Handling Flash Crowds from your Garage

Excellent paper by Jeremy Elson and Jon Howell
of Microsoft Research

Handling Flash Crowds from your Garage: "The garage innovator creates new 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. Many components required for web computing have recently become available as utilities.

We analyze the design space of building a load-balanced system in the context of garage innovation. We present six experiments that inform this analysis by highlighting limitations of each approach. We report our experience with three services we deployed in ``garage'' style, and with the flash crowds that each drew."

RConversation: Silicon Valley's benevolent dictatorship

great article this:

RConversation: Silicon Valley's benevolent dictatorship: "The guys running Google, Apple, Microsoft, and many other companies represented at the Fortune Brainstorm are the benevolent dictators of the global information and communications system. But can we assume they will always be benevolent?"

Scobleizer — Tech geek blogger � Blog Archive The Silicon Valley VC Disease �

Scobleizer — Tech geek blogger � Blog Archive The Silicon Valley VC Disease �: "First, our society’s most valuable audiences are getting iPhones. Last week when I was in Los Angeles, both of the famous architects I interviewed already had 3G iPhones.

Those two guys are HUGELY valuable for advertisers. They are representative. They aren’t the only ones.

But even better than the demographics that the iPhone is getting is the usage patterns.

See, I have two Nokia phones and a Microsoft Windows Mobile phone too. They all suck for using the Web. Fine for email and for texting, but really suck for using the Web.

Go see Google’s Vic Gundotra (he’s Vice President and runs a bunch of the teams that build things for mobile phones). He told me that usage on the iPhone is “off the scale” when compared to other phones.

Simply translated: people who have non-iPhone phones simply aren’t using them for anything other than email. This is easily verified. Sit next to a Blackberry user and watch what they do. I do that all the time. All you see them doing is email and light Web use. Now sit next to an iPhone user and watch what they do. Much more heavily used on photos, maps, Web, and video."

Here's a podcast that explains why, if I were David Hornik, I'd invest in iPhone apps and wouldn't worry about other platforms right now. (Later, yes,

Here's a podcast that explains why, if I were David Hornik, I'd invest in iPhone apps and wouldn't worry about other platforms right now. (Later, yes, but not now.) - FriendFeed: "“Here's a podcast that explains why, if I were David Hornik, I'd invest in iPhone apps and wouldn't worry about other platforms right now. (Later, yes, but not now.)”"

Talking Business - Apple’s Culture of Secrecy - NYTimes.com

Talking Business - Apple’s Culture of Secrecy - NYTimes.com
"But if ever there was a chief executive who ought to feel some responsibility to tell shareholders about his health, it is Steve Jobs. First of all, he is not like other chief executives — he is, instead, the single most indispensable chief executive on the planet. As Mr. Wolf nicely put it, “Apple is Steve Jobs and Steve Jobs is Apple.” He added, “I think the stock would drop 25 percent or more if he were to leave the company unexpectedly.” When investors whisper about Mr. Jobs’s health, it’s not just gossip they are indulging in — his health really matters to Apple’s future."

Anarchogeek: The ascendancy of Hacker News & the gentrification of geek news communities

Anarchogeek: The ascendancy of Hacker News & the gentrification of geek news communities

ongoing � Mobility Blues

ongoing � Mobility Blues: "These days, I’m gloomier and gloomier about the prospects for the mobile Internet; you know, the one you access through the sexy gizmo in your pocket, not the klunky old general-purpose computer on your desk."

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."

APOD: 2008 July 5 - Comet Between Fireworks and Lightning

APOD: 2008 July 5 - Comet Between Fireworks and Lightning

Click image for the high resolution version

Explanation: Sometimes the sky itself is the best show in town. In January 2007, people from Perth, Australia gathered on a local beach to watch a sky light up with delights near and far. Nearby, fireworks exploded as part of Australia Day celebrations. On the far right, lightning from a thunderstorm flashed in the distance. Near the image center, though, seen through clouds, was the most unusual sight of all: Comet McNaught. The photogenic comet was so bright that it even remained visible though the din of Earthly flashes. Comet McNaught has now returned to the outer Solar System and is now only visible with a large telescope. The above image is actually a three photograph panorama digitally processed to reduce red reflections from the exploding firework.

Case-Hardened Web Badges: the Live Version - kentbrewster.com

Case-Hardened Web Badges: the Live Version - kentbrewster.com

Here's my presentation from the 2008 edition of Web 2.0, originally given at the crack of dawn, 8:30am, Wednesday, 23 April 2008.

Quite a bit more on the subject is available here:

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

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.

Identi.ca: May A Million Twitters Bloom - ReadWriteWeb

Identi.ca: May A Million Twitters Bloom - ReadWriteWeb: "Identi.ca is a new microblogging service that launched today - but it's not just another also-ran. The service is an Open Source, CreativeCommons framework for a distributed network of federated microblogging services.

If you've become interested in the paradigm changing model of communication popularized by Twitter but have been frustrated by Twitter's frequent down time or other shortcomings - then Identi.ca could be for you."

YouTube - Miss Teen USA 2007 - South Carolina answers a question

YouTube - Miss Teen USA 2007 - South Carolina answers a question