September 24, 2009
In case you hadn’t heard, there was another Gmail outage today. Of course, the fact that most people who actually use the service were painfully aware of this still didn’t stop many tech blogs and news sites publishing posts to tell us anyway. What caught my eye was a post by the usually-pragmatic Om Malik, whose headline cried, “Why You Can’t Trust Google“,
For time and again, the company has proven that despite all its talk, its offerings are as unreliable as those of any other service provider.
I do sympathise with Om and everyone else who has put their trust in Google to run their email, but we need a reality check here. Just because Google has seemingly infinite resources, it doesn’t make them immune from the kind of challenges that face IT departments in companies, large and small, all over the world.
Anyone who’s provided, implemented or supported IT services for any length of time will tell you that, no matter what risk mitigation/platform resilience measures you put in place; no matter how well you test your changes ahead of implementation; no matter how thorough your change review process, every now and then the technology will fail, something will screw up and service outages will occur.
As Om himself offered in one of his previous posts, following the last Gmail outage:
1. Get used to outages. Why? Scale forces history to repeat. As the Internet matures, we expect it to operate more smoothly, so outages make it look like you’re falling behind. But outages can also be a sign of that very maturation. Companies will learn to avoid them, then as the whole thing scales up and grows more complex, it will happen again. There will always be outages, inside the cloud and out.
I couldn’t have put better myself.
Posted in applications, cloudcomputing, Google, productivity, tech 
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August 6, 2009
Apparently one of the world’s largest media organisations still doesn’t understand how the internet works. The Inquisitr is reporting that News Corp is preparing to sue Google and Yahoo in a bid to prevent them from linking to News Corp. content. So; News Corp can’t monetise their news sites to the extent they’d like, and somehow this is Google’s fault? Take a look at the screen-grab, below:
All of the items in the Top Stories section link off to their respective source sites. This might come as a shock to Mr Murdoch, but the Times isn’t my homepage; nor is the Sun. If it wasn’t for their headlines appearing on Google News on iGoogle, which is my homepage, I wouldn’t ever need to visit those sites. What else do you notice? No ads. Google aren’t monetising this page, which is another reason to question how this hurts News Corp.
Rather than look at them as some kind of competition, News Corp need to see Google and Yahoo as a (and I apologise for the 1990′s AOL reference) portal into their own content. Let Google send me to your site, and when I’m there, give me content compelling enough to make me stick around. To make matters worse, News Corp’s chief, Rupert Murdoch, has gone on record to say that “we intend to charge for all our news websites“. In the face of falling readership and advertising revenue for their physical media business, the last thing News Corp wants to be doing is putting a pay wall around their web-based content. There will always be other, free places to get the news; if not News Corp’s direct competitors, then smaller, feisty startups like BNO. Today, some of those news sources lack authority, compared to the News Corp sites; as pay walls go up, that will change.
If you were in charge of this multibillion dollar, international news and media organisation, what would you do? Does putting a pay wall around the web-based news content seem like a smart play, or are there better ways to monetise?
Posted in business, communication, news, publishing Comments Off
August 6, 2009
On Wednesday, the Google Reader team announced that shared items would be published via PubSubHubbub hub, meaning that anything I share will now how up on – for example – Friendfeed within seconds (there’s a great video in that post showing this behaviour in action). Louis Gray followed up with a post about he depends on Google Reader for sharing a colossal number of items from an equally colossal number of feeds, but ended the post with this:
Now, with PubSubHubbub, if there is any slowdown, it’s clear it’s with me, because Google has the gas pedal pushed all the way to the floor.
This got me thinking. My Reader stats (right) are far lower than Louis’, and yet there are times when I feel swamped by the amount of information I’m trying to filter. The volume of information scrolling down my screen right now on Friendfeed is such that the first page often refreshes before I’ve finished reading one article.
Although PSH solves the problem created by the latency of RSS-client polling periods, the next challenge is making sure that we don’t miss the stuff that really interests us. As consumers of shared items, blog updates et al, we will need to get smarter about making sure that the “interesting”stuff bubbles to the top of our attention stream.
How do we do that? How can we define “interestingness”? Can we build attention flags into our software tools in such a way that we don’t lose sight of why we’re wading through our real-time river?
At the moment, I rely on a combination of Google Reader – although I find Feedly to be a more configurable, usable top layer for Reader – Friendfeed and Lazyfeed. Even then, I’ll come across articles on one or other of those services a day or so after the fact and wonder, “how did I miss that?”.
Maybe I’m not using the filtering capabilities offered by my chosen services to their fullest; maybe there are other services that are worth taking a look at. If you’ve got any insights about you filter your feeds for the interesting stuff, do share them in the comments, below.
Posted in communication, publishing, tech 1 Comment »
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