The latest trunk build has fixed a number of bugs and finally includes COMPLETE support for EC2 and Amazon Associates. All of the methods have been implemented and documented in all classes now (except for incomplete support for logging in S3). The latest builds also have support for the new Amazon CloudFront service which provides a CDN for your S3 content.

There are only 5 known bugs left before I announce an official “2.0″ release. The latest trunk builds are STABLE, and I would encourage everyone currently using Tarzan to begin using the latest development build to help us catch any remaining bugs before the big release. I’ll probably branch off a new pre-release before the end of the weekend as the last pre-release before 2.0.

You can see the remaining bugs for 2.0, and download the latest development build.

I can say that although I personally put a lot of time into Tarzan, it’s not our only product. I know it may seem that way with as much as I’ve blogged about it over the past few months and how little we’ve blogged about anything else, but we’re definitely working toward a larger goal.

Like most companies (and DEFINITELY like most startups), we’ve been squeezed for cash and resources for quite some time now. This isn’t a secret with tech companies laying off over 50k employees in recent months, and Citibank laying off nearly 60k alone. We’re still pre-funding — major funding, anyway — so we’re building as quickly as we can with extremely limited resources. People have asked us if we’re going to keep going even if we run out of money, to which I explain that we’ve been out of money for most of our company’s history. It hasn’t stopped us yet, and it’s not going to stop us now.

We still have a long way to go before we reach our vision. In the meantime, however, we’re planning to have our alpha-quality “ugly baby” release in March 2009. It’ll be enough to show our friends-and-family investors, and long-time watchers, that WarpShare isn’t vaporware. We’re excited to see the progress that’s been happening lately, and we hope to have something for you to begin checking out in the next few months. From there, we hope to attract some cash and talent to help us build out what we believe is the next game-changing business in digital media and advertising.

“Game changing? Sure thing, Ryan.” I know, I know. Every startup thinks that they have something game changing… which is a big reason why they do it. But when it comes to digital media and advertising, it appears (from what we’ve seen so far) that everybody is still thinking inside the box. They’re not re-thinking the proposed solutions. They’re still putting the consumer/end-user last and Big/Old Media and Advertisers first. Tsk, tsk.

If you’re curious to know more about what we’re doing and why we’re doing it, get in touch. We’d love to talk to you.

• Added the ability to change the content-type of an existing object in S3.
• Fixed some minor bugs in SimpleDB and S3.
• Re-wrote all of the documentation in the entire project (which enables us to generate awesome documentation which can be found on the Tarzan documentation page).
• Launched an entirely new website!
• Added support for caching frequently requested data to enhance performance. Caching types currently include file-based, APC, MySQL, PostgreSQL, and SQLite. Informal tests tend to show a speed-up of between 600x-1000x, depending on the request and the type of cache being used.

If you’d rather not use the bleeding-edge subversion trunk builds, you can grab the latest pre-release build from the Tarzan download page. Check it out!

To generate the documentation directly from source code comments, I chose to use (a heavily customized version of) NaturalDocs 1.4. My number one, biggest problem with source code documentation systems is the inability to easily edit the output HTML. I’ve used PHPDocumentor, phpDoc, and Doxygen in the past, and although the CSS editing is fairly straightforward, I prefer to fine-tune my markup before I publish it. Although I still can’t say that it’s easy to edit (fix) the (crappy) HTML that these documentation systems offer, NaturalDocs was the easiest of the bunch.

I, personally, find the new docs easier to read, follow, and link to. Hopefully you will also find them equally as useful. Let us know what you think! Fire away in the comments!

One of the things I learned in my experience working on SimplePie was that presentation is, indeed, everything. It wasn’t until we launched http://simplepie.org in January 2006 that the project really began to take off in a big way. We’re hoping to replicate that success with the new http://tarzan-aws.com site.

In addition to making a better looking website, we also wanted one that was more useful, more user-friendly. The homepage now has a straight-forward description of what Tarzan is, and includes “calls-to-action” for a variety of typical tasks. We have a new customized wiki, documentation that lives on the same web server as everything else, a good-looking yet detailed description of many of Tarzan’s features, and links to the various ways to stay in-touch with what’s going on in the project. The guts of the project (subversion repository and the package downloads) are still on Google Code, but we’re okay with that for now.

We’ll be tweaking and tuning the site over the next few days, but we believe that this will be a solid platform from which to build a successful project. If you haven’t seen the new site yet, check it out!

One facet of WarpShare’s ultimate goal is to become the “Library of Congress” for digital media. As you can imagine, this requires a crap-ton of processing, storage, databasing, and infrastructure in general. Since we’re an early-stage startup with no major financial backing yet, we realized that cloud computing (and related things) would be a fantastic way for us to get rolling. The ability to pay for usage instead of having to buy servers up-front is a huge thing for us. Amazon Web Services (AWS) was the answer to our prayers.

I’ll let you read up on AWS on your own, but in a nutshell you can utilize Amazon’s pay-per-use infrastructure via web service APIs. We’re a PHP shop, so I sat down, began digging through the online documentation, and started putting together a series of classes to interact with the services we knew we were going to use. Back in 2005, I’d started a project that interacted with Amazon’s E-Commerce Service (ECS, now known as Amazon Associates Web Service (AAWS)). I called this project Tarzan since it worked with Amazon Web Services (get it?). I decided to restart the project, throw out the code that sucked, and begin adding support for cloud computing, online storage, messaging, and simple databasing.

In April 2008, we decided that although the project was still a bit immature it was good enough to open up to the larger community (with the very liberal Simplified BSD License) with the hope that we could begin collaborating with other developers who were also interested in seeing a project like this become more useful. We also knew what we were up against: “official” PHP APIs provided by Amazon themselves, along with a barrage of other AWS-related projects that were — for the most part — little more than itch-and-scratch-ware.

In the few months since we released our code to the open-source community, we’ve had people like you submit a variety of bugs and patches, we’ve had some really cool features requested (and implemented), we’ve received some terrific feedback from our users, and we’ve put a TON of time into making the project better for the entire Tarzan community — including ourselves. But we know there’s still much to do.

In an effort to make a bigger splash in the AWS development community, we’re going to be launching a brand-new Tarzan website in the next couple of weeks. The goal being not only give Tarzan more users, but also more feedback, more bug reports and patches, more cool features, better approaches to new and existing methods, and all that other good stuff. It should be noted that Tarzan is not a diversion from WarpShare’s goals, but rather a fundamental piece that will help us reach them.

As part of the new site, we’re going to be integrating a wiki for ad-hoc and community-contributed documentation and tutorials, publishing how-to videos, showcasing the cool things that people are building with Tarzan, (hopefully) bringing on additional developers, and encouraging the Tarzan community to grow beyond the walls of the WarpShare office.

We look forward to watching this project and community grow, and expect more great things in the future.

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.

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.”

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.

Today’s audience is inundated with choice. They choose content, content format, content delivery, content player, content schedule, content presentation, and even content price. With all this choice how does a content provider get noticed enough to win an audience? Without mass slavery consumption attracting massive ad fees, how does a content provider make money? Context baby, context.

Internet audiences rely on context to help them discover, enjoy, recommend, organize and re-mix content. Tags, playlists, ratings, artist, title, length, genre, cast, director, ranking, etc. adorn content with meaning and relevance. Without the context, the content is just another archive in someone’s library.

Context can also inform the advertising industry. Obviously, context reveals the interests of audience members but a more powerful opportunity exists — allow advertising to become part of the context. Sponsor and endorse content, artists, actors, DJs, bloggers, re-mixers, sys-admins, search, delivery, etc. Associate brands with critical components in the discovery, delivery, and presentation of entertainment. Interact directly with audience members and their networks. Give the audience what it wants and it may give advertising what it needs — attention.

Holy crap, just so big media can feel safe they expect the customer to sacrifice fun, convenience, personalization, computer integrity, control, freedom, privacy, first-born, left-nut, etc. This is entertainment folks not Homeland Security! It’s no wonder for every iTunes song downloaded 35 songs are downloaded through unmonetized channels.

Well it’s time to stop investing in services that inconvenience customers and build services that actually serve customers what they want, how they want it, when they want it, where they want it. Then let these customers turn their friends into customers. All within an infrastructure that fairly compensates owners…wait, that sounds like a business opportunity.

The long and the short of it is that consumers and technology are both evolving, quickly; and the advertising industry must evolve with them, or better yet, lead the charge. Relevancy and control, even more so than the entertainment factor, are the keys to advertising’s success in this brave new world. If marketers become enablers of these instead of inhibitors, consumers will engage in the advertising experience, willingly and with open arms. However, if the advertising industry continues to hold on to the traditional advertising models of yesteryear and attempt to retrofit it, as many are, there will certainly be a surge of vacancies on Madison Avenue.

http://publications.mediapost.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=Articles.showArticleHomePage&art_aid=67661

The impact of choice and personalization is revolutionizing the online ad model–small and specific beats big and general. My favorite old media magnate turned new media magnate, Jeff Jarvis, gives fair warning:

Just because a site has 100 million users, that doesn’t mean 100 million people see your ad. It’s not TV. Repeat: It’s not TV. The only people who will see your ad are the ones who see the page on which it appears. If you buy 10,000 impressions, aka eyeballs, you can buy them on a big site or a bunch of small sites, it doesn’t matter. Big brings no advantage other than convenience and it also brings some disadvantages like inefficiency and price. This is the essence of the change in the economic model of media. Post that on your wall and stare at it.

http://www.buzzmachine.com/2007/08/20/big-is-over-portals-are-past/

Success in new media requires prioritizing users and taking the time to understand what they want…how novel.

Traded value must change from extracting value from the movement of stockpiles to extracting value from the flow of data. To maximize value it must flow everywhere freely. Free flowing content focuses the market on the most important goal: attracting and keeping the attention of the content consumer. Anything that impedes this goal appears as an obstacle and the flow will be routed around it.

(nod to Gerd:  http://www.gerdleonhard.net/2007/07/gerd-leonhards-.html)

“Do you hear that Mr. Anderson? That is the sound of inevitability.”

Well fear not! We’ve recently launched our new Foleeo video widgets, which solve this very problem! Now, instead of having several video boxes on your page at once, you can simply add those videos to your YouTube favorites, use our new Foleeo video widget, and you can get a playlist of the last ten videos you’ve added!

Want to show off a new video on your page, but hate having to edit the code? With Foleeo’s new video widget, adding a new video to your page is as easy as adding it to your YouTube favorites! Check it out!

No? Well they have been.

We spent a few days re-writing our entire backend for the widgets, and they’re working much better now. This new backend will also make it much easier to support WHOLE. NEW. WIDGETS. Isn’t that exciting? Yes, yes it is!

We’ve got more cool stuff coming down the pipe. Stay tuned.

“The Break-Up” is about the relationship between an advertiser and a consumer. They’ve agreed to meet in a restaurant. The man’s feeling perfectly happy, until the woman makes a painful announcement: she wants a divorce. In the course of their conversation she makes it clear to him why she is leaving him. And he makes it very clear that he doesn’t have an empathic bone in his body. At the end of the movie the woman walks away disappointed but determined. The advertiser stays behind alone.

Microsoft was “one more player” when they released MS-DOS®. Apple was “one more player” when they released the iPod®. Google was “one more player” when they released their now-ubiquitous search engine. Foleeo is “one more player” in digital media. And like Microsoft, Apple, and Google, Foleeo has a passion. We see all sorts of problems with the current state of digital media, and we believe we know how to fix them.

It shouldn’t be so hard to show off the things that you like. It shouldn’t be so hard to watch videos, listen to music, or look at photos on more than one computer or more than one device. People who want to do the right thing shouldn’t be punished while those want to do the wrong thing have all the advantage. Artists and record companies should be fairly paid for the work they put in to create the music. People should be able to enjoy the music they pay for without all the hassle of Digital Restriction Management. Although that’s a very legally sticky situation right now, we believe that we have the ideas and tools to solve this problem in a way that is legit and allows people on all sides of the equation to be happy.

We’re launching today with widgets — a window into the music you like. Over the coming months, we’ll be updating and upgrading the widgets making them better, cooler and more useful with each update. We’ll also be unveiling a new technology this Fall that addresses the problems consumers, artists, and record companies have faced since the dawn of the digital music revolution.

But more on that later. For now, we’re just happy to be here.