In Gmail today I saw this ad at the top of the page:
Is it just me or does it seem wrong that an insurance brokerage company such as esurance is doing a movie tie-in with Speed Racer? I mean, we’re talking about a company who benefits when people are predictable (i.e. good) drivers and they’re sponsoring a movie about someone who drives recklessly. Tell me this just doesn’t seem right from a marketing stand point.
Google announced their App Engine initiative today. It’s a web application building environment that provides the runtime, the application framework, the database and the storage space. The first version supports Python and comes with enough storage, CPU and data transfer for most initial applications.
I signed up and got my beta account tonight. They’re giving out 10,000 accounts during the beta. I got going on the tutorial and got to the next to last section where they talk about static files and mapping them with the application description and boom! it breaks. I mean, I take exactly what the tutorial shows about mapping in external stylesheets and it won’t load the application descriptor any longer. I traced into some of the code in their appserver Python code and there seems to be a problem with how they’re mapping the file paths with regular expressions. I’m not a Python guru so I’ll let them figure it out (plus I’m tired) but it’s not like I’m on an exotic system (Thinkpad running XP with Python 2.5.2) and I already saw a few others in the user group talking about this same issue.
I was able to get around it by mapping the css files directly using a static_files descriptor vs. a static_dir descriptor so I can keep going at least.
Overall the environment seems pretty cool to begin with. Creating tables in the BigTable store via Python seems pretty damn easy. Scaling should be pretty easy as well unless you do stupid things. Also, being able to tie in directly to the Google user accounts makes things very very easy as well.
I think a lot of folks will gravitate towards this to try it out but I do wonder how many will really build apps on this system since its same advantages are also its biggest disadvantage. You’re tied to the Google platform now. Sure, you got going fast but now how do you scale your app/company when you need more control? Yes, the app will scale but we all know that once you get to a certain size you end up with more than just a web application. Then again, you could probably host some of your application on your own servers and then just connect to the Google servers/data store via REST or other web service APIs.
Amazon’s offering, while not as integrated, seems to offer more ultimate flexibility that you can grow with and then not being tied into using them for everything down the road. You can build whatever environment you want on their EC2 platform, use S3 however you want and also build on SimpleDB or just deploy MySQL on EC2 instances for your database access.
Each platform will appeal to people for different reasons. I think I would gravitate towards Google just for its ease of use (so far) and ability to get an application launched quickly but if my app got popular I’d really have to start figuring out how much it will cost to scale on Google once they get out of beta and see if I can live with the constraints it puts on me. I’ll know more when they start to disclose more concrete details about their future plans for App Engine.
Some of my friends, Stephan and Cyril, from my days at Vignette (Epicentric before the acquisition) have been building this site, Yokway, and they sent me an invite today. I gave it a try and it’s pretty cool. Louis Gray posted about it a while back and has a really great write up. The basic idea is that you trust your friends a lot more and are probably more interested in what they have to say other than people like, say, Robert Scoble.
When someone posts that you have subscribed to you see it in your feed along with their comments about the link. You also see comments and ratings by other people that have subscribed to their link. It will be interesting to see how this works if you subscribe to someone that is very popular and the comments get huge. The way the interface is now it’s hard to see if it has tools to help deal with that. Scrolling through 100 comments on a post would start to get a little daunting.
Along with seeing the link you can also add it to your “memory” which seems to be the same as starring something in Google-speak.
Overall I think it’s pretty slick and is an interesting take on social bookmarking and knowledge sharing. It’s very mature looking for a closed beta. I’m looking forward to it when they get more users behind it. I’ll let you know when it’s open for public use.
Predictable Chaos 