How things have changed. A year ago, just about every device was closed and locked behind closed doors and proprietary information. Now we’re seeing Android, the Chumby, and now Bug Labs. It’s exciting that people are waking up to the power of allowing people to hack - and to have a device as platform. Bug Labs in particular is getting me very excited.

Fred Wilson has been blogging a bit about these guys (they’re a part of the Union Square Ventures portfolio) for a while, but this morning he’s posted a video by Robert Scoble that got me begging for one of these:

I’m not even going to ramble about how this project is going to create a whole bunch of new hardware hackers (which is fantastic) and getting people to try out new ideas and prototypes for future devices - because that’s all obvious if you watch Robert’s video (or read his post). I just want our team here to get one of these and hack away at some ideas we have.

Bug Labs guys - please don’t pull a Chumby on me. I was on the initial list for the Chumby prototypes but because I moved back to Europe, I never got one. Not one of the first limited few (which they kept emailing me about), not one now that they’ve launched. I can’t order the damn thing. Be smart about this, please?

A couple of hours ago Jeff Barr (senior evangelist over at Amazon) posted about Amazon S3’s new Service Level Agreement - which if you happen to run services on the platform (like we do here at Webreakstuff) is a pretty good piece of news. Ever since Amazon S3 (or Simple Storage Service) officially launched developers have been asking for an SLA in order to formally guarantee the service’s reliability and Amazon’s commitment to keeping it going.

Some of the developers building applications with Amazon S3 have been asking us about an SLA, or Service Level Agreement. An SLA defines the minimum acceptable level of performance from a service along with some sort of penalty for not meeting expectations. A typical SLA actually defines a performance or reliability boundary which is somewhat lower than what the system is actually designed, built, and expected to deliver.

We know that many of our customers, including a multitude of teams within Amazon, are using S3 in mission-critical ways and need a formal commitment from us in order to make commitments to their own users and customers.

And the agreement looks good, too. Amazon will give you 10% service credit if uptime goes below 99.9% and 25% credit if it goes below 99% in a given month. Which tells you a lot about how reliable they believe their platform really is.

The agreement is in effect since October 1st, which means those of you who’ve wondered (for so long now) whether it would be a safe bet to host something on S3 can finally exhale. Now, and although I do trust Amazon’s reliability - I mean, it’s Amazon -, it’d be great to have an SLA for EC2 as well, but I assume that’ll be up when it officially launches.

Techmeme (previously known as Tech Memeorandum) by Gabe Rivera has been one of my favorite sites out there for a very long time - and my browser’s homepage. Although I may be a little biased because Gabe is a personal friend, I believe Techmeme is the de facto way to catch up on technology news these days - and to be completely honest, I have no idea why no other competing product gets the same result quality.

Tomorrow (according to Mike over at TC), Gabe is launching the Techmeme Leaderboard, a ranking of blogs based on their appearance on Techmeme itself - which given the way Techmeme’s blog tracking algorithms work makes a lot of sense. While I’m personally not a huge fan of ranks (largely because they don’t often equate to quality), this move does have an impact somewhere else, though - Technorati.

Technorati’s popularity: Technorati is popular for two main reasons: pings and its top 100 list. The fact that quite a few blog platforms still link to technorati’s tag search gives it a boost, and I guess quite a large percentage of people still use it to search the blogosphere, despite competing efforts by Google and other companies. However, the reason why Technorati is still in our daily lingo is the Top 100 list (that matters so much to so many) - but that may soon be gone, too.

It’ll be interesting to see how the blogosphere reacts to this new classification - which is slightly more organic than Technorati’s Top 100 list due to its nature. I guess we’ll see people trying to game Techmeme more often just to get some extra link juice, but more importantly, we’ll have to see how competition strikes back - if at all.

I remember years and years ago when I first started working with web standards. I felt back then what I feel now - there’s good intentions but little activity except for a few initiatives. Zeldman, who I have the greatest respect for, calls it moving at a glacial pace.

There’s people like Molly trying to move the gigantic W3C boat, but it’s not really happening. There’s the HTML5 mess, there’s CSS drafts taking years, and there’s people getting confused and pissed - and rightfully so.

Luckily for web developers out there, the last few years brought something extremely valuable to the table - information. Developers at least understand what’s out there now, standards-wise and are making the best of that - one very clear example is microformats. The last couple of years have proven how resilient the development community is with exploring what’s out there now. We’re better living through current standards than sitting around waiting for the future to unfold.

Jeffrey Zeldman: One day, people from nice homes may forsake XHTML for HTML 5, making us wonder what that XHTML pony ride was all about anyway. Or not. If HTML 5 bombs, we’re not so badly off with the markup specifications we have. Remember this. It may help you sleep at night. If HTML, CSS, or accessibility go seriously astray (and depending on who you ask, at least two of these are in trouble), we will still be able to use HTML 4.01, XHTML 1.0, CSS1 and 2.1, ECMAScript, the DOM, and WCAG 1.0 (with our without reference to the samurai errata) when Britney has grandkids.

Jeffrey says there’s no such thing as a crisis in web standards, and although I agree, I sometimes secretly wish for a small revolution to actually happen - to stir things up a bit and remove the political cruft in the way. But there’s no such thing and for now we’re going to have to keep glueing what we have today in hopes of slowly building the future.