New Amazon Business Model Base don Engagism

I read with interest the recent article about the Web 2.0 Summit last week that mentioned Amazon.com's decision to sell online storage and computing power. According to the Washington Post, "Bezos detailed a corporate strategy that seeks to transform [Amazon] into a provider of Web-based storage, computing power and other logistical services for business." Just hree months ago, Amazon released a Web service dubbed "Elastic Compute Cloud," which puts the company's servers at the disposal of businesses looking for additional computing power.

How is this related to engagism? Well, the needs of engagist social networking sites like YouTube for storage and computing capacity often fluctuate. Some days, there might be a surge (a particularly popular video, for example), while other days there might be less of a need. Rather than being forced to purchase enought capacity to meet the high demand days (and leaving all that capacity unused on low demand days), businesses can turn to services like Amazon and others to purchase additional capacity. An "on-demand" strategy like this allows engagist sites to get up and running without having to purchase more capacity then they might be able to use early on.

This is just one burgeoning business model that engagism is leading us toward. Figuring out the others is a critical challenge for companies that want to be successful in an engagist culture.