Posted by Ian Holsman
Wed, 16 Apr 2008 19:39:00 GMT
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.
Posted in Business Related | Tags appengine, django, google | 3 comments
Posted by Ian Holsman
Fri, 11 Apr 2008 03:57:00 GMT
so i had some more time to thing about appengine, and the biggest problem I can see is the lock-in. all the other things are minor
Krow weighs in about people's complaining about lock-in. Initially I thought so too, as there is no equivalent to GQL. but then I remember about hbase and hypertable. Once some open source guy writes a GQL clone the platform is open and I see multiple hosting providers offering it as an alternative. personally I think the lack of joins a bonus. it prevents web developers from writing slow apps ;-)
the lack of language support is temporary.. I mean how hard would it be to make java not be able to access the local file system or jni? just replace/overwrite some jar files (unless you have legal issues that preclude someone doing that).
but it is still a 3rd platform, and definatly a boon to python guys. now.. what to call the generic version? Python Hadoop, And Gql (PHAG?)
Posted in Development | Tags appengine, google, python | 2 comments
Posted by Ian Holsman
Tue, 08 Apr 2008 07:13:00 GMT
Google has just announced their alternative to Amazon's s3 called 'App Engine'.
I think that if this is successful it will provide a shift in some of the basic web development economics and practices, even more than Amazon's s3 has.
why?
- Small hosting providers (ones that offer a shell account for $12/month) will be marginalized. why pay for something when you get it for free?
- M&A. It will create a 3rd platform to develop on. you currently have LAMP and Windows. The google app engine provides a 3rd. The major difference is you can't buy it. If we acquire a company who runs on this platform we have 2 choices. continue paying google for the infrastructure, or redevelop it onto LAMP. of course this suits google as their integration costs are lessened. Google might provide a 'open source' version of their infrastructure.. but I doubt it.
- Language choice. currently it only runs one language, python. They say they might support others in the future, but if not there will be a lot of people learning python (to the detriment of PHP, perl, and ruby), as well as new tools and utilities written in it. It's going to give python a huge boost in usage
- Database choice. Google's App Engine will be using 'bigtable' which is not a RDBMS, and uses a hacked up version of SQL. This impacts companies like mysql. you don't need to worry about replication here Krow ;-)
- Applications are integrated into Google's authentication system by default. you don't even have your own list of users.
As a python developer I love it. It even has django out of the box, but I would be a bit cautious to base my startup on a infrastructure which can only be provided by a single company.. when I get a invite I will be porting my applications over to it.. hopefully by then someone would have ported their blogging software to it so i won't have to.
Posted in Business Related | Tags django, google, mysql, python | 2 comments
Posted by Ian Holsman
Mon, 17 Dec 2007 12:54:00 GMT
So a while back I bought a house.
One of the things which happened was that it was passed in and I was the only one who had made a bid. (In Australia, a. the housing market is still hot, b. the person who makes the highest bid as right of first refusal/negotiation rights with the seller).
I think I got a good price on the house, but mainly due to the other bidders (there were 2 other people keen on the house as well) being shut out of the auction. If they would have started bidding I believe the house would have gone for a lot more than I paid.
So how did this occur.
The auctioneer thought he would do what is right, and not what is common place. In Australia an auction usually consists of 3 phases. The starting phase where the auctioneer is usually bidding against himself and possibly one other, and the 2nd phase where the auctioneer goes back inside the property and then continues the auction and the third phase which consists of the auctioneer declaring the “house is on the market” which means the reserve has been met. Most people wait for the 2nd or 3rd phase to happen before they start bidding.
In our auction the auctioneer decided to do the right thing, and skip the 2nd phase. The problem is that the bidders were expecting him to do this, as such they didn’t start bidding, leaving us with the right of first refusal.
So why am I telling you this?
In the last 3-6 months I’ve been asked to review various startups who all claim they do a better search than google. and they start going into a demo where they type in a search and they do in fact produce a great result.
The problem is the way they type the search in. No one would ever type in a query phrase like they expect their users to do. Google has trained people to do search in a particular way. These companies expect they can re-train people to do search in their way.
I think thats a losing proposition from the get go.
Unless you are the leader in your area by a large margin, you should not and can not get people to change their behavior to suit your needs. Be it a “better” or more “correct” way of doing it. All you will end up with is confused users.
Posted in General | Tags behavior, google | 2 comments
Posted by Ian Holsman
Wed, 30 May 2007 21:09:00 GMT
Wow.
This is neat.
Google Gears is a IE and firefox plugin which lets you store information on the client end in a relational database.
I heard talk about firefox offering something similar to this in a future release, but it seems like it is here already.
It’s a ~140k plugin which allows you to have relational database on the client, and client side cache the web developer can control directly.
and the best parts of it is that the thing is:
- open source (BSD licensed) the code
- cross platform
- cross browser (well firefox/IE )
from the little digging I’ve done, the db is based on sqlite.
Posted in General | Tags gears, google, offline | 1 comment
Posted by Ian Holsman
Thu, 24 May 2007 18:39:00 GMT
David Ulevitch posts about the
Dell/Google Partnership deal
specifically about how they create a landing page for all their customers when they type in a missing/invalid domain. The landing page is full of ads (under the fold organic results doesn’t count in my book).
Verizon tried this a while back and the outrage was enormous, and they quickly backed down.
OpenDNS came up with a unique workaround for their customer base. They intercept the call to determine if the page is a typo and serve one of their pages instead.
The main difference to a opendns typo landing page and the google one is that the page is 90% organic results AND you have choice to not use their service. The choice here is what will keep opendns honest.
I’m actually surprised @GOOG here, this kind of thing wouldn’t have happened a couple of years ago.
At least the core-search product team has kept true to the mantra. I guess it makes a difference when they know their customers have a choice.
Posted in General | Tags google | no comments
Posted by Ian Holsman
Sun, 22 Apr 2007 18:22:00 GMT
over at ajaxian they mentioned that google has announced a new Feed API which lets you do client side mashups I think.
Great idea. if it catches on, then GooG has another method of figuring out what is popular/relevant as it tracks even more of your actions
Posted in General | Tags google, privacy | no comments
Posted by Ian Holsman
Fri, 30 Mar 2007 05:19:00 GMT
rant
Well.. for some reason most of my ‘chatter’ sites have been removed from the google index.
the reason?
I don’t know. for all I know someone in the google operations centre was drunk was night and accidently clicked “blacklist” on my site.
Google’s arbitration process??
mail our support people with your transgressions and what you have done to fix them, and we might do something about it (in 2-3 weeks)
this sux is so many ways.
1. No notification was given, or reason was given to why it was blacklisted. (not even in there webmaster area, which I use) so I have no idea if there is a bug on their side, or if someone complained or if they didn’t like the color of the background.
2. No support queue. After following the google’s suggest fix (mail + prey). I didn’t get a receipt or a ticket assigned. I don’t even know if my mail reached a bot at the other end, or got eaten by a spam filter somewhere.
3. 2-3 week turnaround? and if it is your mistake? do I get a free t-shirt for the site being dead for that period? I’m lucky I don’t rely on them for feeding my family is all I can say.
now google can respond that they don’t have to index your site. they are a public company and there is no obligation from them to index me.
While that might have been true when they first started. They now hold a monopoly position as far as I can see. 80-90% of all searches are done through them.
In the monopoly position that they hold in the search market, you have different responsibilities to your users/suppliers.
I would argue that they need a impartial / independent body to deal with people getting blacklisted. at the very least they need to fix up their process to:
- notify the domain owner that their site is failing their quality guidelines and the specific reason they are failing, and they risk being blacklisted.
- have a ticketing system so we can see if a google operations person has looked into the dispute.
it’s not that much to ask is it? giving some feedback?
oh.. I’m not saying my site didn’t pass all of their guidelines, I think it was meeting all of them.
Posted in General | Tags google, gorilla | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by Ian Holsman
Mon, 12 Feb 2007 06:51:00 GMT
it’s weird.. I have a couple of sites of all a similar structure, but poor bank chat isn’t being indexed by google.
It knows about the site, as it says it visited on January 10, but nothing since.
anybody know what is going on???
it was on the index for a while, but it vanished without a trace, and google’s webmaster tools doesn’t give me a hint either.
Tags google | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by Ian Holsman
Thu, 11 Jan 2007 12:44:00 GMT
I launched 2 sites at the same time, and submitted them both in the same way, a Fishing and a Golf one. (about 3 weeks ago)
One is showing up in the google search index (and has been for 2 weeks), and the other hasn’t. Google’s Webmaster tools doesn’t shed any light either (ie.. it doesn’t say the site is Spammy.. just to have patience).
I’ve got some theories on why:
- one topic is subject to more spam fraud, and as such google punishes sites which reference those topics
- one of the domains used to be owned by a spammer
- google has some magic number on the number of sites owned by the same whois entry/IP # or something and I hit (very doubtful)
- someone complained about the golf site to the google lords and it was marked as spammy (also doubtful)
I’m sure it will get indexed eventually, but it is curious.
Tags google | no comments | no trackbacks