(Photo: flickr.com/ky_olsen

Don't be alarmed, but it's very possible you wasted money on that smart TV. [PC Mag]

Companies might be reconsidering Amazon Web Services, after one outage too many. [Wall Street Journal]

Netflix is preparing to roll out new social features, like the ability to share what you've watched (if you want) through the company's Facebook app. So you'd better finish watching every available episode of "Say Yes to the Dress" on the double quick. [TPM]

Doesn't look like Poke is going to dethrone Snapchat juuust yet. [GigaOm]

Speaking of online video: is Hulu about to lose a lot of employees? [AllThingsD]

We hope you didn't bet any serious money on the new version of Myspace turning the old girl around. [The Verge]

Never going awaaaay. (Photo: flickr.com/oreilly)

Digital data sure might feel ephemeral, but two big are companies doing their part to make sure everything gets backed up, forever. Last week, Facebook let slip some details about "Sub-Zero," the company's planned facility for long-term data storage. And today, Amazon debuted its "Glacier" service, which Ars Technica describes as "a data archival service that will store data for one penny per gigabyte per month."

That sounds like a pretty good deal, but before you open an account and start backing up your iTunes library, you should probably know that this isn't exactly normal cloud computing. It'll take hours to retrive any data stored with the service. This is only for truly long-term archiving. Think data meant to last for centuries. 

Ars Technica explains:

Glacier is designed to last for a long time, but is slow: accessing data will take three to five hours. Amazon hasn't detailed exactly what technology is storing the data, but massive tape libraries are a good bet given the lengthy retrieval windows.... An Amazon statement sent to Ars says only that "Glacier is built from inexpensive commodity hardware components," and is "designed to be hardware-agnostic, so that savings can be captured as Amazon continues to drive down infrastructure costs."

Use cases outlined include archiving media assets (no more lost-and-found masterpieces like Metropolis!) and archiving research and scientific data (never lose your notes in a fire like tragic science hero Nikola Tesla!).

It's hard not to imagine a massive bunker forgotten in the wake of some Hunger Games-style catastrophe, lying silent except for the whirring of the cooling systems and the shuffling footsteps of a slightly wild-eyed caretaker.

Actually, that sounds familiar. It sounds like Amazon CEO's $42 million Clock of the Long Now project, designed to keep time on a thousand-year scale. In a recent Wall Street Journal piece on the timepiece, a former Amazon exec told the paper that Mr. Bezos "thinks in decades and centuries…Unlike most of us, Jeff is hard-wired for the very long term."

Dude must be a torturously slow chess player.

Now it appears that there was not just a temporary outage, but that some customer data was permanently lost, meaning another headache for local entrepreneurs to explain to their users.

Chartbeat, for example, sent an email out to its customers explaining that 11 hours of data, which measure real time traffic and engagement on those sites, had been lost and would appear as gaps in their timeline.

Several start-ups Betabeat chatted with last week said they were considering a switch to Amazon's biggest competitor, Rackspace, as well as looking into a refund based on the downtime. No word yet on whether this new revelation has pushed any entrepreneurs to the breaking point.

Amazon is still experiencing errors and latency in at least three facilities, according to their status page. We're waiting to hear how Amazon plans to compensate the sites that experienced extended downtime in light of the cloud host's promise of 99.95 percent uptime. (Amazon's uptime is now at 99.65 percent across the web, according to a website put up by Yuval Adam, a Tel Aviv developer.)

This major outage is just about the worst publicity for Amazon Web Services, which is seen as the cheapest and easiest cloud hosting provider. Amazon's main competitor, Rackspace, is seen as the spendier, higher quality server farm, but Rackspace has decided not to seize the moment: "We never sell on our competitor's pain. We want happy customers, not ones that switched under painful conditions," tweeted lead Rackspace evangelist Robert Scoble. Probably a good position to take--Rackspace has had its share of outages as well.

New York investigative journalism nonprofit ProPublica Ablebots also put together a list of sites affected by the outage. (h/t to ProPublica's Dan Nguyen)

Rackspace employee and tech blogger Robert Scoble.

New York start-ups love them some Amazon Web Services, the cloud hosting platform that remotely stores data and makes it easy to add new servers quickly in the event of an increase in usage. But the giant stumbled this morning with an outage at its Eastern data center which took down sites across the web including Reddit, Foursquare and Quora, and while many sites are back up, some continue to experience downtime; locally, web app maker Aviary has been down all day.

Start-ups are naturally disgruntled. Betabeat reported earlier that Jack Groetzinger, co-founder of General Assembly-housed start-up SeatGeek, says he's considering moving to Rackspace, which provides similar services to about the same number of customers as Amazon. “In the tech world people know this is Amazon’s fault, but the average person visiting our site is going to think we are the ones with the tech problem,” he said.

Amazon hasn't said anything to its customers yet about refunds, discounts or other compensation for the downtime, which cost a lot of companies time, money and reputation. But some compensation will be in order, considering the company promises its customers 99.95 percent uptime.

Aviary's CTO Israel Derdik was frustrated but sympathetic. "Communication from the Amazon Web Services has been kind of sporadic, they've posted regular updates but have been vague as to ETAs on fixes. 'A couple of hours' is hardly useful," he told Betabeat in an email. "I've been on the other side of this scenario so I know what it feels like to be under the gun to get things up and running again. They have all hands on deck working on it and I'm sure they're not slacking."

Interestingly, he also said the outage could cause some customers to spend more money with Amazon Web Services. "What I will say is that this incident really makes people evaluate their redundancy and fail-over policies on EC2. If anything, AWS will start generating more revenue as folks create and maintain new redundant servers in different regions," Mr. Derdik said.

Has Aviary considered moving to Rackspace?

It's not that easy, Mr. Derdik explained. "We're pretty heavily invested in AWS's platform so we will probably add a few redundant servers on the West coast as a failsafe," he said, but he acknowledged Amazon's competitors are worth a look. "I'm also going to reevaluate Rackspace and see if they can provide us the redundacy we need. That would require learning the quirks of a new platform so I'm not loving that idea. Microsoft's Azure might work for us as well since our web servers run Windows," he said.

Betabeat also contacted Thrillist, which experienced issues including a delay for their crucial daily newsletter. "They are talking to our tech guys. They are working fast I'm sure," Thrillist CEO Ben Lerer told Betabeat this morning.

We asked how pissed they were, on a scale of one to 10. "It's annoying but it's a 3," he said. "This hasn't happened before and it's not like I'm the only one who's down."

Foursquare, which experienced intermittent issues today, declined to say how pissed they were and referred us to their status blog, which reads: "Our usually-amazing datacenter hosts, Amazon EC2, are having a few hiccups this morning, which affected us and a bunch of other services that use them. Everything looks to be getting back to normal now. We’ll update this when we have the all clear. Thanks for your patience."

The most recent updates from Amazon say its Northern Virginia Elastic Compute Cloud and relational database are experiencing "instance connectivity, latency and error rates," and its Elastic Beanstalk is experiencing increased error rates.

Sounds like a big opportunity for Rackspace, but so far evangelist Robert Scoble has remained silent.

All Is Not Well In This Cloud

One of the most interesting developments in the tech industry since the dot com days has been the emergence of cloud infrastructure like Amazon web services.

With AWS, young companies are able to scale faster and cheaper. One of the reasons the seed stage ecosystem is so flooded with cash right now is because a small investment is enough to build a viable app and test the market for consumer traction.

So it's been a trip watching Twitter today as AWS experiences its worst outage on the East Coast in recent memory. It's not just the little guys. Established companies like Foursquare, Aviary and Thrillist have all been affected.

Not everyone minds disconnecting for a day. "AWS outage (including @reddit) is great news for my midterm grade," Tweeted Max  Stoller. And there are other side benefits. "Actually, we host ads on EC2. So enjoy 'No Ads on Stack Overflow Day'," wrote Joel Spolsky.

Chris Dixon points back to an old post he did, where he notes that he kept his first startup Site Advisor, running on two separate data centers managed by different companies.

UPDATE: Jack Groetzinger, co-founder of local start-up SeatGeek, says his company is considering moving to Amazon competitor Rackspace. "In the tech world people know this is Amazon's fault, but the average person visiting our site is going to think we are the ones with the tech problem."

Groetzinger says the downtime so far definitely exceeds the promise from Amazon to provide service with 99.95 percent uptime, and that SeatGeek, along with many other companies, is going to inquire about a refund for this month. "This will definitely impact their reputation and business within the start-up community."