S3 Down for More Than 7 Hours

Amazon's S3 service went down today and more than 7 hours later, it is still down. The service initially went down around 12:00PM EST and my latest check shows troubles continuing for sites that depend on S3.

“Funny how Amazon doesn't use S3 to store any assets for amazon.com”tweet by @gruber

Smugmug, a popular photo sharing site with more than 600 TB of data stored on S3 has been accessible along with several "Web 2.0" startup sites. Because of the astounding amount of data stored by Smugmug on S3, it can definitely be considered a poster child for the service. Last time I checked Smugmug, at 11:10 PM EST, it was still inaccessible.

“As a consequence, a variety of businesses such as Twitter, digital photo sharing Web site, SmugMug and The Huffington Post all had issues. Twitterers were claiming their avatar images could not be displayed. The Huffington Post was also unable to display images to its stories, while SmugMug could not offer any service at all.
”ComputerWorld

This is not good for Amazon and for startups that are looking to count on Amazon's "redundant" S3 platform. Dr. Werner Vogels is probably pretty upset right now.

Smugmug Badge - or the lack of it

There is no other place on the web that takes as good care of your photos as Smugmug.

That said, while I am a very happy Smugmug customer, I am very disappointed that Smugmug doesn't offer a Flickr style badge. I have a pro Smugmug account and it sucks that there is no badge available for me to easily integrate my photos on my blog through javascript. Worse, the RSS feeds generated by Smugmug aren't focused towards photos rather they have a lot of junk text that I really don't care about.

Some thoughts for Smugmug:
- How about creating a feed that just has photos in it, minus all the noise?
- How about having a feed that displays random photos from my gallery, not just the recent photos?
- Smugmug's pro account is pricey (I am not saying it's not worth the price) so at least the pro members should be allowed to have a Flickr style badge.
- How about putting all the description noise about "user updated gallery" and gallery descriptions incorporated as alt and title tags?

I used Rss to Javascript site to display my photos for now but frankly, the presentation looks very crappy, or should I say not up to Smugmug standard. A badge can act as a marketing tool for Smugmug if it does photos justice in presentation.

I am going to send these suggestions to Smugmug's founder Don McAskill. He cares a lot about his customers so hopefully it is just a matter of time that he will have a Smugmug badge that looks as gorgeous as Smugmug galleries. BTW, I am a big fan of Don McAskill and his work and recently wrote about him on my other blog.

For now, I am thinking of one day writing a quick badge myself. It should be a couple hours of hacking. Since badge creation is generally quite easy, I wonder why hasn't this been accomplished yet by Smugmug.