platform

It's just like an unformatted hard drive, Amazon.com Chief Technology Officer Werner Vogels explained. The difference is that it's in the "cloud" somewhere and you get to it through an API.

Amazon Web Services executives on Sunday described a forthcoming persistent storage feature, called EC2 Persistent Storage, which they say will make its hosted computing services more flexible and far more reliable.

People can sign up for an early beta test program now before Amazon opens it up for a wider release later this year.

The service works with Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) … Read more

Apparently the people behind the Segway are finally starting to listen to the incessant mocking of the personal transporter as the ultimate in dorkdom. The evidence: It's preparing to debut a new RMP (Robotic Mobility Platform) at the RoboBusiness conference that looks more appropriate for a desert battlefield than a paved sidewalk.

It's a far more macho version of the first RMP released more than a year ago, which was developed for use by robots. The new model--which could cost as much as $50,000--can carry up to 400 pounds, according to MAKE, and has omnidirectional wheels for … Read more

Microsoft is planning to detail a new product under development called Live Mesh, which appears to be a way to manage user data in the "cloud" across multiple devices.

Mary Jo Foley at ZDNet spotted the talk, entitled Get Mesh!, which will be put on by Microsoft's Live Mesh general manager Amit Mital at the upcoming Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco later this month.

Foley said the first beta of the product is due later in April and that it will act as a way to synchronize files across a network, or mesh, of devices: … Read more

Amazon.com's Elastic Compute Cloud Web service was knocked offline earlier Monday, but the company appeared to get it back online within a few hours.

A thread on the Amazon Web Services support forum started at 1:51 a.m. PDT. By just past 4 a.m., a support person said all servers that had been unreachable could be contacted again.

It's a far milder outage than the one that occurred in February, when Amazon's Simple Storage Service went down, which appeared to affect hundreds of Web sites.

It's also a reminder of the scrutiny on … Read more

An official Scrabble application, developed by RealNetworks' Gamehouse division, recently launched on Facebook's developer platform. Will it be a Zombies-caliber success? Probably not.

It's been clear for a while that the copyright holders on the classic board game Scrabble have been none too pleased with the wildly popular Scrabulous, a developer-created Facebook application that mimics the design and rules of the original. So it seemed that, after months of legal threats, the companies behind Scrabble would be taking a step in the right direction to actually launch an official Facebook app to offer users a legal alternative to … Read more

Update March 31, 5:07 AM PDT: The post now reflects additional commentary from Amin Ariana.

The creator of a Facebook application called Friendmates doesn't seem to be too thrilled with the social-networking site's new "People You May Know" feature, which launched earlier this week.

"This new feature and its functionality is suspiciously identical to the application I released for Facebook six months ago (albeit with limited resources)," developer Amin Ariana said in an e-mail to CNET News.com, "but it gives no credit to the original author."

Facebook has asserted that … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO, CA--MySpace might have gotten a stigma for its advertising and user spam, but the company is hoping to get a fresh start with its developer platform.

Jim Benedetto, vice president of technology for MySpace, discussed the company's current developer strategy with a group of 250 social application developers, entrepreneurs, and members of the press at the Snap Summit in downtown San Francisco. Benedetto didn't go into detail about this morning's announcement of the OpenSocial Alliance, and instead provided an overview of the development platform, including details about the upcoming integration of the MySpace's hypertargeting ad network.… Read more

This post was updated at 9:00 AM on Tuesday to make it clear that Imeem's platform is technically "live."

Social media service Imeem has announced the Imeem Media Platform, a set of APIs (application programming interfaces) and tools so that outside developers and partners can contribute to the site. The APIs will give developers access to media on the site (music, video, and photos), the media player interface, the music recommendation engine, and playlist-creation tools, among other things.

While the platform itself is technically "live," it's in a very preliminary phase, Imeem founder … Read more

Whoever predicted that social gaming was the next niche of the Web to get totally saturated was very, very right.

On Monday, a new casual-gaming social network called Mytopia entered its public-beta phase. Taking a conscious cue from massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs), Mytopia players create custom avatars and win points in games that they can trade in for virtual goods and real-world prizes, like iTunes and Amazon gift certificates.

Membership is free, but for a $5-per-month premium membership, players have access to an ad-supported version of the site and "grand prize" tournaments. The site already has … Read more