Category Archives: internet

apple, internet

MobileMe losing mail

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My enthusiasm for Apple’s MobileMe is waning rapidly. A few early outages are nothing unusual for a new service; but on Friday Apple admitted losing email:

One issue we encountered was a mail outage affecting 1% of our members . . . We particularly regret to report the loss in the affected accounts of approximately 10% of the messages received between July 16 and July 18.

Losing email is truly aggravating. The worst of it is not knowing what emails you have lost. It has not happened to me for a few years; but I recall sending desperate emails to my most significant contacts along the lines of “if you sent me an email yesterday please send it again.” That never looks good; and of course the email you really wanted might have been from the one person you didn’t think of, or had never heard from before.

It wouldn’t be so bad, except that people still tend to assume that emails are delivered. Usually they are; but it has never been a guaranteed service, and with all that spam sloshing about messages get missed with or without Apple’s efforts.

I expect Apple will fix it and MobileMe will be fine shortly; but with this and the recent security blunder the company’s cloud efforts have been rocky recently. Perhaps I’ll stick to Exchange after all.

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.net, google, internet, software development

My first Google Knol

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On reading this morning that Google has opened Knol to everyone, I thought I should have a go. There seems to be a predominance of medical Knols right now, so my Knol redresses the balance by covering a programming topic. Here it is:

Visual Basic

I deliberately did not look at whatever Wikipedia already has on the subject; knowing how good Wikipedia is on technical topics I am sure it is much longer and better than mine, and probably less opinionated.

Now I’m going to sit back and let the world improve my Knol.

But will anyone find my Knol? Oddly, if I try a search for Visual Basic on the Knol home page, my article doesn’t come up, although I’ve published it:

Oh well, maybe it is still being indexed.

It seems to me that the rating system is key here, and one to which I gave too little attention last time I thought about Knol. The thing is, there’s nothing to stop someone else writing an article about VB, and if it gets rated higher (sniff), my contribution will be lost at the bottom of the Knol dustbin – because I suspect Google will use the ratings heavily when ranking Knols in searches.

Other points of interest: I started creating my Knol in IE7, but gave up because of script errors and continued in FireFox. Second, I tried to verify my identity by telephone, but this only works for USA telephone numbers. It’s a beta.

Update: Danny Sullivan has a good commentary. I agree with him about credit cards. I declined.

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amazon, internet, salesforce.com

Amazon S3 grumbles

Lukas Biewald of Facestat says Amazon S3, which is business-critical, is his #1 cause of failure:

Using Amazon’s S3 has about the same cost and complexity as hosting the images ourselves, but we had thought that the reliability of Amazon would be significantly higher. But that now seems wrong….It’s astonishing that serving content off our own boxes can be more reliable than serving content off of Amazon.

He’s also discovered that the SLA is not worth much – the business cost of the recent 7 hour downtime is far in excess of the 25% fee rebate.

S3 is cheap. Personally I think it is unrealistic to make S3 your storage service, have no plan B, and expect high reliability.

Amazon has a case to answer too. Salesforce.com has now just about lived down its 2005 outages; but incidents like these are terrible publicity for any cloud provider.

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amazon, internet

Amazon S3 was not built on spare capacity

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At least, not according to Jeff Barr, Amazon’s Web Services evangelist. I was reminded of this when reading Om Malik’s post on the recent S3 outage, in which he quotes Antonio Rodrigez who asks:

… if AWS is using Amazon.com’s excess capacity, why has S3 been down for most of the day, rendering most of the profile images and other assets of Web 2.0 tapestry completely inaccessible while at the same time I can’t manage to find even a single 404 on Amazon.com? Wouldn’t they be using the same infrastructure for their store that they sell to the rest of us?

I asked Barr a question along similar lines at Qcon London in March. My concern was whether the business model (S3 is cheap) would break once Amazon had to invest in new servers purely to support S3. This is what he told me:

It’s a common misconception that we launched this simply because we had servers sitting around and we wanted to find something for them to do. It’s always been the case that we launched this specifically because we wanted to bring something of value to developers … Our community is about 330,000 developers now.

I presume that there is nevertheless considerable synergy between S3 and Amazon’s own need for distributed storage, and that there is shared software, data centres, and so on. With hindsight I should have pressed Barr further on what is shared and what is distinct. But it isn’t, apparently, excess capacity. I consider this an advantage.

Update: If Barr wants to correct this misconception he could start by clarifying the wording on the S3 home page:

…it gives any developer access to the same highly scalable, reliable, fast, inexpensive data storage infrastructure that Amazon uses to run its own global network of web sites. The service aims to maximize benefits of scale and to pass those benefits on to developers.

.net, adobe, internet, microsoft, silverlight, software development, web authoring

WCF Sessions with Silverlight and Flex

I wanted to adapt my Silverlight CRUD sample (which I also ported to Adobe Flex) to fix a glaring weakness, which is that any user can amend any entry.

I decided to add some logic that allows editing or deleting of only those rows created during the current session. The idea is that a user can amend the entry just made, but not touch any of the others.

WCF has its own session management but this is not supported by the BasicHttpBinding which is required by Silverlight.

Fortunately you can use ASP.NET sessions instead. This means setting your WCF web service for ASP.NET compatibility:

[AspNetCompatibilityRequirements(RequirementsMode = AspNetCompatibilityRequirementsMode.Required)]

Then you can write code using the HttpContext.Current.Session object.

This depends on cookies being enabled on the client. In my simple case it worked fine, in both Silverlight and Flex. In a real app you would probably want to use HTTPS.

I’d post the sample but unfortunately my Windows web space doesn’t support WCF.

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internet, search, Uncategorized, web authoring

Web 2.0 for the rest of us?

We all know what Web 2.0 means. Google, Flickr, Facebook, Yahoo, mash-ups usually with Google Maps or Flickr, Salesforce.com, and anything but Microsoft. But what does it mean for everyday businesses, like some of the small businesses I talk to from time to time? Some are sceptical. One I can think of sells a successful software application but does not even run a support forum – why make it easy for others to discuss and publicise flaws and problems in your product?

I was interested therefore in a recent book by Amy Shuen, called Web 2.0: A strategy Guide. A foreword by Tim O’Reilly says, "it is the first book that really does justice to my ideas". It was O’Reilly who popularized the Web 2.0 concept – and yes, it is anO’Reilly book.

Shuen writes enthusiastically about network effects, using Flickr, Netflix, Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Amazon and Apple (iPod/iTunes/iPhone) as case studies. I enjoyed it, but the problem with this kind of book is the chasm between these few web giants and everyone else. Another problem is the tendency to ignore the Web 2.0 graveyard – thousands of start-ups that fail, or moribund and/or spam-infested blogs and forums. Since there are more failures than successes, it would be sobering to investigate these rather than riding a wave of Web 2.0 hype. Nevertheless, it is a thought-provoking book with an extensive bibliography, and not a bad starting point for investigating Web 2.0 concepts. I liked the “five steps to Web 2.0”, which begin with finding collective value and end with perhaps the most important, which is what Shuen calls “recombining innovations”:

New-style click-and-mortar, online-offline network partnerships focus on bridging and building new networks rather than replacing or disrupting the infrastructures of offline companies.

I’ve also received a short Web 2.0 book by Marco Cantù, called The Social Web. It is a brisk tour of the sites and concepts that form today’s online communities. Typical readers of this blog probably won’t find anything new here; but I liked the common-sense tips on things like blogging and creating interactive web sites.

I would argue that almost all businesses either are, or should be, “click-and-mortar” entities. Whatever business you are in, a useful question is: what proportion of purchases in your sector begin with or include a Google search? If the answer is significant, you are in the Web 2.0 business.

That does not mean SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the answer to everything. I am an SEO sceptic. All too often, SEO is lipstick on a pig. Optimise your web site for users, not robots. Further, it is no good trying to get users to interact with you, if you are not willing to interact with them. Surprisingly, I see this all the time. I suggest spending less time worrying about high Google ranking, and more time worrying about what users find when they do land on your site.

The case studies that interest me most are where old-style businesses have found ways to engage successfully with Web 2.0 innovations. For example, I’ve written about kitchons.com, which services domestic appliances and tunes its business via Google ads. I came across another example today: a financial company which lets you put an image from Flickr on your credit card. Clever.

Web 2.0: A Strategy Guide by Amy Shuen (ISBN: 978-0-596-52996-3). O’Reilly $24.99.

The Social Web written and published by Marco Cantù. $17.39 print or $8.70 electronic, from Lulu.

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