It seems that Bezos keeps his investing activities separate from the business of Amazon.com, so I don’t think we will see an influx of Amazon.com applications leveraging Twitter soon, but I wonder if AWS is not a viable platform for Twitter.

They already use S3 for serving up avatars, so I wonder if moving to EC2 and related services might be part of the plan?

What do you think? is this just a new round of funding for Twitter and Jeff Bezos just happens to be in the mix, or is this the start of something bigger for Twitter?

(Photo credit ETech)

Several companies found out today when Amazon.com’s S3 service experienced an outage and left applications without their data tier. I first experienced it this morning about 8:30 EST when those of us on Twitter noticed that avatars were not loading. Later reports of missing images on Facebook, and other applications started rolling in as startups and application developers realized their apps were broken due to the Amazon S3 outage.

So, what to do when you rely on the cloud? Simple – don’t rely on the cloud completely.

SmugMug’s Don MacAskil has it right, and discussed his approach on TechCrunch’s report of the outage:

We do rely on S3 for our primary storage, but we do maintain our own “hot cache” of data in our datacenters, too, which is less than 10% of our total storage. Our customers weren’t affected by this morning’s outage.

PBwiki’s Nathan Schmidt agrees:

Never build your architecture to require low-latency, high-availability access to S3 or its competitors, because you won’t get those – that’s not what it’s for, that’s not what it’s optimized for, and you’re never going to be able to peel back those layers of abstraction and long-haul network.

(Photo credit akakumo)

But even though big sites adding many social features at a time draws lots of attention, there is one site that is way ahead of everyone else, offering a myriad of social features that eclipses the field, hands down. That site is Amazon.com.

As Brian Oberkirch points out, if you factor the social networking features with the awesomeness that is Amazon Web Services, S3, and their affiliate programs, Amazon should really be stealing the all the press from Google and Yahoo!

For authors, the rich social features at Amazon.com are perfect for getting the word out about your book, and you really need to be a part of the conversation.  Check out my earlier posting on 10 Simple Ways Authors Can Increase Sales at Amazon.com, and get in there and be… social.