Amazon is one of the few companies that has managed to maintain itself from the 90’s Internet boom, and has created an interesting collection of Internet properties, including Alexa, which I talked about earlier this week, and S3 (Simple Storage Service). Rob and I (I’m positive Rob found S3, but I THINK I stumbled on Alexa) came across these two online tools quite awhile ago, and although we haven’t had a need for S3, it seems like quite the service. SmugMug, a company in the highly competitive photo-sharing arena, hopped on board with S3, and in the last year, saved $700,000.

Click here for the story.

I’m not a huge fan of the competition, but I do give respect where respect is due, and Google and Apple definitely deserve respect for what they’ve accomplished in the last few years. I think it’s been easy for people to jump on their bandwagons, and I don’t think their offerings are as strong as their numbers have suggested, but it’s important to be able to fool the masses with WOW, and both companies do have that going for them. It helps that Microsoft has performed so poorly as of late, and continue to play catch-up, and the Zune and Vista are two good examples.

The Zune is obviously not dominating the market, and has not made a dent in the iPod’s current dominance. The timing of the Zune is a huge factor in this, but some of the WOW they tried to introduce, the ability to share songs, has not been well received, and the system is, typically Microsoft, a little buggy. In this article, there are five recommendations for the Zune, and although I don’t completely agree with ’dropping the social,’ it’s a pretty good article with some good points. The most telling statement is from Jason Reindorp, marketing director for Zune: Zune’s first five months have gone about as expected.

For Vista, it hasn’t been as long a trip, but probably equally as uncompelling. An exerpt from this article:

Windows Vista is the most ambitious version of Windows since Windows 95, but it’s far less compelling than Windows 95 was. Vista isn’t a bad product; it’s just not a great one. After six years of waiting, it was time for something significantly better. We didn’t get it.

Personally, I think the biggest hurdle for Vista is integrating with existing setups. Companies have been slow to develop patches or updates that allow their programs to work easily on the new OS; it’s inevitable, but it has been difficult and trying for those looking to make the move to Vista early. I have no doubt that the next release will not only be more timely, but will also include an online or Internet-based component that mirrors Apple’s .Mac setup.

When I first started to become more heavily intersted and involved in the Internet and Internet technologies, Alexa was one of the sites that I latched on to. The site provided a reasonable, free way of gauging the success of a site, and I definitely didn’t have the resources to call on the services of Hitwise or ComScore, and it’s difficult to find other people publishing the specific information/data needed. Being based on a user-installed toolbar, it’s not a perfect science, but more of a guideline, like the Pirate’s Code (made famous by Disney’s Pirates of the Carribean).

When the site released their API, one of the most popular offsprings was Alexaholic. The site has been changed and forwarded to Statsaholic, due to pressure from Alexa (and parent company Amazon). The overhaul of the Alexa data that created Alexaholic was a slap in the face of the 90’s offering that had remained unchanged, and it was a perfect example of the new Internet and what was possible. Alexa has since adopted many of the features of Alexaholic (something I’ve suggested as a fundamental reason for creating API’s in the first place), and now as opted to block the use of their graphs by other sites.

This is an obvious example of a major corporation missing the boat on an opportunity, and finding no way to recover, has to shut the competition down. It’s understandable to a degree; it is their data, and they should be reaping the benefits of the traffic and corresponding funds, not alexastatsaholic or whatever the site is branded as. This could also be a sign of things to come, and anyone who has based their business on Google, MySpace, YouTube, their corresponding API’s, or any other site and their API’s should take this as an important warning. If these mega-sites see something they like, they have the power to take it away from you, and the only hope is that users, theirs and yours, f-alex their muscles back. In the new Internet, the users have a vote that counts.

UPDATE: Michael Arrington of TechCrunch fame weighed in on this here. I will try and keep up with this and provide links to any updates that become available.

Online identity is something that will continue to get more and more serious; identity theft, fraud, and online predators are just a few of the reasons that an identity, or rather confirmation of an identity, is so important. You might remember a credit card commercial (Visa, I believe), where the user puts his head through the screen and everyone in the office turns to see if they recognize him - well, that might not be too far off from where we will have to go with protecting and confirming our online identities.

In recent weeks, scandals involving an anti-Clinton video posted on YouTube by an anonymous creator (this was the original article I read about it, but it is no longer working - try this randomly chosen replacement) and an avid contributor to Wikipedia that faked their credentials has brought to light the dangers of online identities.

The first individual, who chose to remain anonymous, ended up being Phillip de Vellis, who worked for Blue State Digital, the company that provides consulting services to Clinton’s rival, Obama. Phillip’s identity was revealed, and his ties with Blue State Digital were separated.

The second individual, 24-year-old Ryan Jordan, passed himself off as a professor of theology, with a variety of degrees, but came clean after being brought into Wikia Inc, a for-profit company run by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales. Since the admission by Jordan, two top officials at Wikipedia have resigned (although the reason is not confirmed), the New Yorker magazine has issue an editor’s note regarding an interview from 2006 of ‘Essjay,’ and Wales has indicated that contributors may be asked to back up their credentials. This would bring Wikipedia closer to the model that Citizendium will be using.

Although creating an online identity is important, as is online anonymity, being able to prove that you are you even when you’re online will probably continue to be a theme discussed in the news and the blogosphere.