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.

As some of you may know I’ll be conducting the opening panel at O’Reilly’s Web 2.0 Expo this November in Berlin. It’s going to be a panel about how design has changed in the last few years to take center stage in the business mindset.

In preparation, I am collecting statements about what design means to people and businesses today - and that means I need your opinion too. So how do you see design, and the role of the designer in your area and business? If you have any thoughts on the topic, feel free to leave a comment or drop me an email. I’d love to hear what you have to say.

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.

A month and a half ago I wrote a post called “Facebook is a scary beast” and highlighted how despite the flexibility in its API and the (only) apparent openness, it is becoming a huge closed personal data silo. My concerns then are now voiced also by Danah Boyd in her post “confused by Facebook” which I definitely think you should read. Not only that, but Danah also highlights a few security concerns about Facebook’s new public profile option, which is likely bound to piss some people off.

I’m also befuddled by the slippery slope of Facebook. Today, they announced public search listings on Facebook. I’m utterly fascinated by how people talk about Facebook as being more private, more secure than MySpace. By default, people’s FB profiles are only available to their network. Join a City network and your profile is far more open than you realize. Accept the default search listings and you’re findable on Google. The default is far beyond friends-only and locking a FB profile down to friends-only takes dozens of clicks in numerous different locations. Plus, you never can really tell because if you join a new network, everything is by-default open to that network (including your IM and phone number). To make matters weirder, if you install an App, you give the creator access to all of your profile data (no one reads those checkboxes anyhow).

Truth is, a lot of the initial appeal of Facebook is going away - quickly. Applications are cluttering profiles (no, I really don’t want to see more LOLcats or Zombie invitations, thanks), groups and communities are wide-open and now profiles are by default too. Facebook was regarded for a very long time as a closed and private community, but that has changed. When (and how?) will the glorified address book now with a dash of app-chaos regain it’s cool?