A few months ago Amazon contacted me about our usage of Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS), a messaging platform that enables topic-based messaging between applications. At the time we were one of the biggest consumers of SNS, and they were curious about what we were doing with it.  I pointed them to http://realtime.active.com and explained our realtime architecture to them.  Intrigued, they showed a few of their engineers and later decided to write a whitepaper about Active.com Realtime and SNS.

Now, finally, that whitepaper is available on amazon.com.  Check it out at http://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/active-com/.  Here's an excerpt:

Active.com was looking for a way to analyze a user’s click-stream in  near real-time to deliver pertinent trending information in a timely  manner. One of the fundamental ways that Active.com enhances user  experience on its website is by understanding and anticipating user  needs- surfacing relevant content dynamically to users whenever  possible. This is reflected in the “Popular Near You” feature on the  homepage, or the “Events Near You” feature on the channel pages, such as  active.com/running.

I've gotta give props to Kevin over at Amazon for driving this whole thing.  And of course, I've also gotta give props to the two guys who built Realtime, Brian Levine and Rob Cameron!