Jarrett House North

Google opens the Cloud

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.

People come in waves

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.

April First roundup

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.

Laws of the Internet, continued

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.

Spafford's axioms of Usenet, generalized

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:

Humanity is not (all of) the real world, and human models of the real world usually do not resemble it.
Humanity is no guarantee of sanity, intelligence, or common sense.
Sturgeon’s Law applies to humanity.
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.

Mofuse: Instant iPhone-savvy web sites?

The tagline for Mofuse is a little overhyped. As far as I can tell, they provide a nifty self-provisioning capability to take an RSS feed and turn it into a mobile device optimized page—kind of a turnkey version of Dave Winer’s NYTimesRiver. Of course I’m oversimplifying and it’s more than that, like the ability to put in custom entries. But to say, as TechCrunch does, that MoFuse “instantly converts sites for the iPhone” is overstating things a bit. But is what it does (as opposed to what is claimed) useful?

I set up my own MoFuse site to check it out. If you point your mobile device to http://jarrett.mofuse.mobi/, you’ll see a mobile-optimized version of my site. My one criticism so far: the stylesheet they are using on the iPhone seems to strip way too much out of the source text. Taking a look at one of the articles (my What makes a good product manager post, for instance), you’ll see that there are neither indents nor vertical separation between paragraphs, and that the bullets are stripped out of unordered lists. So for lengthy posts it’s not a pleasant reading experience.

Considering that the mobile-savvy version of Bloglines already allows you to get updates from an arbitrary number of RSS feeds, it would seem that the main value-add of MoFuse is the ability to insert mobile-only content, and the ability to present a custom look and feel to mobile users. If more and more people only have a mobile user experience, that’s probably worth something.

Bad corporate-public relations

Here’s a hypothetical. You are one of two firms in a duopoly for a critical service. You are accused of abusing your position to give your firm a competitive advantage by making it selectively harder for competing products to work across the Internet. You are given an opportunity to explain yourself in a public forum. Do you:

Show up and explain your case, and let the chips fall where they may.
Pack the deck by putting butts in the seats who are paid to cheer for your position. And keep people out who might question it.

Guess which one Comcast did? If you guessed #2, you’re right. I was getting ready to give Comcast credit for even showing up in this forum, and starting to shed a little light into the black box that is Comcast’s network management. But this admission of their astroturfing practices have completely erased that benefit.

LinkedIn goes mobile

Yes, LinkedIn has released an iPhone optimized UI, about six months after Facebook did. Anyone else think that LinkedIn could have used those six months to come up with an iPhone UI that looked more innovative and less like a direct clone of what Facebook did in a weekend?

Still, it’s nice to be that much closer to someone’s profile wherever you go.

Feeling delicious

I’m probably the last person in the world to hop onto del.icio.us, and now I’m wondering how I avoided it all this time. Especially now that my time is too scarce to blog every interesting link I find—it’s much faster just to post it to del.icio.us, then come back later and skim the cream of the links for a more in-depth post. (A cursory glance at my bookmarks will reveal that I’ve been doing just that for the past few weeks.)

You can subscribe to my bookmark feed, if you’re so inclined, or to one of the topic feeds. I particularly recommend the productmanagement feed if you’ve found the things I’ve written on that topic interesting, though I can’t guarantee frequent updates. I’ll be taking advantage of some of the platform features to do a little more integration with my site, so beware: a little breakage may be ahead.

Roundup: the Tin Man speaks; JP Makes, Dave nails it

The Tin Man’s voice is in the New York Times. I mean, they have an actual sound clip of him being interviewed about the Democratic presidential candidates. How cool is that? It gives “voice of the blogger” a whole new meaning.

And I’ve been meaning to post about JP’s other career for a bit as well. He’s the only animator, and UVA alum, and friend, I have who writes for MAKE Magazine. I really dig the Lego Recharging Station.

Finally, I suppose I would be remiss to not point out Dave’s extended post on philosophy in sports, which says a lot of the things that I wanted to say yesterday. Particularly this paragraph:

Losing teaches you that there's more to life than winning, and that's the best lesson possible and it's the one lesson you keep needing to learn over and over until you lose everything, which like it or not is what we all do in the end.

Sonian: Outsourcing scalability to Amazon

A former co-worker of mine, Jeff Richards, has surfaced at Sonian Networks, which is offering a new on-demand email archiving service. What’s unique about Sonian Archive SA2 is its architecture. It’s built almost entirely using Amazon Web Services, and is architected in such a way that each customer gets their own “virtual stack.” As additional customers are added, the service scales transparently, according to the Amazon Web Services Blog.

It’s a pretty cool play, and the price sounds right, at $3 per mailbox per month.

Wonderfulness

There were two spectacularly wonderful things that I found online yesterday:

Guardian: Undercover restorers fix Paris landmark’s clock. This isn’t a new story, but the acquittal of the members of the Untergunther on trespassing charges is. And the concept of people breaking in to fix broken things is one of those delightful moments that makes you glad that the Internet exists. It actually out-xkcds xkcd.
And then there’s this spectacular Mac vs. Vista ad on Cnet’s Vista page, which may be the reason that Internet ads were created. (YouTube cache of the ad; New York Times article on the ad).

NBC "download" "service" "launches"

Thanks to Pete Cashmore from Mashable, who alerts me to the “launch” of NBC’s “download” “service.” The “service” will “allow” “you” to “download” and “watch” NBC’s “content.”

Okay, enough sarcasm. Let’s expand a few of the quotes:

Launch: Don’t call it a launch if you only serve customers with an out of date browser (Internet Explorer), require the download of the .NET Framework, won’t run on Firefox, and can’t operate with a Mac.
Download: Why bother calling it a download? Once I’ve gone through all the hoops, I can’t copy the file to a portable player, including (especially) an iPod.
Service: A big BROWSER NOT COMPATIBLE banner is not service-oriented.
Allow: How very gracious of NBC to put up download content with so much barbed wire around it. How can they possibly imagine that this will draw a larger audience than iTunes did?
You: Who is the target customer for this? Even if my mother-in-law used a PC (she’s on a Mac), I don’t think she’d be cool with downloading a 170+ MB OS component to watch content that she can see in reruns later anyway.
Watch: Watch while you can. The downloads are timebombed and can only be viewed for seven days.
Content: Where is the killer show that will compel me to put up with all this nonsense? And why if you’re going to timebomb the content do you bother embedding unskippable ads?

Wake me up when NBC decides to stop hating on its customers.

FriendCSV: Your data doesn't stay in FaceBook

That didn’t take long. TechCrunch is reporting about a FaceBook application called FriendCSV, which allows dumping selected pieces of data about your contacts to a comma-separated format. TechCrunch has the right angle about this; it’s fundamentally about getting your data back out of FaceBook and not being locked in their trunk.

Some of the folks in the comment thread are getting a little spun up about this. I think they miss the point. As one user says, there is nothing in the data set that cannot be viewed by going to the person’s profile page, and you aren’t pulling any data from anyone who isn’t your friend.

Ig Nobel 2007: Cow dung ice cream, anyone?

At the end of last week, I missed the announcement about the 2007 Ig Nobel prizes. Particular favorites for me include the Ig Nobel Prize for Literature, awarded to Glenda Browne for her study “The Definite Article: Acknowledging 'The' in Index Entries”; the Linguistics prize for a study showing that rats sometimes cannot tell the difference between Japanese spoken backwards and Dutch spoken backwards; and the Chemistry prize, which went to Mayu Yamamoto of the International Medical Center of Japan for pioneering work on the extraction of vanillin (vanilla flavoring) from cow dung.

As Dave Barry used to say, I am not making this up.

Best part: a special public tasting of a new Toscanini’s ice cream flavor, “Yum-a-moto Vanilla Twist.” Asking what the twist is is probably like asking what the “surprise” is in Whizzo’s Spring Surprise.