a range of new e-ink Kindles. The first is a a full-screen, touch-controlled e-reader in the vein of its leading competitor, Barnes & Noble's latest Nook. It's called the Kindle Touch. The Wi-Fi only model is $99, and the 3G version is $149. A lighter full-screen Kindle without touch controls will sell for $79. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos says that it's "75% lighter than previous generations." These Kindles ship on November 21.