Quietly tucked away in the Facebook Developer wiki, as I noticed while browsing around today, was Facebook’s next step to world domination (at least, developer domination) — to offer data storage. Until the launch of this service, developers have been responsible for providing their own storage for the information pertaining to their Facebook applications, the most popular external option being Amazon’s S3 service.
At this stage it seems unclear as to what the precise data storage offering from Facebook is going to be. The Developer wiki indicates that the new service is in Beta, however, there are no indications around more specific details such as space limitations. Costs are also not revealed so one could assume that the data storage offered may be free for a while whilst the service is still in Beta.
It’s not at all surprising that Facebook have decided to start offering a data storage service. The desire to have ones own Facebook application has spread like wild fire since the social network opened up its development platform earlier this year. Providing a storage facility for would be application developers simply makes the list of barriers to getting their own app live a little shorter.
It will be interesting to watch as this new service is officially rolled out by Facebook and announcements are made that indicate their intentions with regards to pricing for this service. If they were to charge for data storage, one would assume that they would then be in direct competition with the likes of Amazon S3 .
But what if facebook take the opposite approach and decide to make data storage a free service? Will this further amplify the Facebook revolution?
I wait with bated breath for the official announcement from Facebook…
