Ling saw my tweet and immediately wrote a blog post on her LingsCars.com site which took the top position on Google a few moments later. As you can guess, this started a war and over the next 48 hours I won and lost the top position several times.

So, after a bit of messing around we came up with the idea of running a weekly competition that is open to developers all around the world. We passed the idea to Jamie and he got working on the concept.

Yesterday, as a result we launched GoogleGrope at the SuperMondays event. This is a weekly competition that allows search engine and SEO experts around the world to compete for a prize. The aim is simple…the person with the top search position for a random phrase after 48 hours is the winner. Check out the website and register!

1. What are my initial reactions?
   As with all Google products or services…I am extremely impressed. I have not decided if I will ever use this service, but I see a value for it and I see that it will probably become very popular.
2. Is this truly unique or new?
   It’s not often that people invent a completely new product or service. Most new products of services are re-implemented versions of their forbearers or results of UAOTATC (unique assembly of tried and tested components). After much thought, I believe that Google Wave is both. It has remarkable similarities to Microsoft Groove and Microsoft Sharepoint while also looking like a Frankenstein version of email, IM, Google Docs and wiki.
3. Is this a replacement to traditional email?
   Firstly, I don’t think that it would be possible to replace traditional email. While I believe that email is deeply flawed in its current guise, I feel that it is too deeply integrated into our lives to be washed away by this technology. With that said, I can see a world where email and wave work alongside. Wave can become a welcome addition to our communication tool set which already includes email, IM, blogs, Twitter, social media sites (Linkedin, Facebook etc) and Wiki.

   Mass adoption would be helped if it was built into normal SME mail servers (such as Mdaemon or even Microsoft Exchange) and traditional email clients such as Thunderbird and Outlook. That way you could read emails and ride waves from the one client. I can’t see integration into MS products any time soon but due to the open-source status of the code I would be surprised if modules aren’t released for other products soon.

4. Will this be the end of spam?
   Well…we have been predicting a technology that would herald the end of spam for almost a decade. Ending spam is the ‘holy grail’ of email and many companies have set their sights on this and failed.

   Research around this area has focused upon the reciprocity of the email sender or server. This is a theoretical value that quantifies the persons online reputation. If we can quantify this properly then we could disregard the emails of people with bad scores. RBL’s and DCC try to work in this area. This research has also been built into most social media services, but while it is very useful for personal relationships online, I believe that this sort of analysis fails once you bring it into the business community because:

   a) Businesses want to receive emails from un-know people…they could be from potential clients
   and
   b) Just because you have a good reputation online does not mean that I want to communicate with you.

   This is the reason why email spam has not been wiped out yet….we want to stop spam but allow unsolicited emails.

   To partake in a Google Wave it seems that you need to be invited…so it would seem that it is very unlikely that spam could be sent using waves…but you could be spammed by people inviting you to join waves in much the same way that you are spammed by invites to Linkedin and Facebook.

5. Will this aid Google’s domination of the world?
   No…Google is not trying to dominate the world…but they are a commercial company and they are trying to make their products and services ubiquitous. Google Wave will help with this goal…this is neither wrong or evil.
6. Why did Google make the code and protocol open source?
   I guess that Google want to get a higher presence in the business community. This is where all the money is. Most of the existing Google services are fully hosted services…the user has little access to the data and has very little control over it….this is one if the big stumbling blocks that this community has is data protection and data persistence. Giving the business community the ability to host their own server breaks down some of these barriers.

So, in conclusion, I guess that Google Wave is going to be very popular…but I cant see in what markets it will succeed and I dont believe that it will make email redundant.

In its current guise, I am not a big fan of Google App Engine…even the new leader of the Western World couldn’t convince me of the virtues.

In my September post I wrote about why I don’t like the existing service. I was a little critical of the service but I think I have justification, while this is still an early BETA service I am unhappy with the way the service is being positioned.

It’s a pain in the neck for App Engine to only support python (apparently PHP et al will follow soon) and limiting external URL requests to 4 seconds is a little draconian, lets forget the fact that you have to use the Gmail mail delivery service and that there is no SQL database available. While all of these are rather limiting they are not the real reason why I don’t like App Engine….it’s because of vendor lock in and the lack of any interoperability with other cloud providers. Google is a big company who will probably dominate this market…they can afford to do better in this area, but they seem to choose not to…Is Google evil?

That doesn’t mean that I am not interested in how App Engine is developing. The service has some incredible advantages over the AWS model if you run a website. Using App Engine you would simply upload your web files and let the system scale for you as opposed to AWS EC2 customers would need to launch multiple servers and install all sorts of stuff. Obviously, if you need more than simply web hosting then the service is somewhat lacking (no ability to schedule jobs, email delivery is a problem and file access is limited).

The App Engine Blog has released a post which details the following:

• an App Engine System Status Site that monitors the latency and uptime of various components and provides real-time visibility into their performance
• a new Quota Details Dashboard, detailing all of the resource quotas that affect your application
• a sneak peak at our upcoming billing feature, which will enable your app to grow beyond our free quotas!

I will watch with interest, but it is a shame that Google is not doing all it can to progress the virtues of interoperability and perhaps the open source software movement.

Barack has a website that canvases opinions on his various policies. This website uses Moderator, a Q&A manager running on App Engine written by Google. 

Google Developer Day, Google App Engine Presentation

On tuesday I travelled to London to the Google Developer Day. As expected, the event was very well organised.

Mano Marks gave an excellent set of presentation on Google App Engine. You can view them on YouTube.

I went along to see what I can learn about the Google App Engine and specifically to see if it would be possible to move some of the emailcloud administation system to AppEngine. It seems that this is not possible because of the following reasons:

1. AppEngine currently only supports python…it will support more in the future but google have not announced a date.
2. There is no way to use the service to manipulate a file…so that we can get a file from AWS S3 and then release it to an email user.
3. There is a limit of 5m page views a month…this will increase soon…but no date was announced.
4. there is a limit of 1Mb per transaction…this is too small
5. there is a time limit of 10 seconds for transactions and 4 seconds for external URL calls
6. the only viable database system it can use is BigTable (as to use any SQL database you would need to host it externally and then be limited to access by URL, including the 4 second delay).
7. no SLA
8. EVERYTHING is covered under the Patriot Act

There were more…but I stopped listening after all this.