Dropbox is amazing, more amazing than I realized. It solves so many problems that I was waiting for a solution to. But sometimes you have to flip around the way you think about the problem to see that. For example, I wanted WordPress to give me a way to store the source code of a WordPress blog post. Then I realized today that I could store the source in my public Dropbox folder and just render it on WordPress. Hey it would be best if the blog could be self-contained, but this wouldn't be too bad. Then I remembered the work we were doing with the World Outline, and how we needed everyone to own some web storage for it to work. Just a place to put some static XML files. I put that problem down because because of that limit. Well, it's time to pick it up again. There's also S3, which makes a whole bunch of other, similar things possible, if you assume all your users have accounts there. Well, with EC2-for-Poets, which is coming along wonderfully -- all the users do have S3 accounts. So I store each user's cache in S3 space. It's quite fast. And with the JSON architecture we're using now for rivers and user interface, you can use S3 almost as if it were RAM. In fact, I kind of do. Read an article that says Amazon has everything lined up to do a tablet. They also have everything lined up to be something much bigger. There's a new kind of software coming online. Just beginning to see the outlines of it. This is the kind of work I live to do. This is exactly where I like to be. It feels like a new Internet is springing to life inside a corner of the Internet. It's like opening a jewel box and finding a universe in there. |