Category: Tech

MeeGo is a Linux-based operating system for portable devices. It’s the product of a partnership between Nokia and Intel which brings together Nokia’s Maemo and Intel’s Moblin environment. This operating system could power your smart phone and your netbook as well as other devices you might not consider like a vehicle or an embedded system.

Since it popped up back in February, MeeGo has gained some steam and has recently picked up quite a few partnerships with both hardware and software companies. MeeGo competes directly with Android and, by default, against the iPhone OS. It remains to be seen if the Open Source OS will be able to gain traction, but this latest news seems to indicate that it does have a chance.

As far as netbooks go, Intel has some specs available for the MeeGo-powered devices. Firefox has been taken out of the picture and replaced with Google Chrome (or, more likely the open source Chromium based on the same code).

For mobile devices, Fennec will be the web browser of choice. This browser is from Mozilla and does actually support Flash. VOIP and Instant Messaging are included. Also, social networking is integrated and GPS should be supported for the location-based app lovers out there. The potential interfaces for mobile are below and quite compelling.

The MeeGo product release schedule shows version 1.0 coming out some time next month. 1.1 should be released during the 4th quarter of this year, and v1.2 should be available during the 1st quarter of next year. Developers can download MeeGo and start developing applications for it now. Some of the basic features of the environment include:

• Performance optimizations and features which enable rich computational and graphically oriented applications and connected services development
• No-compromise Internet standards support delivering the best web experiences
• Easy to use, flexible and powerful UI/app development environment based on Qt
• Open source project organization managed by the Linux Foundation
• State of the Art Linux stack optimized for the size and capabilities of small footprint platforms and mobile devices, but delivering broad Linux software application compatibility

It remains to be seed how and if MeeGo will have any major effect on the mobile device market as it relates to Android and the iPhone , but a little competition can only make sure end users get the best product possible.

more info at CarryPad

MyLikes, founded by two ex-Googlers—former Google Apps product lead Bindu Reddy and former AdSesne tech lead Arvind Sundararajan—took money totaling about $630k from 11 other ex-Googlers to fund the company. Those are the only people they took money from. People who also used to work for Google.

If you recall, MyLikes is a service that helps you make money by telling your friends about stuff you like. At it’s core, it is simply a service that lets you Like anything you want across the Internet (something like Glue). What sets it apart is that some of these items are sponsored. So, when you share your love (er…like?) for something across your social networks and your friends click the link, you get paid.

MyLikes is also a viable service for simple word-of-mouth advertising, which pretty much ensures there will be a steady stream of campaigns for you to choose from. If you’re an upcoming artist or small company, for example, you could spend a relatively small amount of money advertising directly to potential users than you might spend on other advertising methods.

CEO Reddy says she wanted to take money from people she knew and trusts, and those happened to be all Ex-Googlers. Individual investors included FriendFeed co-founders Paul Buchheit and Sanjeev Singh, angel investor Georges Harik, Digg VP Keval Desai, David Hirsch of Metamorphic Ventures, LinkedIn product VP Dipchand Nishar, Aydin Senkut, and Greg Lee. Robert Scoble and Louis Gray will be joining as advisors.

MyLikes is different from others in the pay-to-tweet space in that the focus is on popular users rather than on the advertisers. Simply sharing an ad in your Twitter stream is not enough to get paid. People have to actually click the link. This means that you must have a good reputation with your network and a good overall reach into the Twitter community. This also means that spammers and bots won’t be able to penetrate the market as they have done with other services.

MyLikes will still have to compete with Twitter’s new ad platform and existing pay-per-tweet services, but I think MyLikes has a leg up on the competition. Especially since you can also post your sponsored likes on your blog and other social media avenues.

As of today, Opera Mini has been approved for distribution through Apple’s App store. This browser is already in use by over 50 million users worldwide, providing lightning fast mobile browsing by compressing data by about 90 percent before it ever sends the content to your device. This means you waste less bandwidth and your pages should pop up on your little screen much faster.

Not only will the Opera Mini browser speed up your mobile browsing in general, but it also helps you save money on your data bill. The change in browsing speed will be especially noticeable if you’re forced to use a slower data network like the 2G Edge.

Even though Opera won out in the end, the process of getting accepted wasn’t as simple as you might think. Apple is pretty strict about what it allows into the App store. Especially apps that potentially replace Apple’s own offerings. In this case, they could have denied Opera Mini based on the fact that Safari is also a mobile web browser (even though they had previously accepted other browsers).

Besides creating an outstanding product that would actually be a huge benefit to iPhone customers, Opera put up a website that provided a live countdown until Mini was either accepted or rejected. We covered this back in March. 20 days, 8 hours, and 31 minutes later, Opera Mini was finally made available in the App store.

Did Opera’s strategy make a difference, or did Apple simply recognize that Opera Mini would be a useful App for their customers? We probably won’t ever find out for sure, but I’d like to think so. While it is at Apple discretion what they allow into the App store, some of their policies have been very upsetting to developers and customers alike and this move by Opera was either going to end in Opera Mini being accepted or possibly in some type of litigation.

Even now, Apple has started informing existing iPad developers that they cannot use the word “Pad” in their applications. Not “iPad” or anything specific like that, just the generic word “Pad.” If you want the new Opera Mini browser, feel free to download it (for free) via iTunes.

With all the Buzz surrounding Buzz, many of us have forgot about all the other services out there vying for the privilege of serving as our lifestream or aggregator. You have the old stand-by, FriendFeed which is still alive and kicking despite being purchased by Facebook. Cliqset is improving all the time. There are still others, including a little known service called Nsyght.

Easy Registration

Nsyght has been around for about 2yrs, but has recently received a round of funding and has since grown from a simple social search site to a full fledged social aggregator. Signing up is simple because you don’t actually have to sign up, simply register using your existing Twitter, Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Clickpass, or OpenID account.

Adding Accounts

Once inside, head on over to Settings > Services to attach your Nsyght account to all your different social media networks. Currently, these include: StumbleUpon, Vimeo, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Delicious, Last.fm, Digg, OpenID, Clickpass, Google, and Yahoo. In addition to pulling in your content, most of these can also be used to login later. Nsyght uses OAuth so you don’t have to tell it your passwords.

General Usage

From here, most things work as expected. You’re looking at a river of all the content from your social networks. You can post items via Nsyght and have them also post to your other sites. A set of filters in the sidebar lets you focus on one specific services, simply click the ones you want to see. This is helpful if one particular service happens to be burying the rest.

What Makes it Different

While Nsyght has most of the features you would expect to find from any other social media aggregator service, it’s approach is very interesting. By definition, an aggregator is supposed to pull things together and help you keep your self organized. Rather than visiting multiple different websites to try and keep track of your friends’ activities, you can monitor everything from one place.

What actually happened with most of these services is that they came with their own social graph and their own comments for each item you import. Instead of being able to manage all your social networks and services from one place, you just end up with yet another social network to keep track of.

Part of why we built nsyght was to help users really take advantage of data portability. Instead of building a service that would encourage you to leave your network behind, we wanted to build something that could give you cool tools and services that helped you get more out of your existing social network, while allowing you to keep all your various profiles up to date. At the end of the day, we all (theoretically) have lives and jobs to do, so doing more with less seems pretty appealing.

When you comment on an item in Nsyght, your comment shows up in Nsyght as well as on the site the item came from. If you Like an item, you get a similar result. All in all, definitely worth a look and I’m sure they would appreciate your feedback.

Google is announcing some pretty major updates to it’s Google Docs service. They have done some under-the-hood updates to improve the overall speed of the document editor and spreadsheet editor. In addition, Docs is starting to look more like Wave as far as collaborative editing and discussion around documents. These updates come as a result of Google realizing they needed to make major changes to the foundation of Docs in order to provide more advanced features.

Multiple participants can now edit a document and see changes made by others in real-time, character by character. Each individual’s changes are color coded. In addition to watching actual changes being made, you can chat in the sidebar with potential participants and leave notes on the document, separate from the actual document content. It’s almost like putting a sticky note on it. Google has improved reliability and accuracy of the import/export functionality, added real margins and tab stops, and improved image layout within documents. You can drag and drop images freely within the document.

Spreadsheet editing is a lot smoother due to the updates on the back end. Your spreadsheets will load much faster, are more responsive, and scroll more seamlessly. They have added a formula bar which allows you to input formulas as well as edit cells. You can now drag and drop columns and save time with auto-complete within columns. Just like with the document editor, you can see changes being made by other people in real-time and color coded.

Google has added an entirely separate drawing editor. This will save you from having to open big and bulky third party drawing/diagram software. You will be able to access your drawings alongside the rest of your documents. You can also copy drawings to the web clipboard and past them into your spreadsheets, presentations, and documents.

This new version of docs is not compatible with Google Gears, which Google was planning to do away with anyway. After these updates roll out, offline mode will no longer be supported. On the positive side, they are working on a replacement for this functionality that takes advantage of similar features in HTML5.

These new features are coming to you within the next few days, but you can get them immediately by clicking New Version at the top of any spreadsheet or look for New Version of Google Documents under ‘Document Settings.’

In a live event today, Microsoft revealed the project referred to as the Microsoft Pink until now. It’s called the Kin and it represents the next generation of devices stemming from Microsoft’s acquisition of Danger. The Kin is a device which focuses on people deep in the social media world. Those of us who live on Facebook and Twitter and who have groups of friends that extend beyond just those we interact with in person.

There are actually 2 devices in play here. The Kin One and the Kin Two. Both devices are sliders with a camera, LED flash, and a full QWERTY keyboard. The Kin One is a small squarish device and the Kin Two is more of a standard sized slider phone with a higher quality camera (8 megapixels) and screen.

The phone has no support for third-party applications, but is well integrated into all the most popular social networking sites. The point is to keep you in tune with what’s going on with your friends online, separating your friends into 3 groups:

• Friends you interact with on a regular basis and in person. The people you hang out with.
• Friends that you probably haven’t seen in years, but still stay in touch with online. Like those people on Facebook you graduated high school with.
• Friends that you met online that you have probably never actually met, but you still share interests with.

The primary home screen of the device is where you stay in The Loop. The Loop refers to both the stream of information available on the Kin as well as the conversations and media that are constantly flowing through your network of friends.

In addition to keeping you in The Loop, the Kin helps you easily share things. A green dot is ever present on your screen and dropping items on this dot allows you to share them across your network. You compose your share by dragging things to the dot from The Loop, the web browser, your search results, and so on. Once you send the item to your friends, the Kin figures out what to send to whom. For instance, your Facebook friends may get a Facebook message with all the details and your standard phone contacts will get an MMS with the relevant attachments.

The Kin One comes with 4GB of internal storage, while the Kin Two offers 8GB. The great part of it is that this internal storage is almost made irrelevant based on the fact that all of your data is stored in the cloud. This is pretty much identical to how the Sidekick (created by Danger) has always worked. In addition to having all of your phone data available outside of the phone (yeah! no lock-in!) you can access your data via any web browser. There is even a timeline available so that you can scroll back in time and reminisce.

I can’t lie, this device looks very interesting. The Sidekick was probably my favorite phone ever and the only reason I got rid of it was it’s lack of 3rd party apps. Even though the Kin series offers Over The Air updates, the lack of apps might turn many off. On the other hand, it might be exactly what their target demographic is looking for. If you want to be the first one to comment on your friends’ updates, this is the device for you.

The device is exclusive to Verizon and you should be able to snag one in May.

first photo via Engadgenet

Lifeyo is a new startup that helps the average person create a website with minimal web development skills. Their mission is to make polished, professional websites accessible to everyone. They provide a simple interface and set of tools that allow you to build the website you’ve always wanted without needing to hire a UK website design company.

The procedure for getting your website set up is a simple one. The first step is to pick a title for your website. This is the general idea or concept behind your website. The next step is to pick one of the many professional themes or layouts to use for you shiny new website. There are currently 13 themes to choose from.

Your next step is to actually create your Lifeyo account. This will allow you to login and manage your website. There are 3 plans to choose from:

• Starter – this free plan gives you the domain YourName.lifeyo.com and gets your website online right away using the website creator.
• Use My Domain – For $30/year, you get to use a domain you already own while also taking advantage of Lifeyo’s advanced editing tools.
• Get a New Domain – For $40/year, Lifeyo will help you register a new domain and automatically connect it to your Lifeyo website.

Once you decide which plan works for you, you can proceed to editing your website. Keep in mind that you can always start at the free level and upgrade later if you just want to check things out.

Designing your website is as simple as dragging things where you want them. To edit an object, just double-click it. Easily add photos and text to your page and create any additional pages that you need. You can add advanced widgets like YouTube videos by adding a code block. Copy the embed code you need for the video or widget and paste it inside the code object.

You have full control over the visual appearance of your site. Change your theme, modify the title, and even change the background image. Quickly add a blog to your site so that you can provide dynamic content to your audience. Your blog posts can also include photos, videos, music, and any other file attachments you need.

Once you’ve got everything looking good, don’t forget to Publish your website for the world to see. Lifeyo is something like Stiqr, but it gives you a base to start from and doesn’t even require you to paste any code anywhere. You need absolutely no web design experience or knowledge to get involved with Lifeyo and create something awesome.

Take a look at Lifeyo and tell us what you think in the comments.

Ping.fm Adds Support For RSS

Ping.fm, the service which lets you broadcast your status messages across all your social networks, has tapped SuperFeedr to add RSS support. This is definitely a powerful new enhancement to the Ping.fm services, which was just recently purchased by Seesmic. I’m a big Ping.fm user and welcome any updates and feature additions, but this one has me worried.

There are a plethora of apps out there that completely automate Twitter with the goal of helping marketers get their message out there. Most of these service are abused and end up creating droves of spammy and useless Twitter drones. With RSS support in Ping.fm, there is potential to easily create the same type of zombies across the entire social media landscape. Maybe I’m just being overly dramatic.

Gowalla Goes Real-time

Gowalla is another service taking advantage of SuperFeedr to enhance their service. They’re providing real-time RSS feeds for checkins and venues. This will allow you to do things like add your checkins into Buzz, track your favorite venues and people right in your RSS reader, and we’ll probably see some fancy Yahoo Pipes magic in the near future. As RWW points out, Foursquare offers RSS feeds for each user, but they’re not the real-time PubSubHubbub feeds now provided by Gowalla.

iBooks Coming To The iPhone

The fancy new iBooks app that was created as part of the iPad launch will be coming to the iPhone with the new OS release later this year. It’s unclear why they’re making iPhone users wait until the release of the new OS to provide access to the iBooks software. When it comes down to it, it’s really just another app. Another issue is that Apple may be leaving a lot of money on the table by not snatching up existing iPhone users before they break down and get a Kindle. Amazon has more books, anyway.

Foursquare Cracks Down on Cheaters

Foursquare, pretty much the leader in location-based services, has one major problem: cheating. Anyone who knocks the service points out this Achilles heel and Foursquare has decided to solve the problem once and for all. If they can’t verify your location, your checkin doesn’t count.

One of the reasons I decided to go with Foursquare was that it was easy to checkin via SMS, so it was working out pretty good. With this new change, users won’t be able to cheat as easily, but I also won’t be bothering because pickings were slim via SMS already.

Dennis Crowley goes into detail about how the changes may affect in this comment.

Providing more proof that Google’s evil plan to take over the world is coming along nicely, both Apple (WebKit2) and Mozilla (Firefox Lorentz) are making modifications to their web browsers that mimic something Google’s Chrome already does. One of the reasons that Chrome is different and arguably more efficient than other browsers is in the way it separates everything into separate processes. Each tab is a separate process. Each extension is a separate process.

If you have ever visited a single web page that crashed your entire browser, you have experienced the very reason why this is important. Having everything seperate means you can kill the tab or extension that is having trouble without losing your whole browsing session.

Chrome was built from the ground up with this separation as a basis for it’s design. Chrome was also built with the intention of shaking up the browsing industry. Since Chrome came around with it’s simple design, process separation, and super fast javascript engine, just about every other major browser has seriously stepped their game up. This latest development is just another step along that path.

In their latest beta build, called Lorentz, Firefox has duplicated this same process separation. If a page goes wild because of some plugin issue, you no longer use your entire Firefox session or lock up your computer entirely. Firefox goes gray and notifies you of the issue first, giving you the option to try again or just close the tab. The sad robot face is pretty much identical to what you would see in Google Chrome.

Apple’s Webkit2 announcement is very interesting because Google Chrome, Safari, and a few other browsers are actually based on Webkit. It’s not a browser itself, but is a framework to build a browser on. What Apple has done is take this idea of seperate processes and incorporate it into that framework.

WebKit2 is designed from the ground up to support a split process model, where the web content (JavaScript, HTML, layout, etc) lives in a separate process. This model is similar to what Google Chrome offers, with the major difference being that we have built the process split model directly into the framework, allowing other clients to use it.

Simply by default, Safari and other software based on Webkit will already have this multi-process ability built into it and should become more stable and efficient because of it.

A new deal with Universal and Fox means that you won’t see your new releases until 28 days after they’ve already become available elsewhere. The first release affected by this new deal will be Avatar. If you were planning on renting the DVD from Netflix so you could get caught up on your award-winning, excessively long, CG-animated, regurgitated film you will have to wait until May 20th. Everyone else will be checking out this race of blue people on April 22nd.

You might wonder why in the world Netflix would make such a deal. On the potential plus side, depending on how you actually use Netflix, you’ll gain access to a bunch of TV shows via streaming video. These shows are free to you as a subscriber. Stay tuned for previous seasons of “24″ and “Lie to Me.” You can also catch “Arrested Development” and “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” in their entirety. The Universal side of the deal brings us movies like ”Gosford Park,” “Being John Malkovich” and “Do the Right Thing.”

Depending on how you use Netflix, this news either makes you extremely angry or you’re indifferent to the whole thing. It seems like a large portion of the geek demographic will be happy to see more streaming television shows online, but I doubt the average consumer wants to watch reruns of Buffy the Vampire Slayer on their computer. As a matter of fact, I doubt the average Netflix customer even knows they can watch stuff online as opposed to just renting DVD’s.

What’s most interesting about this deal between Universal, Fox, and Netflix is the previous deal already in place between Universal, Fox, and Blockbuster. Blockbuster has been going downhill for a while now because of companies like Hulu, Netflix, and Redbox. They are just more convenient than going to the local video store and then worrying about late fees and whatnot. In an effort to save itself, Blockbuster literally sold out to Universal and Fox, giving them first lien on 459 stores in Canada, in exchange for being able to provide newly released DVD movies on the same day they’re released. Also, I’m pretty sure Comcast offers new movies On Demand say day as the DVD release.

Do you use Netflix? How do you feel about having to wait a whole month to see new releases?

AOL has finally decided to do something about the Bebo service, which most have long since written off. They plan to sell or just shut the site down by the end of May. The social media and social networking landscape has become very competitive. Even MySpace had to eventually concede victory to Facebook as a strictly social networking site. AOL has found that it will be entirely too costly to invest in Bebo’s success. In a memo to employees, AOL Ventures EVP Jon Brod said:

The strategy we set in May 2009 leverages our core strengths and scale in quality content, premium advertising and consumer applications, positioning us for the next phase of growth of the Internet. As we evaluate our portfolio of brands against our strategy, it is clear that social networking is a space with heavy competition, and where scale defines success. Bebo, unfortunately, is a business that has been declining and, as a result, would require significant investment in order to compete in the competitive social networking space. AOL is not in a position at this time to further fund and support Bebo in pursuing a turnaround in social networking.

AOL is committed to working quickly to determine if there are any interested parties for Bebo and the company’s current expectation is to complete our strategic evaluation by the end of May 2010.

AOL, as part of Time Warner, bought Bebo in 2008 for $850 million. While it remains one of the top social networks in the UK, it never took off in the United states except among young girls. It seems then president of Bebo, Joanna Shields, sold AOL on the whole social media thing. They brought Shields on to run one of their divisions which eventually bought SocialThing.

It seemed that AOL might have been on the right track with their social media strategy. They used SocialThing to enhance the Bebo service and it looked like it could have been interesting as a social aggregator, taking some cues from FriendFeed. A change in company structure brought new management and a new vision as AOL split from Time Warner and they brought in a new CEO. Shields left the company shortly thereafter. With no driving force behind their social media efforts, Bebo has sat idle while it’s executives were hired away and other jobs were cut entirely.

With abysmal unique visitors, there is no way Bebo will get sold for anything close to the $850 million AOL bought it for. Interestingly enough, AOL’s stocks went up after the announcement that they would be getting rid of Bebo, jumping up almost 4 percent.

Gmail has added a couple of noteworthy features to Gmail Labs. Nested Labels allows you to create a hierarchy or tree of labels, much like you would do with the folders in other email clients. The second is the Message Sneak Peek feature, which lets you see a small preview of each message without actually opening it.

Nested Labels

First thing you need to do is activated the Nested Labels feature in Gmail Labs. Find the green labs icon next to your email address on the top right of your Gmail window. Enable Nested Labels and remember to click Save at the bottom.

The next step is to actually create your nested labels. You do so by including a forward slash “/” in the name. So, you could create a hierarchy with “Black Web Media” as the root and have it contain labels like “Black Web 2.0,” “Young Black Professionals Guide,” and “Politic365.” Just create labes with the following names:

• Black Web Media
• Black Web Media/Black Web 2.0
• Black Web Media/Young Black Professionals Guide
• Black Web Media/Politic365

A couple of things to note here:

1. If the root label already exists, you don’t have to create it from scratch
2. If the sub-folders or sub-labels already exist, you will still be creating an entirely new label. For example, you already have a bunch of emails labelled as “Black Web 2.0,” but they won’t show up under “Black Web Media/Black Web 2.0.” This means that you will have to do a lot of relabeling if you want to move your current labels into the new format.

Message Sneak Peek

Most other mail clients offer you a preview of your messages in a separate pane. Message Sneak Peek brings a similar feature to your Gmail inbox. Once you enabled it in Labs, simply right-click on any message to see a pop-up preview of it’s contents. From here, you can decide to read the whole message, Archive the message, or Delete it.

If you have hotkeys enabled you can open the preview by pressing “h”. There are also a few other actions you can take, including:

• <Shift> + t : Add to tasks
• s : Star conversation
• <Shift> + i : Mark as Read
• <Shift> + u : Mark as unread

Google has been rolling out a new version of Google Maps and the latest update for Blackberry is pretty extensive, including connections to Buzz and a search by voice feature.

We’ve been rolling out new versions of Google Maps for mobile at a fast pace lately, and the first Google Maps for BlackBerry update of 2010 is a big one. For version 4.0, we’ve added new features to help you find places faster, post from those places with Google Buzz, star them for quick access, and more.

Up until now, the Google experience on the Blackberry has been pretty lame. With this latest update, it looks like Blackberry users can actually be proud of and actually enjoy using their Google services. What may be the important part of the update for most Blackberry people is the search by voice update. Instead of trying to type out directions with your thumbs, which is a pain even on a full keyboard, just hold down your green call button and say where you want to go. A map of your search result appears on your screen.

This feature works great for locations where you know the name, as you can just say it, but also works when you might only know an address or intersection. It’s basically just the power of Google’s location search without the hassle of typing everything out. This frees your hands and eyes to do more important things…like driving.

Google Buzz for mobile is the next hot new feature that is now available on the Blackberry. Using the layers interface, you can see what others are saying on Buzz, or post your own Buzz. Just as on the standard web version, you can also share photos, videos, and news.

There are many other features that come along with this update. Now, like on Android, you get personalized search suggestions based on your previous search history. Your starred items also synchronize to your Google account. You just need to make sure you’re logged in first.

To get started, install the application on your Blackberry by visiting m.google.com/maps in it’s browser. The new 4.0 version should install automatically.

Amazon announced a new system today that will make it simple for developers to provide push notifications to users of their applications and even to other applications. The new feature, which is part of Amazon’s web services, is known as Simple Notification System or SNS for short. According to the website:

Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) is a web service that makes it easy to set up, operate, and send notifications from the cloud. It provides developers with a highly scalable, flexible, and cost-effective capability to publish messages from an application and immediately deliver them to subscribers or other applications. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.

To put this in English, this will allow developers to easily add a notifications feature to their applications so that you know what’s going on with them. The primary benefit to developers is that they can skip the boring task of coding a notification system from scratch. They also avoid the pitfalls of a polling system, which wastes resources and kills your battery.

Push notifications only happen when an event actually occurs. This not only frees up your mobile device or computer to do other things, but it prevents you from redirecting your attention periodically to check if anyone or anything hit you up. The fact that this has been made available in the cloud from Amazon at a pretty affordable price may be a huge benefit both to developers and consumers.

This new notifications system goes right along with the way the web is heading. Push notifications happen in basically real time. Take a location-based application as an example. Using SNS, users of the application can be notified immediately whenever a friend checks in nearby. The notifications can happen via the protocol of choice (email, HTTP, etc.) to provide the best solution within the current application.

The system requires the user to opt-in so that we can avoid any spammy situations. SNS is secure and scalable so that, as the user base grows, your notifications system doesn’t get bogged down or clogged. Nothing worse than getting a sudden burst of notifications about old information.

What is most interesting about this service is the Free Tier. For applications that don’t send out that many notifications or that are just getting on their feet, you may not need to pay a dime to use the service:

You can get started with Amazon SNS for free. Each month, Amazon SNS customers pay no charges for the first 100,000 Amazon SNS Requests, no charges for the first 100,000 Notifications over HTTP and no charges for the first 1,000 Notifications over Email. Many applications may be able to operate just within these free tier limits.