http://www.s3fm.com/ is really useful for uploading/viewing files for personal viewing.
I was wondering if there was something good for social networks (using Amazon s3 or something similar), where it will only show the subset of files uploaded by a specific user (for example, limit access to the user's specific bucket).
Can s3fm be adapted to this solution? or is there something else out there?
I believe you would need to build your own system to do this. What you use doesn't really matter, you could use S3, Azure, etc as your base storage "cloud."
There is no method of authentication on S3, it only serves files publicly. You can of course obfuscate the file names by naming them with hashes. But still only a fileserver. Maybe roll your own system?
Then make it public so I can use it... it would be awesome!
Chris, thanks for bringing this up.
Next version of S3fm will allow just that: sharing files and "folders" with your friends and colleagues using your own S3 account. A bucket owner will be able to use his or her credentials to create new (non-AWS) "accounts" and assign different permissions for each user. Then s/he will be able to select files to share or "folders" for uploads for each of those users.
A secure authentication method has been developed on top of regular Amazon S3 API so no 3rd party service will be required for that purpose. In fact, your newly created account credentials are not even accessible to anyone but you and you users . On the flip side, if you loose them - they are gone, we wont be able to restore them. :)
This version was expected this coming Fri (Aug 9, 2009), but apparently will be delayed another week or so.
Happy to help, feel free to follow up with questions or ideas,
Alex