Life is grand

I just backed up the 5.5gig of my music collection to my Amazon S3 account using S3Fox Organiser. It was largely a painless process except for any song that had a # character in its name. Not sure why S3 won’t accept that but a simple rename sorted it.

I especially liked how the transfers are atomic. If for some reason a file failed half-way then it wouldn’t leave a half-uploaded file on S3. This made transfering 5.5gig painless with no worrying about what was and wasn’t uploaded properly.

Total cost? The initial 5.5gig transfer will cost me about one buck ten cents. From there on it will cost just under a dollar per month. Fantastic!

S3Fox is an extension for Firefox that gives you an FTP like view of your Amazon S3 account. You can upload and download files, view their URLs, create “directories” (S3 doesn’t technically support directories within buckets and so this has to be faked) and set the Access Control List on items.

Following along with Cardbox’s Tunesafe thread discussing using and monetizing Amazon’s S3 I came across the latest one which suggests gold buckets:

So the proposal is that Amazon S3 should have the equivalent of premium-rate phone lines. Since Amazon calls its fundamental unit of data segregation a “bucket”, the obvious term is “golden buckets”.

Now I am in agreement that the user should have an account with Amazon and not with Tunesafe. I believe the user should have his online storage and then allow the apps she wants to access it. Apps shouldn’t have disparate storage silos.

However I am not quite convinced about the golden bucket idea. How transparent to the user would it be? I would be on the “full disclosure” side of things but I imagine some users would wonder just why you are getting a continuing cut of what they are paying to Amazon when you aren’t providing a continuing service (you have given them the app, no more involvement from you.)

It really is a golden bucket as you could provide the app, distribute it widely and then go out of business and yet still recieve revenue from Amazon. Users might not like that idea.

S3 is fantastic but I see some serious challenges in monetizing it directly. Using it as SmugMug does is grand but with TuneSafe and similar apps there is a problem. I hope some smart business chap comes along and shows us the way.