April 11th, 2008

The problem with Google Apps Engine

Posted by Garett Rogers @ 12:01 pm

Categories: Google, Google APIs

Tags: Google Inc., Google Apps, Productivity, Databases, Security, Enterprise Software, Software, Data Management, Garett Rogers

If you are considering taking advantage of the new Google App Engine service from Google, I suggest you read this article first. There are some hidden facts that you should be aware of before making your decision to adopt this platform.

First, I’d like to thank Google for providing this service — it really is a great idea, and can be very useful for people or companies making web applications from scratch without needing to worry about infrastructure. It’s also a very smart move on Google’s part — host the world’s applications, make money off their success, even if they aren’t the owners of successful applications. Popular applications will likely exceed “free” limits, giving Google the green light to start charging money.

Another advantage for Google is the ease of acquiring companies if they are already using Google’s infrastructure — simply make a deposit into their bank account and slap the Google logo on the interface.

But everything that sounds too good to be true, usually is — right? In this case, I have to agree. When you choose to use Google App Engine, there are a couple of things you need to think long and hard about. If you go through this list and still think it will work for you, then it probably will. Go for it, it really is a great service after everything is said and done. It’s very well thought out, and as it promises, it will scale with the growth of your business.

Things you need to think about:

• You are putting your application in Google’s hands
  Think about that for a minute. You are at the mercy of Google — if disaster strikes and Google one day disappears, you are done too. Or, more realistically, if the Google App Engine goes down for an hour, you are also down for an hour — and you will have no idea what happened. Even if you try and get an answer from someone at Google, you won’t. Just like Google Apps, it will be impossible to explain things to your end users.

  What if you are violating some terms of service (which likely won’t, but theoretically could happen to people without their knowing)? You thought making your company’s revenue dependent on AdSense was risky — what if your whole application was banned because of something you didn’t know about? Like I said, this scenario isn’t likely to happen — but it’s true that it could.

• Once you are in, you are really in
  Using Google’s infrastructure is very tempting. But any smart company should have some sort of plan for the future. What if you realized that you didn’t want to host your application on Google App Engine anymore? Good luck, almost everything you are given access to is proprietary — that means all your data is locked into BigTable in a format that isn’t like a traditional relational database. It’s also very tempting to use the API’s Google provides to interface with things like Google accounts.

  On top of that, you will be using the “webapp” framework that Google built that makes writing Python applications real nice — but good luck porting that to another language or putting it on a machine of your own.

• It’s free right?
  Not only are you locked in, you are completely at the mercy of Google’s future pricing strategy for the Google App Engine. It’s true that it’s likely to be cheaper than anything else comparable, but are you willing to take that risk? Right now it’s free, so everyone and their dog wants to at least give it a try — but what if your application actually really takes off? You will one day have to pay for your success, or shut down your service.
• Privacy should not be taken lightly
  Google has a very strong privacy policy — and personally I trust them. However, I’m trusting them with my personal information — you will be trusting them with all of your company’s data. These are two completely different things. If you have a low trust tolerance, you may not want to risk putting everything that belongs to your company behind Google’s doors. That said, I personally would still feel comfortable putting company data on their infrastructure — simply because I know it’s proven to be secure, scalable and robust over the last several years with their own services.

Like I said, I am really glad Google has put this service out there. It’s a great tool people can and should use if they are comfortable with the risks. If you have any additional things you would like to point out for people who might be considering using Google App Engine, or if you want to debunk anything I have said in this article, please feel free to post them in the Talk Back.

April 7th, 2008

Google announces App Engine: Should Amazon worry?

Posted by Garett Rogers @ 9:44 pm

Categories: Google, Google APIs

Tags: Developer, Google Inc., Amazon.com Inc., Scripting Languages, Development Tools, Programming Languages, Software/Web Development, Web Development, Software Development, Garett Rogers

Just like most of us thought, Google’s new App Engine appears to be a direct competitor for Amazon web services. And in true Google fashion, the service is being opened up to the first 10,000 developers that request an account — free of charge. Of course, that will only last until the beta program is over, but according to Brady Forrest, the system will remain free to some extent — yet to be determined.

This new service is not identical to Amazon’s offering though — it’s more of an all-in-one solution. Amazon’s web services (EC2, SimpleDB and S3) each perform a unique purpose, and can be used together or separately as part of another project. Google App Engine on the other hand requires developers to host their apps there, process requests, and use their database (BigTable) with this single unified system that does the following: [source]

• Dynamic webserving, with full support of common web technologies
• Persistent storage (powered by Bigtable and GFS with queries, sorting, and transactions)
• Automatic scaling and load balancing
• Google APIs for authenticating users and sending email
• Fully featured local development environment

One drawback is the requirement that currently forces developers to use Python as their language. While Python is a powerful language that Google uses all the time for applications, there are large pockets of developers who are only familiar with other popular languages like PHP and Ruby.

Now that I’ve had a chance to hear what Google is actually doing, I am starting to wonder if Google really is doing this to simplify the acquisition process. It would take no time at all for Google to snap up and rebrand a service that are already using Google’s infrastructure — no more messy porting.

I can’t wait to start playing around with this new service — unfortunately, all available accounts have already taken. To get on the list, click here.

April 6th, 2008

Google to launch BigTable this week?

Posted by Garett Rogers @ 1:42 pm

Categories: Google, Google APIs, Acquisition

Tags: Google Inc., Amazon.com Inc., BigTable, Pricing, Storage, Marketing Research, Marketing, Hardware, Garett Rogers

It sounds like the press is being briefed on a new service Google is about to release to developers — possibly as early as this week. The service is called BigTable, and it has been proving itself for quite a while as the storage engine behind many Google services.

BigTable is based on the Google File System (GFS) and designed for distribution across thousands of commodity servers that collectively store petabytes of data. Services that rely on it include Google Search, Google Earth and Maps, Google Finance, Google Print, Orkut, YouTube, and Blogger.

People are saying they expect BigTable to be direct competition for Amazon SimpleDB — and I’d have to agree. The only thing I’m wondering about is the pricing strategy. A post from March 29th hinted that it could actually be free, compared to the pay-per-use pricing model for Amazon’s equivalent service.

SimpleDB from Amazon has the following costs assocated with it:

• $0.14 per machine hour
• $0.10 per GB inbound data transfer
• $0.13-$0.18 per GB outbound data transfer
• $1.50 GB/mo data storage

If you think about it, those prices are very reasonable — but Google has the guts to do even better. Potentially much better. If Google opened this up as a free service, imagine the impact that would have. I’m not one hundred percent sure how Google could monetize a service like this if they did make it free though — some people think it could be a way for them to save money on acquisitions. Imagine how much time and effort could be saved if a company purchased by Google already uses Google’s technology?

What do you think? Will Google make BigTable free, or will it be competitively priced with the Amazon equivalent?

April 1st, 2008

Oh Noes, April Fools has lost it’s mojo

Posted by Garett Rogers @ 7:54 am

Categories: Google

Tags: Google Inc., YouTube Inc., Google Australia, Social Networking, Channel Management, Internet, Corporate Communications, Online Communications, Marketing, Advertising & Promotion

I remember when April Fools rolled around, things remained in a state of normalcy, with the odd joke you really couldn’t tell if it was real or not. Today, April Fools has taken a turn for the worse. Everybody and their dog at Google has spent the last month preparing jokes instead of working, and that doesn’t even include all the other Google-related pranks being pulled across the web too.

Philipp Lenssen has a massive list of Google-related jokes this year — it’s sad, but it took me about five minutes to read his point form article from top to bottom. Here are a few of the points from Philipp’s post:

• The Google Talk blog reports wants to help lower CO2 emissions and starts reducing the characters you send… by converting them to instant-messenger-speak. For instance, the sentence “As far as I’m concerned, you can give me the twenty dollars you owe me when I see you later.” will be automatically translated to “AFAIC, U can gve me the 20 $$ YOM whn I CUL8R.” before it reaches the other person. You can already see how your texts will translate thanks to the
• YouTube is rickrolling its users big-scale. All the featured videos on the YouTube.com frontpage are currently linking to Rick Astley’s Never Gonna Give You Up. Or, as a commenter at YouTube puts it in the comments to the video, “HAHAHAHHHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHA lol nice youtube”.
• Google Australia delivers gDay with MATE technology to “search content on the internet before it’s created,” i.e., from the future. From the page: “Google spiders crawl publicly available web information and our index of historic, cached web content. Using a mashup of numerous factors such as recurrence plots, fuzzy measure analysis, online betting odds and the weather forecast from the iGoogle weather gadget, we can create a sophisticated model of what the internet will look like 24 hours from now.” I saw this yesterday already and tried to search for “Google Blogoscoped” and indeed, found this post and opened its Google Cache version – I was then able to copy the full text of the post, which saved me a lot of writing today.
• Google’s social network site Orkut turned into Yogurt today, according to their logo.

It’s not just me though, Matt Cutts is also taking a break from April Fools this year. Hopefully, even though I highly doubt it, next year there will be more real news, and a lot less trickery.

March 31st, 2008

Google launches Dajare in Japan

Posted by Garett Rogers @ 9:51 am

Categories: Google

Tags: Google Inc., Japan, Google Dajare, Search, Garett Rogers

Google launched a new feature in Japan called Google Dajare. Dajare is similar to an English pun. This new Google service expands Google’s mission to organize the worlds information by also “organizing the world’s laughter”.

To see the new feature in action, check out these search results for “domestic flights” on google.co.jp.

Of course, this is very likely just an April Fools joke, as April 1st has arrived in Japan already.

March 29th, 2008

Google turns the lights out for Earth Hour

Posted by Garett Rogers @ 9:50 am

Categories: Google

Tags: Google Inc., Light, San Francisco, Government, Vertical Industries, Enterprise Software, Software, Garett Rogers

The last time Google switched the lights off was for an initiative called “Lights Out San Francisco” in October. It’s much easier to get people to listen than to actually act — based on the pictures that were taken during Lights Out San Francisco event. This time, Google is supporting the Earth Hour initiative created by the WWF.

Earth Hour was created by WWF in Sydney, Australia in 2007, and in one year has grown from an event in one city to a global movement. In 2008, millions of people, businesses, governments and civic organizations in nearly 200 cities around the globe will turn out for Earth Hour. More than 100 cities across North America will participate, including the US flagships–Atlanta, Chicago, Phoenix and San Francisco and Ottawa, Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver.

Today, at 8:00 your local time, please switch off the lights in an effort to make a statement about climate change.

March 15th, 2008

Early St. Patrick’s Day easter egg on Google Maps

Posted by Garett Rogers @ 12:22 pm

Categories: Google

Tags: Google Inc., Google Maps, Easter Egg, St. Patrick, Rainbow, Microsoft Office, Office Suites, Software, Garett Rogers

Street View in Google Maps now shows a tiny leprechaun instead of the classic yellow guy — it’s a bit early, but you can only assume this has to do with St. Patrick’s Day on Monday. A rainbow follows him when you drag the little guy around the map too. Cute.

Yesterday, Philipp Lenssen and Tony Ruscoe posted a probable April Fools day spoiler too — Cliply. When working in Google Docs, you may experience Google’s take on the annoying paperclip that you run into using Microsoft Office. Read the original post if you want to see the image — I don’t want to completely ruin it for you.

March 13th, 2008

Google attempts to steal buzz from Microsoft WorldWideTelescope

Posted by Garett Rogers @ 8:46 pm

Categories: Google, Google Maps

Tags: Google Inc., Microsoft Corp., Web Site, Web Site Development, Web Technology, Recruitment & Selection, Channel Management, Internet, Human Resources, Workforce Management

We know that “Google Sky” in Google Earth is a bit of a mess — especially when you compare it to other products like Stellarium. Even Microsoft’s own World Wide Telescope (WWT) has it beat according to the lucky people who have caught a glimpse.

Google knows that they cannot make the required improvements to Google Sky in time for the spring launch of WWT, so maybe that’s why they whipped up this new web interface that does a better job of showing the night sky. It’s still a bit rough around the edges though — I would really like to see the ground so I have some reference as to what I’m looking at (See Stellarium). Maybe I’m weird?

The new website is pretty cool though — it’s sure a lot easier than opening up another application, and from what I can tell, it’s got pretty much everything you get in Google Earth. It uses the same technology as Google Maps, Google Moon, and Google Mars.

What do you think? Is the launch of this new service directly related to the upcoming launch of WWT?

March 9th, 2008

The Google Apps Appliance would make Microsoft sweat

Posted by Garett Rogers @ 8:28 am

Categories: Google, Microsoft

Tags: Google Inc., Google Apps, Microsoft Corp., Financial Accounting, Finance, Garett Rogers

Out of all other Google services, Google Apps is the product with the most potential to put a dent in Microsoft’s earnings if it ever took off. As we’ve seen in the recent past, both companies will do almost anything to one-up the other — and that should worry Microsoft.

Given Google’s dominance over Microsoft in the search space, it’s strange to think of them as “the little guy” in the enterprise. Since Microsoft is so far in the lead, they don’t Google seriously — that could be a problem.

According to Bill Gates, the enterprise is a beast only they know how to tame:

“[Google Sites doesn’t] understand the special needs of business” … “If you’d seen what the Google tools that have tried to do productivity type things, they really don’t have the richness, the responsiveness,” he said, later adding, “for most of these Google products, to be frank, the day they announce them is their best day.”

Google has been throwing pebbles (Google Sites, Google Apps Team Edition, and Postini), but there could be one boulder in their arsenal they are just waiting to hurl — the Google Apps Appliance. Google already has an “appliance” for the enterprise, but the only thing it does right now is search. The Google Apps Appliance could be an upgrade to that, or something completely new that is designed to plug right into your existing IT infrastructure. This could be the enterprise home run they have been looking for.

The main reason Microsoft products are consistently chosen over switching to Google Apps is because most companies, of all sizes, don’t trust anyone with their data but themselves — and rightly so. Google has two options:

1. try and convince people that their most private information is safe behind their doors, or
2. start swimming downstream by offering a hardware solution that users control

It will be easier for Google to shift it’s enterprise strategy than shifting the minds of potential customers when it comes to privacy.

Launching the Google Apps Appliance will put Google on a level playing field with Microsoft — and the lower price-point of Google services will look more attractive than ever before. Microsoft will either be forced to reduce their price to compete, or lose some customers. Both will negatively impact their earnings.

March 7th, 2008

GOOG-411 expands outside of United States

Posted by Garett Rogers @ 8:12 am

Categories: Google

Tags: Canada, GOOG-411, Recruitment & Selection, Telecom & Utilities, Human Resources, Workforce Management, Garett Rogers

Today I picked up the phone to give GOOG-411 another test drive, and was thrown back after hearing the prompt “What city and province?”. Surely this thing doesn’t work for Canada now — so I said “Regina Saskatchewan”. Sure enough, “Please say a business name or category” — the service now works exactly the same in Canada as it does in the US!

Just like when using it to find businesses in the US, I can get Google to connect me to the listed Canadian businesses too. I would be interested in knowing, if you are outside Canada & the US, if the service works in your country too. I tried London England without any luck — so I’m going to guess that it’s simply North America for right now.

Good job Google — I’m glad you have finally brought the service to Canada, now we’re just waiting for the rest of the world!