Amazon provides two very compelling services with S3 and EC2, allowing you to easily, and cheaply, scale both processing and storage. If you utilize these services, you might be wondering “What is the expected network performance between Amazon EC2 instances? What is the available bandwidth between Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3? How about in and out of EC2?” Well, RightScale provides the answer with Network performance within Amazon EC2 and to Amazon S3.

Facebook has created quite a stir with their new Beacon — a feature that allows third party sites to communicate user purchases and interests to Facebook and then into a user’s newsfeed. It has raised a number of valid privacy concerns, but the technology itself is quite interesting. Jay Goldman has taken it all apart to see how it works in Deconstructing Facebook Beacon Javascript.