Chris Brogan wrote a scathing post about Amazon’s new Cloud Drive product that caught my eye. He makes some excellent points about the closed nature of Cloud Drive and concludes that it just “needs to get better – please”.
Any file storage site that’s been developed by someone else for you to use has been developed to meet the needs and vision of those who designed and developed it. However, if you used any of these services they’re not done the way you’d do it, right?
That’s one of the great things about Amazon’s S3 service. It’s just storage and the rest is up to you. Sure it’s a hard to use. Yes, the login criteria is overly complex. But, it is secure – and it’s yours to use AS YOU PLEASE.
That’s the best thing about S3. It was designed to be used by anyone who wants to use it. They don’t make it easy for non-technicians to use, they just make it available.
The fact that they left it as basic as they did leaves opportunity for people to develop applications like FileZoomer that making using Amazon S3 as simple as using a local drive on your computer.
If you try CloudDrive and hate it (I tried it too, wasn’t crazy about it) just keep on using S3. It’s not free but it’s really cheap and you have complete control over your files and can use whatever user interface is right for you.
And if you haven’t tried FileZoomer with your S3 account go ahead and download it while it’s still in beta and use it for free.
