Amazon S3, P2P Storage, and API Access

There's been a lot of talk about Amazon's S3 storage platform recently. It's accessible via an API and has a "relatively" low cost per gigabyte. If you think about companies that allow for online photo, video, and music storage today, these companies are essentially reselling storage. But they have made storage accessible to users in a very meaningful way; that is, it's easy to upload your content, etc. and then publish it to other sites.

It would be interesting to wrap a consumer-friendly interface around the Amazon S3 storage platform. You would allow people to upload their content and then publish it out to other sites if they wanted to. Here are some companies that have gone down the path.

An interesting and even cheaper alternative to this would be to take a P2P storage infrastructure (lots have been built in the past and become widely used) and wrap a consumer friendly interface as well as an API around it for uploading/downloading of data and publishing to other locations (along the lines of the hybrid destination/distribution model I spoke of a few weeks ago). You could replicate the data so that if one node went down, the data would still be accessible.