Here's a tip.  If you really want to annoy me.  I mean REALLY get under my skin.  Leave a comment or send an e-mail that says something like this...

"You totally missed the point"

Now, I've been known to miss a point or two in my day, I won't deny that.  But nothing is more obnoxious than someone leaving a message saying "you missed the point" and then not explaining what the point was that I missed.

It's just rude.

I've gotten a few such messages in regards to my post on Facebook connect so I thought I should address what I think the issue is.  Though I want to point out that any ignorance in the following text is not my fault but the fault of those who didn't see fit to explain exactly what they meant in their e-mails.

(OK, maybe a little my fault for not wanting to dignify their rude e-mails with a reply, but mostly their fault)

That said, I think the point they refer to is that Facebook Connect is more than an authentication system in that it's also what some would call a "revolutionary ad platform."  To quote Om Malick...

In addition to offering a simple authentication method, FC allows granular social interactions to be embedded in non-Facebook services. If Facebook can work with its partners to build interesting use-case scenarios that go beyond simple sign-on, it is quite feasible that Facebook can out-execute Google, MySpace and everyone else with its ID ambitions.

Why? Because this is their one chance of building a monetization engine. The company makes no bones about trying to build a platform that allows it to offer branded advertising in a manner akin to Google’s Adsense. A simpler person (like yours truly) would call this a platform that serves ads for all occasions, reasons and seasons.

In response to that I have a couple points...

1.  Read My Original Post.  The point I made there is that no one is going to use the authentication features of Facebook Connect.  If no one uses the authentication than the ad platform is useless because it can only collect info from users it can identify.  As for "granular social interactions" I said it before and I'll say it again, I don't think there's that much valuable information contained in a Facebook profile and I think the company's failures in the ad space so far verify that skepticism.  

2.  This isn't revolutionary, Amazon's been doing it for years and it really doesn't seem to work.  This is one of those ideas that seems really smart in theory but anyone who has watched their Amazon home page knows it isn't because information without context is useless. 

In other words, Amazon doesn't know that I bought lingerie for my girlfriend last month and not myself.  So now I'm getting solicited for Women's magazines and cosmetic products on my Amazon page that I have no interest in. 

Anyway, those two reasons are why I didn't address the issue earlier.  I wasn't missing the point I just didn't think this particular point was relevant given my feelings toward the authentication scheme and the system's potential in general.

The NPD group reports that Apple's iTunes continues to be the #1 music seller in the U.S. for the first half of 2008.  Here's a quote from Businessweek...

The latest NPD figures on music sales are out for the first half of 2008, and as you might expect, Apple’s iTunes is still in the top spot, but what’s interesting is who’s in fourth place: Amazon. Here’s the top five:
1) iTunes
2) Wal-Mart (includes Walmart, Walmart.com, Walmart Music Downloads)
3) Best Buy (includes Best Buy, Bestbuy.com, Best Buy Digital Music Store)
4) Amazon (Amazon.com, AmazonMP3.com)
5) Target (Target and Target.com)

What I find interesting, and what no one seems to be mentioning so far, is that Amazon's "DRM-less" music seems to hold little draw.  They've risen one place from 5th to 4th (which includes their physical CD sales) but the change is hardly dramatic.  Even more surprising was this...

Last year, NPD made a case that Amazon, given its somewhat broader consumer base might pose a long term threat to iTune’s dominance. It said that 64% of Amazon customers are male, versus 44% for iTunes. But Amazon was weaker among teens.

So even Teens, supposedly the most DRM adverse of demographics, don't seem to be willing to suffer the most minor inconvenience (using Amazon's downloader) to get DRM free tracks. 

In fact, if you count the fact that Wal-Mart, Best  Buy and Target (the other 3 in the top 5) all sell physical copies of music (which can be ripped DRM free) it seems people are actually going out of their way to choose the one music provider that sells DRM enabled music. 

I'm not arguing for DRM but I think the above numbers go a long way to proving that people just don't care.  DRM is an issue where a very small minority making a lot of noise has created an issue that seems bigger than it is. 

In the end it's not freedom to copy your music but convenience that seems to be king among consumers.  As pointed out above, it really isn't even that big of an inconvenience to use Amazon's download service.  But DRM just seems to be a non-issue among most consumers.  As the author of the Businessweek article says...

I have yet to buy an MP3 from Amazon mainly because I haven’t run into anything I wanted to buy digitally that I couldn’t already get from iTunes.

So DRM apparently isn't even an issue in his mind.  Again, I'm not pro-DRM and for the record I buy all the music I can from Amazon but it's interesting to compare the average person's concerns to those of the tech crowd and realize just how different they are. 

Given the quoted numbers and the seemingly blasé attitude of the Businessweek author one has to wonder if DRM is even on the average person's radar.

• It never occurred to me before now, but the iPhone 2.0 might not be the most exciting thing that comes out of today.  Three banners have caught my eye: "iPhone Simulator: Actual Results will not vary", "Accelerometer: Add new dimension to your apps.", and my personal favorite "Cocoa Touch:  Tap into the future".  Makes me think they'll open the doors to the Developer program to everyone. 
• I jumped over to Amazon to see if maybe they would accidentally list products before the announcement.  But it showed a "Http/1.1 Service Unavailable" message.  Clearly whatever  happened last week isn't over yet.

So hmmmmm....

Before going any further I'd like to remind you that this is not a pre-written post.  I learned about this an hour ago and these are my initial thoughts.  Things might look completely different in the morning.

Though...I doubt it.  The quick snippit is that Microsoft Mesh, for right now, is just a sync-able desktop.  Sign Up for a Mesh account, add several computers, store all your stuff in local "Mesh Folders" and everything syncs up nicely.  That's about it for now. 

But the real promise of this is the SDK.  As Scoble put it...

We haven’t even gotten into the developer SDK. They spent about an hour showing me how to build new kinds of syncable apps on top of the Mesh in a variety of tools.

Now you’re just getting a taste of how Microsoft is going to use the Mesh to stay relevant. It is bringing its developers onto the Internet in an interesting new way.

So this is Microsoft's strategy for the future, sync based apps built around Feedsync feeds.  My initial thoughts...

Lock-In: A big part of me feels like this is Microsoft trying to devise another way to lock everyone in.  Like they are trying to replace Windows with the cloud rather than just provide a great service.

A Whole Lot of Effort for Developers: For a Developer the question is this: You can build one Online App.  Or you can build One Adobe Air App.  Or you can go with Microsoft and build an App for each and every platform out there all based around Microsoft's Sync technology.  So my question is, why would I go with Microsoft?

A Whole Lot of Files for Users: So lets say I buy into Microsoft's grand vision, sync everything up, and carry a copy of everything on each one of my devices.  Doesn't that mean I have 20 copies of files to worry about now?  If I forget to delete my old computer from my Mesh account do my files still float around on that PC?  Continuing to update while now in the hands of others?  This system seems awfully insecure.  Its true that users should be careful about leaving files on old computers but one lesson I've learned as a developer is never to trust the user to act in the ideal way.

Not Much Gain For Anyone (But Microsoft): I think my main problem with this is that it seems like an initiative that is "strategy based" and not "user based".  Its designed to pull the focus back to the desktop.  But with connections getting faster and web based technology getting more interactive why would I revert back to a desktop model?  In a constantly connected world do I really want my files residing on every computer I touch? 

Obviously I'm going to keep a very close eye on this but right now it seems profoundly uncompelling.  Almost like Microsoft made a checklist of their desires (lock people to a platform, put the focus back on desktop computing, etc...) and built a product around that without much thought given to the user. 

I'm a Microsoft Developer, my platform of choice is ASP.NET, my language of choice is C#, and I find this completely uninteresting.  If that's the case how on Earth does Microsoft plan to convince those hostile towards them to come over? 

I really wasn't planning to post any more on this topic but one of the comments on waxy.org's Google App Engine post caught my eye.  Here's the quote from Gordon of getlucky.net...

First of all, I don't believe that anyone creating applications that live in the cloud expects perfect portability from platform to platform. Whether you're living on Ning, Amazon, AppEngine, or something else, you're working in a sandboxed API that might just happen to look like an existing language runtime. If you're not willing to bind to a provider's cloud abstraction API, then that begs the question of what is acceptable and has semantics that magically port to the universe at large?

So, to me, this is all kind of a silly argument. Promoting the idea that all cloud platforms should speak some form of scripting and data Esperanto is probably just about as effective as filing a bug against the MySQL developers asking them to "work like Oracle."

To me, this post demonstrates a fundamental difference between the Amazon concept of "cloud computing" and what Google is doing with App Engine which is vastly different.  More to the point, it shows that many people aren't seeing the difference between the two. 

The "Cloud" is not a functional thing in the Amazon model.  It is simply a virtual space where an application can reside and store data.  There are APIs related to environmental functions such as what you use to write files or query databases but beyond that the "Cloud" isn't providing additional functionality.  Any additional functionality is provided from outside the cloud by open (SOAP or REST based) web services and/or programming environments.

This is how Amazon is doing cloud computing and this gives the developer, as Gordon put it, "perfect portability from platform to platform" 

What Google App Engine is doing is what I would call "Proprietary Cloud Computing".  They're providing a cloud just like Amazon but then they're offering additional functionality which is limited to their cloud.  Beyond that they are restricting you from using other open APIs that provide that same functionality *

In doing this they are locking your data into their data store.  This isn't necessarily a bad thing if all you want to do is write applications for Google but its important to be aware of the box you are putting yourself in to.  Google App Engine is not free.  When you use it your simply paying in data instead of money.  Google doesn't need your money but as a company they're in a mad dash to organize all the world's data so they do need your data.  Data is worth more than money to Google. 

Now clearly the above are generalizations and there are components of each service that slightly contradict them such as SimpleDb being a directory service or Google App Engine's APIs being ported.  But the overall the above lays out the philosophy of each company and even the exceptions tend to reflect that (e.g. SimpleDb is proprietary but it can be used from non-Amazon hosts and the Google App Engine port is not sponsored by or officially approved of by Google). 

Understanding the difference between these two philosophies should be the first step when deciding which service to use.

* Just to be clear, Google can still use open web services and I wanted to make sure I didn't give the impression that it couldn't.  But you can't run your own environment which is the point I was making.

I wanted to address one issue specifically since I still think people have a weak grasp of what it means.  That issue is scaling.  There have been two scale arguments that have been presented to me in the responses to my last post so I addressed both below. 

Scaling for an Individual Application

One of the arguments presented has been that Google's solution allows applications to scale beyond the point that a shared host could match.  This is because, according to those who make the argument, Google has massive resources that they can employ if your application grows into a high traffic site.

What people are missing here is that, once you get to a certain size, it becomes cost effective to host your own site.  No matter how efficient a company like Amazon or Google is they have to charge an overhead to make money.  Once you get to the point where you can afford to hire a full time server person and maintain a server farm for yourself there's no way those companies can compete because of the overhead they have to charge. 

So people thinking that one of the benefits of the Google App Engine is that it can scale into infinity miss the point that no one will ever need that even if Google was providing it. 

Which Google isn't, and that brings me to my second point...

Scaling for Multiple Applications on Google's Server

There's been much confusion over one thing in my previous post.  That thing was...

Google App Engine's ability to scale depends on how much server resources Google is willing to dedicate to the task of running these applications.  Google is not going to risk slowing down their primary services for a Google App Engine application.  So their ability to scale could very well be less than other companies, we just don't know.

So I thought I'd elaborate on that.   One of the arguments people have made is that Google's massive data centers gives them the capability to completely eliminate performance drags.  So Google App Engine applications will perform faster because they'll never have to wait for CPU resources. 

What this line of reasoning misses is that we don't know how many of Google's computers they are willing to dedicate to the task of hosting App Engine Applications.  So while a normal shared host might put 100 website's on every computer that still might outperform Google if Google's Server-To-Application ratio is higher.  So even if Google has 300,000 computers dedicated to Google App Engine and your shared host only has 100 computers to their name they could very well be even in performance if Google has 30,000,000 App Engine applications to run. 

In fact, I'd argue that Google's popularity and the fact that the service is free makes App Engine more likely to exceed your average web hosts Server-To-Application ratio. 

In the End...

When all is said and done my point still stands.  Scalability really doesn't play a part when deciding between a web host and a service like Google or Amazon.  It all boils down to price.  Since Google has chosen not to reveal their pricing yet there's no way to compare.  That is exactly why it is too early to be singing the praises of Google's solution (which was the point of my last post).

I wasn't going to tackle the Google App Engine Beta at all because I thought others would come forward with the same argument I wanted to make.  But as far as I've seen that hasn't happened.  Instead a steady stream of posts praising the service as the next big thing have come out which, to me, is ridiculous.   

For those completely unfamiliar here is a summary of Google App Engine from  Niall Kennedy's post on the topic...

Google App Engine lets any Python developer execute CGI-driven Web applications, store its results, and serve static content from a fault-tolerant geo-distributed computing grid built exclusively for modern Web applications. I met with the App Engine's team leads on Monday morning for an in-depth overview of the product, its features, and its limitations. Google has been working on the Google App Engine since at least March 2006 and has only just begun revealing some of its features. In this post I will summarize Google App Engine from a developer's point of view, outline its major features, and examine pitfalls for developers and startups interested in deploying web applications on Google's servers.

After reading Mr. Kennedy's post I couldn't hold my tongue anymore.  This service has gotten entirely too much credit and I'm now to the point where I'm willing to spend the time to make a post on it. 

Google App Engine: The World's Worst Webhost

Google App Engine is essentially just a free web host.  You can throw around terms like "geo-distributed computing grid" all you want but the reality is most applications have a server or servers in one location and do just fine. 

Given that, I made a quick chart comparing Google App Engine to a popular shared hosting company (for the record, I've never done business with this company).  I compared Google's free service to the other company's $5.95 per month service...

As you can see, Google falls behind in every single category.  So the question becomes this: is there really anyone who can't afford $6 a month?

But what about Scaling?

One of the arguments for the Google App Engine has been that its backed by Google's ability to scale.  When I hear people say this I have to wonder if they've even thought through what the words mean.

Google App Engine's ability to scale depends on how much server resources Google is willing to dedicate to the task of running these applications.  Google is not going to risk slowing down their primary services for a Google App Engine application.  So their ability to scale could very well be less than other companies, we just don't know.

Beyond that, Google is allocating resources "per cycle" which means that Google's ability to scale doesn't come into play unless you are using enough resources to max out another web hosting company (which is unlikely).  

On top of all that Google hasn't even released details on how much they will charge for overages making it impossible to judge the service against other available options.

The Great Google Stack

To quote from Mr. Kennedy's post...

Google App Engine is a proprietary virtualized computing suite covering the major common components of a modern web application: dynamic runtime, persistent storage, static file serving, user management, external web requests, e-mail communication, service monitoring, and log analysis. The Google App Engine product offers a single hosted production web server stack hosted on Google's custom-designed computers and datacenters distributed around the world.

Here's what he doesn't mention: almost every modern framework manages these tasks.  .Net, Ruby on Rails, even PHP all have ways to handle the above tasks with  just a few lines of code.  Google isn't doing anything monumental by offering these items. 

The one exception to the above rule is authentication.  Google does offer the ability to authenticate your program's users through their Google account which is a nice feature.  But again, entirely proprietary.  To use it you essentially have to be willing to give your customers to Google.

In fact, the end result of all these libraries is to lock you into Google's proprietary system and force you to use their language of choice (at least until they expand beyond python).  So if you do use those features you really can't move your site to another host without a massive rewrite. 

Those pesky privacy concerns

Another thing that doesn't seem to come up is that Google has made no guarantees as to the privacy of the content being put on their servers.  They'll have access to your complete source code and the rights to do whatever they want with it.  I doubt they would do anything but the fact that they could is enough to chase any smart start up away.

But Wait, There's more limitations

Going back to Mr. Kennedy's post  he lays out a few more limitations that I didn't know about...

1.  
   1. Static files are limited to 1 MB. App Engine does not support partial content requests (Accept-Ranges).
   2. Cron jobs and other long-life processes are not permitted.
   3. Applications are not uniquely identifiable by IP address, leading to a lack of identification for external communications. Applications may suffer from bad neighbor penalties from API providers upset at another app on the service.
   4. No SSL support. You can rely on Google services (and branding) for login and possibly future payments.
   5. No image processing. Python Imaging Library relies on C, and is therefore not a possible App Engine module.
   6. Google user accounts. Site visitors are very aware of your choice in web hosts each time they attempt to logon to your application. I feel like this flow makes your application seem less professional, but may be a reasonable trade-off. Google will store your user data and potentially mine its data for better ad targeting.

All but #6 are things you CAN DO on every web host I can think of. 

Conclusion

The Google App engine may some day be worth mentioning but as of right now its nothing short of comical.  Essentially Geocities 2.0. 

The idea that this is a competitor to Amazon's services or that Startups are going to start flocking to this platform is absurd.  You'd think the people singing the praises of Google's solution had never heard of a web hosting company before. 

Amazon was revolutionary because it provided a superior product for a cheaper price than most web sites were paying at the time.  Google on the other hand has provided a product inferior to every web host I can find and won't even tell us how much they'll charge to bring their service up to equal those other products. 

I can't imagine any serious developer signing up for this under the current circumstances.

As a change of pace, how about a visual quote (gotten via Read/Write Web)...

That pretty much says it all, Amazon is turning physical space into a web service and charging for it in the same way they charge for hard drive space now.  Apparently the way this will work is that Amazon won't charge for the service but will instead charge for storage space and the transactions themselves. 

This way companies can use Amazon's back-end for automation while only paying when they make money. 

This service seemed counterproductive to me at first (package up all your stuff and send it to Amazon just so they can package it up and send it to someone else).  But as I thought on it I realized most people using this service don't manufacture their own goods they buy those goods from someone and then act as a middle man.  So by just having your supplier ship straight to Amazon you could, in theory, automate your supply chain just like the big companies do. 

That's where the beauty of this comes in.  With a little programming knowledge you can run your business as efficiently as a big chain store and do so at a fraction of the cost.  Especially since there is no cost to the service itself allowing you to poll it as much as you need to.

I do see one issue and that is in quality control.  Because you as the seller will never have your product in-hand you won't be able to weed out damaged items until they hit the consumer.  You can obviously offer returns in the same way the big chains do but a smaller company might not be able to get their money back from the original vendor once the item is returned.  Small companies usually have a limited return window which means they lose money if a damaged item sits on Amazon's shelf too long.

But unless you have serious quality control issues on the vendor side I doubt this would be too big an issue.  If anything a few losses should be easily offset by the money saved through operating more efficiently. 

So while this is a harder sell than previous Web Services I still think it's a win for Amazon...albeit not an immediate one.  Since this is a relatively new concept to small companies I expect adoption to be a slow process.  But Amazon is building this off their own infrastructure so they can, in theory, give it as much time as it needs to prosper. 

Addendum: In case you were wondering, the title of this post is in reference to Amazon blurring the line between the virutal world of web services and the physical world of storage and shipping.  I thought that was clearer than it was :)

Second Addendum: As was pointed out in the comments there are similar services to this that have been around for a while.  One of which is ShipWire.  I don't have the specific need for a service like this and I lack the time to fully investigate which service is better but I thought I'd throw that out there so anyone interested in this type of thing could make their own comparison. 

In discussing Amazon's Kindle I think I've echoed the sentiments of most bloggers in that I found it interesting but entirely too expensive.  Given how expensive it is I just didn't see success in its future particularly while it matches the iPhone in price.

So Imagine my surprise at reading this (via ABCNews.com)...

Amazon amzn launched the paperback-size gadget to considerable fanfare last November. But prospective buyers who click on the Kindle links at the top of Amazon's home page are informed that due to heavy demand the product is "temporarily sold out."

...

"We can't go into details about exact wait times," says Amazon vice president for digital products Ian Freed, conceding that the company underestimated demand. "We've had to ramp up manufacturing pretty significantly, and ramping up a manufacturing takes a little time." Amazon's Senior Vice President Steven Kessel told a group of publishers recently that Amazon's focus is "on getting back in stock" with Kindles.

...

Judging from online discussion groups, the Kindle wait time seems to be about four to six weeks. It took a month before Sacramento-based digital library consultant Kris Ogilvie got hers.

Of Course, there is one catch...

The company takes Kindle orders on a first-come, first-served basis. But the online retailer won't reveal how many have been sold or when supply will catch up with demand.

So we don't know exactly what this means.  If Amazon was hedging its bets on the Kindle a sellout would still equate to very few sales. 

But this is a good sign for Amazon and it means we probably won't see a price drop anytime soon.  I wonder where the disconnect is between what I (and most bloggers) thought and what consumers actually did.  The best I can come up with is that a society of book lovers exists and they're willing to spend money on book paraphernalia.  Amazon would know that audience better than anyone and could have tailored Kindle to them. 

These are probably people who don't even know what the word blog means but who, because of their love of books, are avid Amazon visitors who have a lot of trust in the brand.  When they saw an e-book reader made by Amazon their trust was enough to justify the cost. 

This could end up being a coup for Amazon if they play their cards right.  They can milk the die hard buyers for $399 and then release an updated version (perhaps one actually worth the $399) while dropping the current Kindle down to a more reasonable price.  By doing that Amazon could become the Apple of the e-book revolution.  A very profitable place to be if e-books take off. 

I doubt e-books will ever be as successful as digital music...but then again...I didn't think the Kindle would sell out either so what do I know?

This really bugged me. 

I'm very late to this particular controversy but apparently some talk show host named Cooper Lawrence (whose the first girl I've ever heard of using the name Cooper by the way) came out against the game Mass Effect on Fox News because it uses nudity and a few mild sex scenes.

In retaliation gamers started giving her book a 1 star rating on Amazon.  Here's the quote from Gaming Today...

After hearing the offensive and biased attack against Mass Effect on Fox News, I decided to check out some links on Cooper Lawrence, the psychologist who took part in the biased strike on the game. I came across her book on Amazon.com titled ‘The Cult of Perfection: Making Peace with Your Inner Overachiever’. It was interesting to see that the page was full of one-star reviews of her book mostly coming from gamers. Shawn covered the topic HERE yesterday. This is definitely one of the reasons I love the Internet. She may think that it’s ok to bash a product she has never used and gamers are now bashing a book they have never read to drop her book rating on Amazon.

Isn't "Two wrongs don't make a right" still something we teach to Kindergartners? 

That said lets go over the multiple reasons why this is stupid...

1. It has a destructive effect on the community: By far my biggest annoyance here is the fact that people like this do nothing but take credibility away from the power of a social network.  Amazon eventually had to just delete all the 1 star reviews which robbed the people who actually read the book and didn't like it of their voice (oh, and made the book look better to people in the process)
2. They actually helped her sales: Here's a little life lesson, every time you attack someone en mass you actually draw attention to them.  Mark my words, her sales are going to go up because of this.  So again these idiots did exactly the opposite of what they were trying to do.
3. Newsflash: the News is scripted: The biggest irony here is that Mrs. Lawrence may not even be against this game.  CNN, Fox News, MSNBC and all the others hire pundits to take a side on these type of shows and people who do these debates don't necessarily agree with what they're saying.  They are paid to take a position of "positive" or "negative" and nuance isn't something the networks are interested in.  If you want proof see Mrs. Lawrence's follow up comments here.

I'm sure there are more but that makes my point well enough.  What bothers me about this is the gamers' actions accomplished nothing that they set out to do.  They actually did damage to Amazon's community while helping Mrs. Lawrence sell books.  It never ceases to amaze me how many people will just act without putting any thought into whether their actions do anything to actually accomplish their goal. 

It really does just bother me to no end...