When Amazon.com announced S3 a few weeks ago there were mixed reactions around the web. Some people focused on the promise that S3 offers - unlimited, reliable, online storage for a fraction of what other providers currently charge. Others focused on the reality of the situation - S3 is just a set of web services. Nothing for consumers to use, no application to install, no web site to visit. Both groups were right of course. S3 offers a value proposition for personal storage that is unmatched in the market today, but without a way for consumers to use it who really cares?

Well today, all of that changes. Jungle Disk isn’t the first utility released to make use of S3, but we think it’s the first one that makes S3 consumer friendly enough for the average Internet user, and it’s shipping today in a stable-beta form.

To help understand the value proposition of S3 all you need to do is spend a few minutes with the calculator on the front page of the site. For almost any values you put in, and certainly any  real-world usage, S3 comes out way ahead of the competition - and not just by a little bit - by an order of magnitude in most cases. And frankly, I don’t expect them to catch up on price any time soon. Other storage providers will probably be quick to point out that they have a more complete feature set right now, with features like public file sharing and folder synchronization, but with time that lead will disappear. It’s a lot easier to add features than it is to retool a business model that has just become obsolete. In the end, I believe users will choose where to store their data online based on two factors: price, and trust. In both of those areas I believe Amazon S3 is head and shoulders above the rest.

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