WarpShare™

A slimmer, faster Tarzan

For those are are interested in, or have been using our Tarzan API for interacting with Amazon’s web services stack, I’ve spent the past two solid days writing and debugging new code that finally unshackles Tarzan from the PEAR classes it was using for fetching remote data and calculating HMAC hashes.

Starting with today’s trunk build, Tarzan is entirely self-contained. Besides moving to the HMAC hashing function that is built into PHP 5.1.4, the new TarzanHTTPRequest class has been written from the ground-up based around the cURL extension for fetching data from remote servers. Its methods are the same as what we used with PEAR HTTP Request, so if you had custom code that relied on that functionality it should still work with this new class.

Today’s commit laid the groundwork for future MultiCURL support, which will substantially improve performance in classes with lots of requests like AmazonSQS. I also noticed today that Amazon added COPY support to the S3 API last month, so you can expect that functionality to make it into Tarzan in short order.

If you’re a PHP developer looking for a set of classes for working with Amazon S3, SQS, EC2, AAWS (formerly ECS 4.0), or SimpleDB, take Tarzan for a spin and let us know what you like and what could be better.

Categories: Announcements, Tarzan and What we're doing

It’s The Audience

While mainstream media argues, “people need to learn the value of music”; digital media lays bare a cold reality: Media has no value (fungible) without people — it inherits value from the size and influence of its audience.

None of this is new. What’s changed is the business. Crappy entertainment no longer garners attention simply by occupying a place in the distribution channel. Simultaneously, good stuff wins an audience via many zero-cost channels.

So let’s leave behind the “manual grain counting” business and replace it with something that will “feed the world”. This is probably the biggest lesson from Google’s success: “More value can be harvested from aggregated attention and interaction than from tit-for-tat transactions.”

Categories: Industry Thoughts

Road Construction Ahead

We’ve all seen the bright orange signs warning us about torn-up concrete and ashpalt on the road ahead. We know the ride will soon become uncomfortable and traffic will crawl. However, after time the road is new and improved, the ride is smoother, and it handles more traffic. Media companies have seen these signs posted all over their business since Napster arrived in 1999. Instead of heeding the warnings and learning to adapt, they hassle work crews and erect barriers around the improvement sites. Now they wonder why traffic has rerouted around them.

The ongoing deconstruction/reconstruction of the media biz has been prompted by very fundamental changes in the way people receive their entertainment. For over 50 years, purchase transactions have been tightly coupled with distribution hand-offs. Every time media changed hands along the distribution pipeline a monetary transaction occurred. This made sense when the hand-offs added value to the item being delivered by moving it closer to the customer (e.g warehouses and retail stores) or increasing the convenience (e.g. TiVo shows around individual schedules). Since media has gone digital, it is as close as the nearest Internet device and raw distribution is simply part of the infrastructure rather than a value-add. That leaves us with convenience.

Convenience is not trivial in the digital world. Imagine if the near zero costs of digital distribution applied to newspapers and mail delivery. Hundreds of newspapers and thousands of pieces of junk mail would pile-up in front of your home everyday. As you sift through this avalanche of information, you find items of interest in most papers and even a few mailers. Unfortunately, no single publication satisfies all your interests and you don’t have time to go through this stuff everyday. Your time and attention has become the limiting item. Fortunately, the digital world has been busy building convenient services that save time and attention:

a) Search tools (discovering and culling information)
b) Social sites (co-op of similar tastes)
c) Blog feeds (trusted experts)
d) Sharing networks (trusted friends and general grazing)

These new “workmen” can rebuild our broken media “highways” if we support them rather than hinder them.

Categories: Industry Thoughts