Amazon Inside…

A number of great web applications are built on top of Amazon services such as ECS, EC2 or S3. In fact, 3 of Amazon’s services are listed in a recent Linux World article, Ten Web 2.0 APIs You Can Really Use.

Here are a few cool Amazon-powered applications that have caught my eye:

• Social bookmarking tool BlueOrganizer was recently updated; you can read all about it on TechCrunch.

  The new version adds the Blue Menu, a context-driven (right-click) menu of search and tagging options. The exact set of options are determined at click time based on an analysis of the page. For example, if I am visiting an Amazon.com book detail page, the Blue Menu knows that I am looking at a book, offers me the option to search for other books by the same author, other books in the same subject, or other books with the same tags.

   
• The web site for Professor Lawrence Lessig’s newest book, CodeV2, is hosted on an Amazon EC2 server. In addition, the book itself is stored in Amazon S3 and can be downloaded from here for free. Because the book was to be made available for free, the site developers knew that demand would be very high. Using EC2 and S3 gave them the power to simply turn up the server power as needed, while also ensuring near-infinite bandwidth for downloads.
   
• Smartsheet is a web-based spreadsheet which uses Amazon S3 for storage of attached documents. Smartsheet supports alerts, change history on all spreadsheet fields, and direct on-screen updates of document changes.
   
• WishRadar manages wishlists, quietly monitoring prices until they reach the desired amount and then issuing an alert. It also happens to run on Ruby on Rails (see Jinesh’s recent post for more such Amazon-powered applications).
   
• Jamglue is an online, community-powered, music mashup and remixing tool. Using the browser-based user interface, you can easily create multi-track musical arrangements, limited only by your creativity. Jamglue uses S3 for media storage and streaming, along with EC2 for backend media processing.
   

Ok, that’s about all I have for now. If you’ve got something else that should be featured in this blog, post a comment or send an mail to awseditor@amazon.com.

— Jeff;