I agree. SQS's design has its uses and S3's ordered key-space makes it easy to create queue structures without this behavior if that's what you think you want.

I agree. SQS's design has its uses and S3's ordered key-space makes it easy to create queue structures without this behavior if that's what you think you want. The thing I too would like to see from AWS would be some kind of callback api where an HTTP request would be sent to an EC2 instance when something useful happens in S3. That would allow you to dispense with polling entirely.