Wednesday - September 19, 2007

Facebook's Online storage solution... 

 So facebook now has a data storage API and they're making it available for free during the beta period.  Pretty cool idea.  If you're a budding developer who wants to write a facebook app, but can't afford the bandwith/capacity charges of hosting the app data yourself, this will let you do it for 'free' for a short time. 

The slashdot article comments have some interesting things to say about it, as do this computerworld article.  I love the idea.  I doubt it'll be 'free' for ever.  They could make it threshold based.  They could make the initial X Gb of usage free then start the fees after that.  The downside is it would encourage developers to purge users who they don't deem worthy of using their free allotment.  They probably couldn't make it 'all free, all the time' either because then the inevitable facebook MP3/Porn/HD backup app will drive them bankrupt.   

It reminds me a lot of the S3 service from Amazon.com.  Just another avenue for a startup to get going and get a proof of concept out the door on the cheap.