Amazon S3 is cheap, essentially limitless online storage. If this is the first time you’ve heard of S3, you’ll find everything you need to know about it online at the S3 homepage.

For those of you that are interested or already using S3, I have three questions.

1. How do you use S3?
2. What do you use it for?
3. What software do you use to interact with S3?

These questions come from my own experience working with S3.

The only solid client I’ve found for working with S3 is Transmit from Panic. Transmit allows me to work interact with S3 exactly as if it were an FTP server. It’s a beautiful thing.

On Windows however I haven’t been able to find anything reliable.

I’ve tried the S3Fox Firefox extension. It’s buggy as heck. I’ve contacted the author of the extensions author offering to help out with bug fixes and added features. I never heard back though. So that’s sad.

I’ve seen a number of other products, the seemingly most popular being JungleDisk. Almost all of these are geared for drive backups. That’s just not the way I need to use S3.

I’ve tried JetS3t. But it’s also pretty buggy. The kind of stuff it barfs on is not knowing how to map a folder on S3 to a folder on my local drive. That just totally baffles me.

WebDrive I have to say has made me pretty happy. Still it doesn’t have that “it just feels right” quality about it.

The main thing I use S3 for is storing my iTunes movies and music. I regularly work on 3-4 different computers. I don’t want to replicate my entire 50 gigs or so of iTunes data. So I just stash it up on S3 and then download songs as I want to listen to them.

We’re considering building an S3 client that better supports the type of more casual usage model that I described. Before we head down that road though we want to get some feedback from the rest of the world out there on how they use S3.

If you’d be interested in seeing new and better ways to interact with Amazon S3, let us know.