Cloud versus cloud

Cloud versus cloud: A guided tour of Amazon, Google, AppNexus, and GoGrid | InfoWorld | Review | 2008-07-21 | By Peter Wayner: "Cloud computing offerings differ in depth, breadth, style, and fine print; beneath the heady metaphor lurk familiar pitfalls, complex pricing, and many questions"

Google enrolled for schools email deal

Google enrolled for schools email deal - BizTech - Technology - theage.com.au: "Google has snatched what is believed to be its biggest single client in the world - the NSW Department of Education - away from its rival Microsoft to claim up to 1.3 million new users of its free email product."

From __utma to __utmz (Google Analytics Cookies)

From __utma to __utmz (Google Analytics Cookies) | Analytics and Site Intelligence: "When someone visits a website that is properly coded with Google Analytics Tracking Code, that website sets four first-party cookies on the visitor’s computer automatically."

Amazon S3 Availability Event: July 20, 2008

Amazon S3 Availability Event: July 20, 2008
down for about 8 hours

Microsoft Office Live Home

Microsoft Office Live Home: "Quickly build your Web site with ready-to-use templates and simple yet powerful Site Designer"

SiteKreator.com - Professional web site creation solution. - Home

SiteKreator.com - Professional web site creation solution. - Home

Weebly - Create a free website and a free blog

Adding Content
Content elements, such as videos, pictures, maps, and text are added to your website by simply dragging them from the Weebly bar to your webpage. We have a bunch of cool elements and add more all the time. Are we missing an element you'd like? Suggest it, and we'll include it as soon as we can.

Choosing a Design
Deciding on a look for your website couldn't be easier. Click over to the "Design" tab and you'll see thumbnails pictures of available designs. Hover your mouse over a thumbnail to preview the new look instantaneously or click the thumbnail to select it as the design for your website.

Customizing the Content
Once elements have been added to your page, customize everything just by double-clicking. Double-click a picture to upload a new one, double-click text to change it, or double-click a map to set the address. Rearrange the elements by dragging them into an new order.

Managing your Pages
Adding and organizing your website's pages is completed in the "Pages" tab. When you add new page to your website, it's automatically added to the navigation bar. Reordering pages is simple, just drag and drop them into place.

Picnik - edit photos the easy way, online in your browser

Picnik - edit photos the easy way, online in your browser: "Photo editing made fun
Picnik makes your photos fabulous with easy to use yet powerful editing tools. Tweak to your heart’s content, then get creative with oodles of effects, fonts, shapes, and frames.
It's fast, easy, and fun."

Handling Flash Crowds from your Garage

Handling Flash Crowds from your Garage: "web applications which may rocket to popular success - or sink when the flash crowd that arrives melts the web server. In the web context, utility computing provides a path by which the innovator can, with minimal capital, prepare for overwhelming popularity."

This is an outstanding practical paper on the current options for scaling web services.

Free Page Creator Tools From The Big Three: Trash or Treasure?

Free Page Creator Tools From The Big Three: Trash or Treasure?: "Have a small business in need of a website, but no budget for professional design services? Yahoo, Google and Microsoft all offer free small business site creation tools that can help you develop a professional online presence. Keep reading for an in-depth review of what Office Live Basics, Google Page Creator and Yahoo SiteBuilder include and how they work. Additionally, we'll consider ease of use, positives and negatives, and recommended uses for each tool."

MySpace signs up to OpenID scheme

BBC NEWS | Technology | MySpace signs up to OpenID scheme: "MySpace members will soon be able to use their login details to get access to some other websites."

Protocol buffers: the early reviews are in [dive into mark]

Protocol buffers: the early reviews are in [dive into mark]

Google (my current employer) has finally open sourced protocol buffers, the data interchange format we use for internal server-to-server communication. The blogosphere’s response? “No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.”

Aaaaanyway…

Protocol buffers are “just” cross-platform data structures. All you have to write is the schema (a .proto file), then generate bindings in C++, Java, or Python. (Or Haskell. Or Perl.) The .proto file is just a schema; it doesn’t contain any data except default values. All getting and setting is done in code. The serialized over-the-wire format is designed to minimize network traffic, and deserialization (especially in C++) is designed to maximize performance. I can’t begin to describe how much effort Google spends maximizing performance at every level. We would tear down our data centers and rewire them with $500 ethernet cables if you could prove that it would reduce latency by 1%.

Besides being blindingly fast, protocol buffers have lots of neat features. A zero-size PB returns default values. You can nest PBs inside each other. And most importantly, PBs are both backward and forward compatible, which means you can upgrade servers gradually and they can still talk to each other in the interim. (When you have as many machines as Google has, it’s always the interim somewhere.)

Comparisons to other data formats was, I suppose, inevitable. Old-timers may remember ASN.1 or IIOP. Kids these days seem to compare everything to XML or JSON. They’re actually closer to Facebook’s Thrift (written by ex-Googlers) or SQL Server’s TDS. Protocol buffers won’t kill XML (no matter how much you wish they would), nor will they replace JSON, ASN.1, or carrier pigeon. But they’re simple and they’re fast and they scale like crazy, and that’s the way Google likes it.

BetaNews | Google releases its data encoding format to compete with XML

BetaNews | Google releases its data encoding format to compete with XML: "In an effort to solve the bulk and time-consumption problem when encoding large databases, Google developed its own alternative to XML. Yesterday, the company began evangelizing others to use it as an alternative to the industry standard.

There's an argument that open standards are only truly useful when one standard applies to any given category of service -- an argument that was raised in the matter of application formats. Now the broader category of data encoding -- handled nowadays by XML -- is about to receive a big challenge, ironically from the group perceived as the champion of open standards in Internet communication: Google.

Yesterday afternoon, Google publicly released documentation for a system it has been using internally, called Protocol Buffers, inviting others to use it as well. And in a surprising blog post, one of its own software engineers argued that its system was preferable to XML because it's less expensive to deploy, and can more easily scale up to very large databases."

Bit.ly: Please Use This TinyURL of the Future - ReadWriteWeb

Bit.ly: Please Use This TinyURL of the Future - ReadWriteWeb: "URL shorteners like TinyURL are a wildly popular way to share long links over email, IM, microblogging and other contexts. The millions of shortcuts that have been created through such services represent a huge opportunity to capture interesting data - but to date those opportunities have all just gone down the drain.

Bit.ly, a new URL shortening service from the innovation network Betaworks, is launching today with a staggering feature set for both end users and forward-looking developers."

TechCrunchIT � Blog Archive � A Million Businesses on Office Live While Generic Hosting Slides

TechCrunchIT � Blog Archive � A Million Businesses on Office Live While Generic Hosting Slides

At the same time today over at Pingdom they noticed that the search mind-share for ‘web hosting’ is continuing its downward trend. Generic hosting seems to be on it’s way out - the type of hosting that can be purchased from GoDaddy, 1&1 and many others where the basic plan offers a control panel, a shared host and some bandwidth.

Generic hosting is not only being replaced by services such as Office Live and Google Apps, but for personal user networks such as Wordpress.com and Blogger. For an SMB, there are a number of easy options available that require little development work and setup time with integration into other applications such as document management. The downward trend in generic hosting in favor of more specialized and integrated platforms will also definitely cut into the SMB web development market, as each of these solutions provide default templates that are easily branded and customized with a corporate identity.