The Open Platform is an example of an API done well, and I’m very keen to see try fitting this into some of the work we’re doing at Imagini with our VisualDNA Platform. The idea of recommending content from a massive pool of providers – be they products, articles, videos, or photos – based on a user’s VisualDNA, or their similarity to another user’s VisualDNA, is quite appealing.

There are already some fine examples and proofs of concept out there, and I can only hope that the web community firmly utilises the potential.

Given that I’m used to the rather excellent Monmouth Coffee shop in Covent Garden for my morning brew, they’ve got a lot to live up to, but I’m looking forward to trying it.

Apple sorted the problems out, and gave everyone a 30-day extension to their trial periods. However, yesterday I had more problems accessing .me. My iPhone wouldn’t sync, Mail.app couldn’t connect, and when I logged in to the webmail interface I was presented with a blank screen. Apple even went to post a trouble ticket about the problem, but disabled their discussion boards which were undoubtedly getting filled with complaints about the poor quality of service. They claim that only 1% of users were affected, but I find this hard to believe given their previous problems.

Apart from these shenanigans, Apple also screwed up the UK billing and extended everyone’s trial periods by another 30 days.

I want to like .me. I set up a .mac account a few days before it launched so I could get the name I wanted and beat the queues. I wanted to use the Push functionality of the iPhone 2.0 software, as well as online contact and calendar syncing (which itself is buggy). At the current level of service, however, I think I could see myself heading back towards GMail. If only they offered a push service!

This is certainly an application where the much requested cut & paste will come into its own. Writing out whole URLs is not a pleasant task (especially given that the software doesn’t provide a landscape keyboard option), so this is going to make a highly requested feature become virtually essential. I’m also pretty sure there’s a bug that messes up the date of the post (this was originally posted in 1969).

Criticisms aside, it’s certainly preferable to the previous method of emailing a secret account in order to post on the move.

This is Amazon’s second major outage this year, and given how many sites rely on the service it’s a real nightmare when it goes down. It’s a little concerning to think about some of the other third-party providers that could exhibit similar problems. For example, those using Yahoo’s YUI library might well be accessing them from Yahoo’s JavaScript site, rather than hosting the files themselves. In the even that these go down, the sites will likely be rendered useless, in a rather ungraceful manner. Fortunately, JavaScript, CSS, and the like can all be easily hosted locally. Hundreds of gigabytes of photos are not so easy to have local backups of.

Youniverse isn’t the only site that uses S3 as a major provider of service. SmugMug have completely taken down their site until S3 is running properly again, and Twitter are not showing profile images.

Amazon’s Status Blog indicates that they’ve solved the problem, and are making “incremental progress”. Looks like we’re going to have to come up with a fallback solution for when S3 goes belly-up again!