Google needs to change their motto
Posted by Ian Holsman
From "Don’t be Evil" to "We don’t need to be Evil".
because its true.
This yahoo/msft/aol/newscorp thing is just noise to them.
James pointed me to Latrz, which to me is a delicious clone. I’m guessing it was written in a day. My recent experience and It highilghts a couple of things to me
- Having the user api just makes sense for google in so many ways. I wish they would have chosen OpenID for openness, but If I was in thier seats I wouldn’t have.
- the next great idea will be written with appengine (or on a clone). it’s just too easy not to. I was on a conference call yesterday, and while listening I nearly coded up a django picture gallery and voting tool. now I would have been done if I actually remember WTF I was doing (I haven’t coded a django app in about a year and a half now).
- it is easier to just upload it on appengine than go through operations, and even copy it to a hosted machine I run.
- I don’t see the lock in anymore. If google announced this about a month ago, I would have a SoC project proposed to write a GFS-SQL parser for Hbase and Hypertable. (Anyone see the irony/joy of getting google to pay for it’s competition?) and it would have been done.
I totally agree on your thoughts on appengine – and yes Latrz, it was written in a day :).
Latrz certainly has similarities to delicious in that its a personal set of links with tags. So the user interface for adding/removing links is kinda similar (but then there’s only so many ways to do that :).
Though the big difference is how you use the links. With latrz its not bookmarks; its articles to read – which once read are removed from your reading list.
So I tend to think of latrz as more like a cross between bookmarks and email. You can move things in and out of your inbox when you’ve read them – along with a nice little UI for reading them and marking them as read. With an added bonus of rating all articles you read so we can generate feeds of recommended articles you can then share with your friends etc.
Impressively, your typo in the link to Latrz means that http://latrz.appsot.com/ is the current top hit for Latrz on google (instead of latrz.appsPot.com, which I slowly untangled when I when I ended up there trying to refind latrz to bookmark at home…
Oops. sorry about that. I fixed the link.