In my Google reader I follow over 350 RSS feeds. From that I try to get a decent understanding of the zeitgeist of the online world. Since so much of the online blogosphere is created by techies, there's always a huge slant towards tech-oriented stories, ideas and news. So, sometimes, I get this rush of excitement as all these feeds light up heralding the coming of something new and web-changing. And so, since the announcement of Amazon SimpleDB, I too got excited.
But then I realized that I don't really need it. And, though I see the vast potential... I wonder exactly "who" needs it.
But first: What is Amazon SimpleDB?
A while back (two years ago, I believe), Amazon introduced a service called Amazon Mechanical Turk. This service existed to allow people to make requests to actual humans to do work, like tagging the colors in a photo or some other menial task. The humans were then paid a small fee for their actions.
This led to Amazon slowly introducing other services, such as data storage and data processing.
The intriguing issue with these services is that they are slowly developing a complete platform to run services from. The only way for the end user to access these services, however, is to be an actual programmer. Amazon supports a number of languages with APIs:
*PHP
*C#
*JAVA
*Perl
*VB.NET
But, if you don't know how to program... does SimpleDB matter? And, even if you do know how to program... could it matter to your church? Your online ministry? Your everyday life?
I don't think Amazon SimpleDB effects us "layman" tech users as much as it might someone who is coding everyday. What it does do is open the doors for people willing to learn a new technology to scale their system efficiently. Perhaps the right person with the right motivation can create a scalable online church management solution using SimpleDB and the Amazon S3 data storage tool?
I think other tools are better suited at this point for the more common users. For example, I wrote a simple database app using Zoho that can track and create ISRC numbers. Even that is something relegated to my full time job, not personal or church interest. A great use for a database might be keeping track of what worship songs were song when at your church, or for your pastor to easily keep track of what verses he has used.
Unfortunately, Amazon SimpleDB can't let me know build such things, unless I have extensive coding skills. So for now, I'll keep using Zoho (but there's still this little part of me that is excited about SimpleDB... ah the curse of the Internet zeitgeist).
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