Archive for the 'Google' Category

First Mover Advantage: When Copycat Doesn’t Work

Published on 1 February 2011 in Google, opportunity and web. 0 Comments

How perceptions of Being Bigger may not always play out in reality.

First Mover Advantage. A popular adage in this era of perennial web startups. Equally as strong has been the thought that established players – the big fish – can simply move in on the small fry’s niche patch and bring it to the mass market – the Free Rider effect.

Groupon is arguably a case in point. Out of nowhere the young gun from Chicago has been described as the world’s fastest growing company and a $6bn gamble, only for such heavyweights as Google and Facebook to begin to muscle in on it’s coupon territory, sensing their already huge ecosystems will at least make the new guy irrelevant.

This is the textbook case. What happens when the innovator is somewhat higher up the foodchain? We may be about to find out.

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When to do Real Time

Published on 10 October 2010 in data, Google, information media and web. 0 Comments

Image courtesy jayce 31

Google has done two ‘real-time’ things lately, one good one not so good: Real Time web indexing and real time web search.

With ‘er, hang-on a minute…‘ moments now surfacing in the public domain I find the contrast between the two to be especially important. Google in their traditional engineer style expound the benefits of both in shaving seconds of search: ’11 user hours saved globally each second’; ’50% faster indexing rate of content’; figures that prove the mantra – machines search better than humans.

Machines definitely do the donkey work better than humans. Continue reading ‘When to do Real Time’

Some App Engine Hacks

Published on 23 August 2010 in Google and hacks. 1 Comment

Google App Engine is a fast way to get into the fundamentals of cloud computing. But as well as having it’s share of important technical restrictions there are also some structural kinks like no support for naked domains and a limit of 10 apps per user account. Fortunately there are hacks around both:

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Google & It’s Search For a Social Graph

Published on 12 July 2010 in Facebook, Google and web. 1 Comment

Google Borg
image courtesy Tantek

Techcrunch lead on a $100m investment by Google in Zynga the social network gaming company. It’s the latest in a long line of Google failures in a vital area of capturing web traffic – or, “organising the world’s information” as Google diplomatically puts it.

Canny move or desperation?

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Google App Engine Datastore Gotchas

Published on 28 November 2009 in data, Google and Tech Labours. 0 Comments

stormclouds gather
image courtesy johnson7

App Engine is generally a new paradigm for webapp developers; replacing sessions with memcache and a schemaless datastore just two elements requiring new thinking for old problems. Unfortunately there are a few more hidden nuisances which have the potential to waste programming time relatively early on. Here’s four of my personal head-bangers:

1. the datastore doesn’t always store Properties
I’ve had trouble with it refusing to store arbitrary entity props unless I assign them in the entity constructor itself (these fields were optional btw). Just setting prop values after initialisation then put() on the ds didn’t write them.

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Nofollow Stops Google Indexing Your Site

Published on 9 November 2009 in Google and web. 1 Comment

blackbox.jpgI posted about Google’s inhouse deadpool a couple of weeks back.  Strangely though although I use one of the wordpress sitemap plugins to update mine accordingly Google stubbornly refused to index it.  The reason?

Google appears not to add pages that include the rel=”nofollow” meta attribute by default.
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The Google Deadpool

Published on 28 October 2009 in Google and web. 0 Comments

Mobile, Music, Real-time and er, that watery thing – make no mistake about it, Google is the new borg. But they don’t always succeed. Like the finely tuned crack team of elite geeks they are, they bury their mistakes. For this piece I’ve taken on the role of chronological gravedigger (well it’ll fill my CV out won’t it?) and scooped out the bodies; not pretty viewing:

dodgeball.jpgDodgeball
This is what happens when the big G ventures outside of it’s tech stronghold: Tech invents something better and Google is left wondering why it got itself into some arcane mysticism it never really understood in the first place. Dodgeball, social networking on mobile before smartphone-based GPS services went nuclear – it even used SMS. Bless.

Google Answers
Two for the price of one here, as Google Q&A was a forerunner to Answers, and whose comedy value is far more interesting. Not today’s Q&A app that very few of you may be aware of, but an old web0.1 version whereby users emailed Googlers who responded for a fee, presumably with some answers. We never found out for sure though, as the service only lasted 24 hours. Nothing like fail fast, fail often eh Google?
Continue reading ‘The Google Deadpool’

Wave Theory

Published on 29 May 2009 in Google, information media and web. 0 Comments

Making a bit of a splash (no more I swear) online, Google Wave has been trumpeted as the replacement of ’60s’ email and IM applications. It’s also got friends in high places at Google Towers.

This could be a turning point on the web.Vic Gundotra, Google Engineering VP

On seeing a screenshot my first thought was ‘Facebook news feed’.

It’s got a similar albeit primitive system of inline comment right now. While it’s a nice to have, it’s not ‘killer’ and some of the Wave features (every character typed is spewed out in realtime as if participants were viewing the same terminal) will turn a lot of people off straight away. Indeed I’ve a few ideas of my own regarding ‘next generation’ communication, and they don’t involve greater intrusion. While the inline editing is a good thing I don’t regard it as a big enough win to justify moving onto a new platform, cloud or no cloud. What would be wrong with sticking this kind of functionality into Google Docs? We need smarter comms not more of them.

First quality flame post appears to be at Gigaom…

First Mover Advantage?

Published on 23 February 2009 in Facebook, Google and web. 0 Comments

TechCrunch recently covered the phenomenol rise of FB photos over existing well established image stores such as Flickr.  First mover advantage was always a big draw in the first dot com rush, yet the debate around FMA and what is termed ‘fast second‘ is a mature one in other industries.  Size versus speed.  I wonder is the web conforming to a more balanced ratio in this regard?  A look around gives mixed signals -

  • Twitter  One of the hottest web properties today.  A resounding success thanks to FMA.  Just don’t mention the business plan.
  • Friendster  Big in the Asia-Pacific region (I’m not sure if that’s the web equivalent of stating a musician is “big in Germany”) but has fallen behind FB & MySpace in Western online society.  Imo FB’s rep for being a college student’s thing got it viralling and the API sealed it’s dominance in the long term.
  • iPhone App Store  Certainly got developers excited, but then wouldn’t the devs who like to be known as creatives already have iPhones in the first place?  The proliferation of announced app stores for the various mobile platforms since merely means the commoditisation of the idea and another wall around each silo.  First mover advantage will mean little in this regard.
  • Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud  Amazon went at it full pelt – access to root, command line, the whole server OS.  A brave move.  Second out of the blocks was Google’s App Engine, offering a much more restricted/simplified Python-based service depending on how you look at things.  Crucially though it allows devs to play for free – that together with the “it’s Google” factor give it a much greater monthly pageview traffic than EC2′s homepage.  But it’s cpu cycles that measure the success here and EC2 already bears the hallmarks of an enterprise-ready app in a production environment with a standard SLA in place.  Too early to call then, but investors have been asking for more visibility on Amazon Web Services in general, so definitely a future battleground.

Has first mover advantage disappeared then from the web?  Although many breakthrough applications have been superceded by bigger and better alternatives with a far greater leverage, none are by any means rendered dead in the water because of it.  And neither are the fast seconds always some massive corporation throwing money at the latest buzzwords; Zooomr established itself by providing a slightly more interactive interface for what is in effect an online storage bucket.   So I guess the answer is “it depends”. 

Chrome: Keeping it Simple, Stupid

Published on 5 February 2009 in cool, Google and web. 0 Comments

So after killing my runaway IE processes for the nth time yesterday I decided to download Google Chrome.  I was extremely sceptical of their ‘faster browsing’ claim, believing it would amount to illusions similar to their tricks in Gmail – actioning requests onmousedown, etc. 

I was wrong.

24 hours into my first Chrome session it still only uses up 50meg of memory – and stayed at ~20 yesterday for most of the day.  It refused to choke in an IE-like manner over sites like Ebay, YouTube & Gmail.  Flash videos loaded up closer to my PS3 browsers speed (i.e. like something approaching acceptable performance), and as I say, no memory leak.  Internet Explorer would have hogged anything up to 600meg of space by now, thus requiring me to save all my current tabs on notepad/to memory kill it then start the shoddy thing up again.

Granted Gmail and other javascript-heavy sites did not seem to run any faster.  But they didn’t stall either.  It doesn’t come with Java support built in, but I don’t think I’ll risk adding it on – Chrome is my new speedy browsing experience from now on.  Firefox still gets the heavy-lifting vote due to the overwhelming array of plugins I’ve slapped onto it.I’ve been critical in the past towards Google and their useless feature-bloat, particularly in Gmail’s case.  But with Chrome they seem to have done good.

 Update:  Too much hope I guess.  No sooner had I posted this than I found a bug.  Over and above the annoying textbox glitch that seems to be posing quite a problem.  It’s treatment of textbox input is faulty when it sends to the server – It removes newline formatting in WordPress 2.2.1.  Thus my blog post came out as one long blurb.  Bug report submitted.