"Increasingly, we see that organizations of all sizes are putting AWS to use in new, innovative, and mission-critical ways," wrote Amazon Web Services Evangelist Jeff Barr in a blog post. "These organizations have told us that they need a more direct and more discreet way to request assistance and to report problems."

The new services don't come particularly cheap, costing $100 per month or $0.10 per dollar of total monthly usage for silver level (whichever is greater), or the greater of $400 per month or $0.10-$0.20 per dollar of total monthly usage for gold level.

Amazon is also beefing up support options for free customers with the release of the new AWS Service Hearth Dashboard that monitors the status of all AWS services. Amazon says that during outages, users can expect to see updates from the team every 15-30 minutes until things are fixed. Status updates can be accessed via the page or by RSS.

If Amazon really wants to upgrade their free support center, we suggest they build something off the excellent Get Satisfaction service, which just released an API yesterday. Some of Amazon's web services already have a page on Get Satisfaction, but the company has yet to send over any official support reps.

No, I don't mean my idea personally (although I do have some ideas for the company), but rather the collective ideas of every Starbucks loyalist, hopped up on caffeine. Simply put, My Starbucks Idea is a socially driven marketplace for Starbucks-related ideas that will help the company reinvent itself.

You know better than anyone else what you want from Starbucks. So tell us. What’s your Starbucks Idea? Revolutionary or simple -- we want to hear it. Share your ideas, tell us what you think of other people’s ideas and join the discussion. We’re here, and we’re ready to make ideas happen. Let’s get started.

All you need to do to participate is sign up on the site using a username, password, and an email address. Once you're logged in, you can post your idea in one of 13 categories:

Every posted idea immediately shows up in the recent ideas queue, where it is voted on in a Digg-style manner. If it gets enough votes, it gets 'promoted' to the popular ideas list and top all-time list, from which Starbucks employees and management pick the best ideas to actually implement in stores. If your idea catches someone's eye, it will be labeled as **under review**, and if they actually decide to implement it, you will see a **coming soon** tag next to the idea.

A complete list of ideas that are going to be implemented can be found in the ideas in action section of the site.

Overall, the site is an absolutely great idea. In many ways it is very similar to Dell's IdeaStorm which I similarly praised. Every company could benefit from its own implementation of a socially driven marketplace for ideas, especially major consumer brands such as Starbucks and Apple, which have developed an incredibly loyal core following. Such marketplaces can help companies capitalize on the passions of their their most important fans and deliver on the promises of the next big thing without huge research budgets.

My Starbucks Idea has been a huge success so far, just like Dell's IdeaStorm before it. Approximately a month after launching, the site has gotten a plethora of great idea submissions from Starbucks-lovers, and the most popular submissions have gotten tens of thousands of points (votes) and hundreds of comments. As long as Starbucks keeps letting the community freely voice its opinion and keeps implementing the crème de la crème of the community's ideas, the company has nothing to lose and everything to gain.

Disclaimer: I own Starbucks stock.

AideRSS's "post rank" algorithm scores items in any feed for the number of comments, Diggs, tags in Del.icio.us and inbound links it's got. You can then view, or subscribe by RSS, to just the 50%, 20% or most popular items inside that particular feed. The new Firefox plug-in lets you apply these filters on the fly inside Google Reader with just two clicks.

The first 200 RWW readers that click through this link can get access to the plug-in immediately. The plugin uses GreaseMonkey (no separate download required), which the company says isn't playing nicely with the wonderful new Firefox 3 Beta, so FF3 users won't be able to use it yet. Update: We're hearing reports that you can turn disable addon version checking in Firefox and then use this plug-in with FF 3 Beta. Likewise, in the spirit of "it's in private Beta" users with Greasemonkey already installed and turned on may need to turn it off first. See this customer service thread for details.

Here at RWW we use AideRSS regularly, some of us daily. It produces simple, powerful and clearly useful results. In addition to using it in any feed reader, there's all kinds of other things you can do with a feed filtered by popularity. See, for example, our recent post on bricolage blogs ("10 Sites for Finding Wonderful Things"), where the most popular items from 10 prolific blogs are filtered using AideRSS and displayed dynamically using FeedDigest.

AideRSS can filter almost any RSS feed, including tag and search feeds. Popularity, as expressed by explicit attention gestures like AideRSS indexes, may not be the perfect determination of quality - but it's not a bad start at all. AideRSS is a great little tool and we expect that many Google Reader users will find this new extension very useful.

How It Works

DreamAds appear only during your REM sleep, as a footer overlay to your dream. According to scientists, things that we see during our sleep are up to 10 times more influential than the things that we see in our real life. And this is exactly what makes DreamAds a potential cash-cow for Google.

DreamAds works with a very light apparel that you put on your head. It is said to be so light that you won't even feel it and so it won't disturb your sleep in any way. The apparel will be distributed for free, starting with a beta rollout in San Francisco - dates as yet unknown. Here is a concept drawing of the device, which we got from our Google source:

Full image

On the business model, we were told us that the ultimate goal is a CPA model (Cost Per Action), whereby ads are embedded into dreams so that users can 'action' them. However the current technology isn't that sophisticated. So in the first version of DreamAds, Google will start with a 'Cost Per Impression' based ad model.

Conclusion

This is an intriguing product that has the potential to take Adsense to the next level. Google will probably be able to make around $500 per DreamAds apparel user. And with the upcoming CPA version, the high relevancy could increase Google's revenues to $5,000 per person. Think about that: $5,000 * 1 billion users means an unparalleled distribution model for advertisers and a gigantic revenue source for Google.

Our source didn't confirm this, but we've heard a rumor that Google has already started a private beta program with a limited number of trusted testers in the Mountain View area. ReadWriteWeb will stay on top of this story and bring you updates as they happen. In the meantime, please share your thoughts in the comments.