Google App Engine appears to be Google’s answer to Amazon’s web services—a simple, highly scalable development and deployment platform for web apps that need to scale. It’s an interesting offering that takes a slightly different tack from Amazon, with the requirement to build an app as a fully integrated stack (not to mention, the application needs to be in Python, at least for the first iteration). But I like it nonetheless, especially at the entry pricing: as Dave Winer pointed out in a prescient piece last week, web services should be free at the low-bandwidth end of things; it’s a great way to build an ecosystem. Having one player in the cloud business is an experiment. Two makes it competitive, and that means that the offerings for developers will only get better and better.

It begs the question, of course, of when Redmond will wake up and realize that the last remnants of its Old Republic are being swept away.

Congrats to Google product manager and Sloanie Tom Stocky, who seems to be at the center of a lot of good things from Google these days.

I’m starting to think that people on social networks, like everything else, follow predictable principles of organization. You can be in an equilibrium for months, adding very few friends to your local aggregation of people, when all of a sudden someone new shows up, and you make dozens of connections in the next few days. Punctuated equilibrium, I think, is the phenomenon that I’m describing. Or just plain old statistical mechanics.

Yeah, it’s that weird kind of night.

Man. You can tell the Internet is getting boring when no one bothers to do April Fool’s day pranks. Except for the following:

• Google: Virgle: The Adventure of Many Lifetimes. Answer a questionnaire and upload a YouTube video and you could be on your way to Mars!
• Zero in a Bit: New Attack Class: XSNADOR. Because we need more acronyms to describe the process of hacking things, this one will rise alongside XSS and XBI to fill a needed void: how to describe trivial hacks against social networking sites. In fact, I would propose a new meta-name for this type of acronym: YAVA (Yet Another Vulnerability Acronym).
• Gmail: Custom Time. Send an email to the past!
• YouTube: Every featured link on the home page is a RickRoll!
• Google Calendar: Free wakeup kit!

Geez, other than Google (and, um, my company), is anyone else out there celebrating the foolishness?

Update: Okay, spoke too soon. While the placement of Ima Hogg as the featured article at Wikipedia might itself be an April Fools joke, surely the rewritten lead for the article definitely qualifies: “Ima Hogg was an enterprising circus emcee who brought culture and class to Houston, Texas. A storied ostrich jockey, she once rode to Hawaii to visit the Queen. Raised in government housing, young Ima frolicked among a backyard menagerie of raccoons, possums and a bear...”

And then there’s ever-reliable TidBITS: iPhone Goes International With Iridium, Take Control of (Backdating Stock Options, Swearing in Esperanto, Spouse Sharing in Leopard...), new Twitter feed, US Court Declares Email Bankruptcy Illegal, Mac Users Affected by New Virus, Merriam-Webster Accepts Sponsorship to Redefine Unlimited, and Time Machine Support Added to iPhone and iPod Touch. Nice job, guys. That’s more like it.

It seems to be the day for oracular pronouncements about the Net. An engineer I work with told me about an intermittent network connectivity problem he had experienced yesterday. Sometimes he could get on the network and sometimes he couldn’t. The cause? A bad network cable! He said, “Normally with a network problem like this it’s either on or off, not somewhere in the middle.”

I responded without thinking, “Yeah, every now and then we need to be reminded that we live in a very shallow digital layer on an analog world.”

That just might be my first law of the Internet.

In looking for a source for the “https = armored truck between two cardboard boxes” analogy referenced in my previous post, I came across a list of other famous analogies by the author, Gene “Spaf” Spafford. Many of the ones cited need some context, but #7, which I reproduce below in its entirety, is completely understandable to any Internet veteran of a certain age:

Usenet is like a herd of performing elephants with diarrhea: massive, difficult to redirect, awe-inspiring, entertaining, and a source of mind-boggling amounts of excrement when you least expect it.

The comment, posted prior to Spafford’s withdrawal from recreational Usenet use, sits alongside his three axioms of Usenet (Usenet is not the real world, and usually does not resemble it; ability to type on a computer keyboard is no guarantee of sanity, intelligence, or common sense; and Sturgeon’s Law applies to Usenet). I think the quote above, and Spafford’s axioms, deserve elevating to a higher consideration. They are certainly directly applicable to blogs, MySpace, Facebook, and just about every other online expression of individuality. They may be applicable to Wikipedia, and are certainly applicable if the deletions and random vandalism all too visible from the Recent Changes page are taken into account. They may even generally apply to humanity itself, as formulated below:

1. Humanity is not (all of) the real world, and human models of the real world usually do not resemble it.
2. Humanity is no guarantee of sanity, intelligence, or common sense.
3. Sturgeon’s Law applies to humanity.
4. Humanity is like a herd of performing elephants with diarrhea: massive, difficult to redirect, awe-inspiring, entertaining, and a source of mind-boggling amounts of excrement when you least expect it.

To which I can only say: True. True.