Mark's World » google

Google I/O day 2

Mark Lise — Fri, 29 May 2009 06:47:13 +0000

Wow x2. Yes, that’s Google I/O day two = wow x2. Vic Gundotra wasn’t kidding when he had some more surprises up his sleeve at Google I/O 2009. Wave was amazing to say the least.

Normally in these presentations you get the typical echo-chamber response to events.. lots of hype etc.. but this is really impressive. Google Wave started 1.5 years ago, and if you think about it – that’s a long time ago to come up with this kind of vision of where the web should be. Some have suggested that they have looked at Facebook connect and other web properties to guide them over time. Maybe they did.. It’s irrelevant. They’ve achieved some really neat stuff, plus they open sourced it. They are ahead of the curve by a mile, although as they stated it themselves – the web hasn’t moved fast enough hence what they’re doing/releasing now.

To take a page from @anotherjesse, goodbye HTTP – hello XMPP. The web as we know it is already old school, so welcome the new school of realtime communication and collaboration c/o Googl Wave. I for one, as I mentioned in my last post, am quite excited. The web is becoming more like an OS

Google I/O day 1

Mark Lise — Thu, 28 May 2009 06:36:55 +0000

So I’ve finished my first day at Google I/O. Man, what a day it was. The keynote was great and I actually got to sit front row. To see Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google no more than 20ft away was pretty cool. Vic Gundotra was the most active of the speakers and I’d say the most well-spoken next to Eric.

They have been really pushing hard for evangelising the next phase of the internet. I think of it similar of the situation when desktop software became mature. Multi-threaded apps were necessary, storage, accessibility, API standards for drawing etc. These are now the things that are translating into the things that Google is trying to promote. Background workers, pixel-based drawing, and offline mode just to name a few obvious examples.

I’m really stoked for this since I was one that was brought up upon C/C++ and threading and the like is a natural thought process for me. Initially, coding javascript in the early days was almost a step backward for me – but now it appears that’s about to change. I’m really happy a large company is behind these sorts of changes. I really means the web is moving in an incredibly exciting direction. Kudos Google.

If you want to check out the keynote for yourself, head to Google Youtube keynote for Google I/O 2009.

Google App Engine Invite

Mark Lise — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 05:29:05 +0000

I was a little bummed when I was madly hitting refresh on the Google App Engine and couldn’t get through. Once I did get through the 10K limit was already hit, all within about 15 minutes of release. I was trying to be one of the 10,000 developers allowed access after I saw their announcement about it a couple hours ago. So here I am surfing around.. commenting on blogs.. and my inbox lights up. It’s an email from Google saying, “Invitation to try Google App Engine”. Woo! I get to play with this thing. Funny thing is that some of the most obvious names I would pick were already taken! Oh well, happy with what I got. We’ll see what I can make of this thing.

Google App Engine

Mark Lise — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 04:12:17 +0000

Update: The 10k limit has already been hit. Wow. < 15 mins.

I saw the live Scoble feed on the Google App Engine announcement, so here are the details:

500MB storage
Available to the first 10,000 developers as of 9PM PST
10GB Bandwidth/day
200 Million megacycle CPU/day
Python code only

For a well-written app, Google says this should equate to something around 5 million page views/month. As for the Python code restriction, Google says it’s only temporary. To focus on just this issue is to not capture the bigger picture of what Google’s broader intentions are.

The whole point of Google App Engine is to take on the web platform space, and the first company that comes to mind when you think competition is Amazon. Now, I’m not sure that it’ll “take off” immediately given that it’ll be in essentially private beta, but I think Google going into this space has the potential to disrupt or otherwise take a bite out of Amazon.

Some services shown were Jaiku (ported to App Engine), Vorby(blank page as of writing), and Barbound(sorry no linky). Some reported that one of the reasons Google bought Jaiku was to demo it. It’s left to be seen whether Jaiku becomes more stable as a result – it might just turn out to be a good example of what can be done by hosting with Google. That is left to be seen however.

One of the things I noticed in the announcement was the repeated calls for “help us improve App Engine”. I think that’s a wise move and it looks to me that they’re attempting to reach out to the developer community to help shape the service. Maybe they think by allowing 10k developers to hack at and feel like they can contribute to the development that they’ll strike a Twitter or Jaiku on the platform.

This is a wait-and-see for me, the announcement wasn’t as big as I thought it’d be – but it’s got me interested.

OpenWeb Vancouver

Mark Lise — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 18:24:38 +0000

Geeks Unite! As the title says on their page… I will be attending OpenWebVancouver this year. This event I’m especially looking forward to as it brings together web technology, culture, design, and the open source discussion all in one neat little place. If you want to learn about where the web is going today from some of the top leaders in the space, come to Openweb Vancouver! Talks include those from the Mozilla foundation, Google, Sun Microsystems, and Facebook.

The event is put on by the Vancouver PHP user’s association, a non-profit organization that advances php development and other open source initiatives. Sign up and register today to learn about or simply promote the use of open source technology! Hope to see you all there!