Google App Engine

Thanks Google, what a tasty birthday present. I’m thinking the Google App Engine is going to be a lot of fun. I guess the devil is going to be in the scaling. Haven’t read that bit of the docs yet.

2008 Predictions: Internet and Social Media

It is traditional. Writing some predictions for 2008. I’m going to focus on the Internet, social media and associated technology.

Google Search: Trust

I think 2008 will be the year when we’ll realize that we can’t have search being a closed algorithm any more. I get the feeling that it is going to be just too easy for a couple of folk at Google to work out how to pervert search a tiny bit and make a couple of billion extra in revenue. Given that you can do that, it is going to happen eventually, isn’t it, despite the ‘Do No Evil’ thing, which is just sounding more and more defensive these days.

Time to dust off that wikia vision of open search and get moving on it. Ooooh look, the are launching something on Jan 7th. We’ve only got the one Internet, and it would be a pity if we lost trust in our search results.

Also, I’ve always been really uneasy about the whole SEO thing. It feels to me like the SEO gurus are like high priests claiming to know what God is thinking.

Facebook. What?

2008 will be the year we collectively forget about facebook. And give up on social networking for the sake of social networking. My hope is that Open Social and similar will help make possible really useful applications that are socially enabled.

Web $2

You pronounce that web two dollars. I predict the end of Web 2.0 rounded corner build-it-and-think-of-a-business-model bubble. Why? Because with weakening economies in the US and Europe, VCs belts are going to tighten and there will be less money lying around for the high-risk punt at gathering a few million members to somehow later.

Those that have collected the few million members will start the money making machines. I’d predict some good old-fashioned outrage as fun Web 2 sites start to sell their members data or attention to stay afloat.

I’m hoping the focus goes back on to decent revenue-making businesses and some really good ideas emerge and start and work. And people actually pay for it and are happy doing that. People don’t mind paying for stuff, as long as they can really see the value. You need more than (another plain old) social network to pass that test.

The answer to the question that twitter is

I think this year we’ll see the answer to the question “What is twitter for?” And I’m not sure we are going to like the answer. See Web 2$ above. I’d love twitter to stay its lovely simple self, but I’m just a little worried it can’t be.

A new A-List :-)

The old A-listers will collapse en mass from spending too many long nights mumbling into seesmic and will be replaced with a new widgetized microblogging A-list that say nothing useful but say it all the time all over the place. Oh hang on, has this already happened? :-)

Oh powerbook!

My trusty Powerbook g4 is back in the shop again. Sigh. After a couple of days of fairly weird behaviour, it got to the point of presenting a black screen and running the fan full blast.

Dead logic board suspected.

This is the third major fault since July.

I’ve only had it back for a couple of weeks since the last logic board replacement. We’ll see what happens.

What this practically means is that I move all my non-online files to Lib’s old iMac g4, which works great but is a bit slow these days. Still a pleasure to use. And reinstall the current set of apps i’m using. MySQL, PHP5, gCal.app

Thankfully, a lot of my working tool and files are held online these days:

* email in gmail

* calendar in google calender

* more and more documents and spreadsheets in google docs

* code in subversion archives at online service providers

and so on.

What isn’t online: local app, experiments in code not yet in subversion. Offline writing. *My Todo List* grr.

I’m hoping Apple will come through with something, given how many failures I’ve had lately.

Google Developer Day

Today I’m heading into London to join in the fun at the 2007 Google Developer Day.

Pretty much all the day is going to be focussed on getting the most out of Google’s APIs. I’m most familiar with youtube’s APIs at this point, but I’m pretty intrigued with what is going on in the mapping and mobile areas.

Resilience

So I’m sitting on a train on the way home from London. It takes an hour or so to get from London Bridge to Brighton. I climb on the train on one of the carriages that has the t-mobile wifi stickers on the doors. But as happens at least half the time, there’s no wifi. Oh well. When there is wifi, it at least is free.

So I have the laptop out anyway, writing and replying to emails and you know what? I flip over to the browser and get a popup from my Google Calendar reminding me of an event in my Calendar coming up shortly.

There’s no net connection. But the browser javascript deployed from google doesn’t mind, the alert still pops up. So what if we are offline. And that is nicely resilient and is perhaps a design pattern for web apps:

Resilience: Keep working even when the network goes away for a short while.

Not for ages, though, but at least be resilient for a number of minutes of outage. The standard web page (GET/PUT) normally handles this pretty well, but with AJAX you have the ability to tie you application close to the server. Don’t if you can avoid it except where necessary.

I typed a bunch of appointments into my Google calendar here on the train with no network. I wonder if they’ll get committed to the server when I reconnect. There’s no reason why not, really, and if it works, I’ll always keep Google calendar in a browser window and use it even offline.

[Update: I got home and no, it didn't remember appointments entered while offline. I can sort of understand that from a transactional point of view -- what if the window closes or the PC shuts down.]

Using Google for site security testing

The Ethical Hacker has a set of top ten searches you can perform with Google to see if you site leaks security information. It all starts with using the site: prefix to target your site, then see what you can find.