Facebook Launches Data Storage Service
Posted by Nick O'Neill on September 16th, 2007 6:55 PMFacebook has now launched a beta version of a data storage service for developers. Rather than having developers store all of the information pertaining to their applications, they can now store it on Facebook’s servers. Right now there is limited documentation. The only information being provided is on the Facebook developers wiki. I’m not sure if space is unlimited and if they will start charging for storing this data.
Is Facebook looking to take on Amazon’s S3 service? Are they looking to challenge Google base? Unfortunately there are no details about the service yet. I can’t imagine them providing this service for free. If they do decide to make the service completely free, Facebook will have created an even bigger revolution. I am looking forward to Facebook’s official announcement about this new service. For the time being we will just have to theorize about what Facebook may be planning to do.
September 17th, 2007 at 4:13 am
From having a quick look at this API it appears to be similar to holding your data in a SQL database however it is held on Facebooks side.
I don’t believe they are challenging S3 as I see no mention of file storage.
September 17th, 2007 at 9:28 am
Very interesting indeed. It could help those developers who are worried about their apps becoming too popular.
September 19th, 2007 at 8:03 pm
Nick - is there a product manager in charge of this initiative?
Users of S3 storage might be very interested in exploring Facebook storage as an option, but for entities that would be ready to consume many TB of storage there is going to need to be some point of contact for business/technical questions. Any information you can offer is greatly appreciated…
Keep up the good work.
October 13th, 2007 at 7:27 pm
[…] I pointed out back in September, Facebook launched a data storage service but little details have been provided […]
November 5th, 2007 at 4:51 pm
[…] O’Neill over at the Facebook watchblog, AllFacebook, is speculating that the API is the beginnings of an Amazon S3-style storage system — Facebook’s […]