Category Archives: internet

Giving up on the mobile web

Mowser, a start-up which provides a service that makes web sites mobile-friendly, is giving up. Founder Russell Beattie says:

I don’t actually believe in the “Mobile Web” anymore … anyone currently developing sites using XHTML-MP markup, no Javascript, geared towards cellular connections and two inch screens are simply wasting their time.

His point is that devices are adapting to enable browsing of the full web, making attempts to adapt the web to devices rather pointless. Which is pretty much what I said six months ago.

This isn’t absolute. As a mobile web user, I’ve appreciated mobile versions of sites like Google or the BBC. It soon becomes frustrating though, because so many sites are not designed to work well on mobile browsers, and never will be. Fix the mobile browser, and you get the lot.

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Amazon’s cloud computing to surpass its retailing business?

That’s what Larry Dignan is predicting.

I’m sceptical. I like what Amazon is doing with its infrastructure services, but I’m guessing they are low margin and price-sensitive; it’s going to be difficult to pump up its value to equal the retailing side.

My hunch is that Amazon will work at bringing its retailing and cloud computing businesses together. Look at the Flexible Payments Service and DevPay:

Amazon customers can pay using the same login credentials and payment information they already have on file with us. This helps Amazon customers keep their payment information secure and removes the friction you would face if you required customers to enter their payment information before they could make a purchase.

Sounds like a bank, right? Now look at what eBay is doing with PayPal (which it is moving towards making obligatory), and Google with Google Payments – note that the new AppEngine can use Google accounts as an identity service.

Banking is highly profitable. These three giants will be fighting over how to get a small slice of more of our Internet transactions – which will be an increasing share of our total transactions.

Like eBay, Amazon already has a strong business handling the storefront and payments for third parties in its marketplace.

I’ll be surprised if things like S3 and EC2 become more important to Amazon than its retailing; but I won’t be surprised if identity and financial services become the core of its business, rather than running warehouses and shipping out goods.

Update: clearly not yet.

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud gets persistent storage

An annoying feature of Amazon EC2, a service which provides virtual servers on demand, is that server instances have no persistent storage. Any data written to the virtual hard drive disappears when the instance shuts down. Developers have needed to store data elsewhere, such as in Amazon’s S3 storage service.

Amazon has now announced persistent storage. These are virtual hard drives that you can attach to EC2 instances. Another enhancement since the initial launch is static IP numbers. Early tester (and reseller) Thorsten von Eicken is enthusiastic:

The feature that really makes the storage volumes sizzle is the ability to snapshot them to S3 and then create new volumes from the snapshots. The snapshots are great for durability: once a snapshot is taken it is stored in S3 with all the reliability attributes of S3, namely redundant storage in multiple availability zones. This essentially solves the whole backup issue with one simple API call.

It’s an excellent feature which arguably should have been there from the start.

Incidentally, I don’t know why people keep comparing Amazon’s web services with Google’s App Engine. OK, they are both cloud services. But Amazon is providing infrastructure services; Google is offering an application runtime. They hardly compete at all. Google and Amazon compete in other ways: Amazon marketplace vs Google Base and Google Checkout, for example.

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MySpace account hacked

Around two years ago, I set up a MySpace account in order to try the service. I confess I hardly ever log in, and have not done so for several months. I’m sometimes reminded that I have an account by spam friend invitations, which I ignore.

Today I was puzzled to get email notifications of several spam comments on my MySpace blog. Puzzling – I have no posts on MySpace. Except I have (or did have): when I logged in, I found about a dozen blog posts and a similar number of bulletin posts made in my name. All spam. You don’t get notification of your own posts, so it was only when comments were made that I became aware of the problem. If I had any real content in the account I would be embarrassed.

I cleaned it up and changed my password, but I’m intrigued. Did a hacker (or more likely a hacker bot) guess my password, or is MySpace just easy to hack? I suspect the latter. I doubt it was a cross-site attack, since I am never logged in.

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Retail crisis: when I shop on the High Street, I feel I’ve been mugged

Tip for a happy life: when you get home after shopping at bricks-and-mortar stores, never check the online prices for what you’ve just bought.

Last Christmas we were given a gift voucher valid at a chain of stores in the UK, and thought it was time we spent it, so took a trip to our local city centre. One of us wanted Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix on DVD (£19.95) but in the end we settled on a XBox 360 game (Rayman Raving Rabbids – it’s not for me!) at £25.00.

Glanced at Amazon when we got back. The Potter film is £5.98 new or £4.25 used. The 360 game is £19.99 new or £9.99 “Like new”.

Our gift voucher has been spent mostly on propping up businesses that cannot compete with their online competition. Further, if we’d read the Amazon user reviews, we might have chosen a different game.

There are whole categories of goods where buying on the High Street is now hugely more expensive – and that’s without taking into account the travel and the hassle. I don’t mind paying a little more for the sake of supporting local shops and the community they provide, but these price differences are not sustainable.

How about the expert advice you get from a real shop, in specialist areas like electronics, computing, household goods? Frankly, and unless you are very lucky, the expertise readily available from user reviews or Google far exceeds what you are likely to receive out in town on a Saturday afternoon.

Retailing in the UK is shaky anyway, on account of tough economic conditions. I guess the online factor will accelerate the changes coming to our High Streets.

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Microsoft’s live maps upgrade is a downgrade in the UK – developers are fuming

Microsoft’s latest upgrade to Live Maps has some interesting new features, including more detailed 3D city views, labels in bird’s eye view, GeoRSS feeds, and more:

As always the changes visible in the user interface only scratch the surface of the dozens of improvements across the application tiers including Geocoding enhancements, browser compatibility (Safari and IE8), parsing improvements, reverse geocoding, printing improvements and tons more. We are also releasing an upgrade of our Map Control to version 6.1 for developers.

Unfortunately for UK developers, there’s another change. In December 2007 Microsoft acquired Multimap, and the latest update now redirects maps.live.com to Multimap, if your region settings are UK (or, possibly, elsewhere in Europe). You can see the difference if you force the region to US with an url argument: http://maps.live.com/?mkt=en-us.

The Multimap maps have fewer features and include advertising. For example, there is no 3D view in Multimap:

Here’s the real Live Maps version (note the extra features):

It looks like the photography is the same; but developers are not happy. Check out the comments to the announcement, for example:

I loved Live maps, but i’m off to Google maps if multimap doesn’t get removed and we go back to the nice clean good interface and all the features we’ve come to love.

Multimap is awful.

or

I never thought I’d have to say this, but for UK users Live Maps is now complete TRASH. Why on Earth did you replace Live Maps with Multimap??? Multimap uses technology that hasn’t changed for years, the maps are awful, the page is full of clutter, and it doesn’t even use smooth zooming – it just reloads the page every time you zoom in because it’s all static image based.

Add to that the fact that the road maps all use images scanned straight out of the PAPER atlas, not the sleek, computer-friendly road map style that Live Maps uses.

It’s a shame, as I’d been meaning to blog about how impressive Live maps and Virtual Earth looked in some of the demos as Mix08. That said, Microsoft can fix this easily by removing the redirect.

This is an integration issue. If Microsoft-Yahoo becomes a reality, I wonder what other such issues will cause developers to fret?

Thanks to Ian Blackburn for the link.

UPDATE: Live Maps is back. As of yesterday, Multimap is no longer being used even in the UK. Looks like Microsoft listened; I’m impressed.

Google App Engine: how much will you pay for freedom?

Google is offering to host your web apps for free:

You can create an account and publish an application that people can use right away at no charge, and with no obligation. An application on a free account can use up to 500MB of storage and up to 5 million page views a month.

What’s an application? It’s a runtime for Python apps (only Python code will run) and includes the Django web framework. There is a structured datastore which on the briefest of looks has echoes of Amazon’s SimpleDB and Microsoft’s SQL Server Data Services. Welcome to GQL – the Google Query Language. You can send email through Google’s servers (hmm, hope some work is being done to foil the spammers). You can use Google Accounts as an identity service – this is a big one, since it helps Google to meld your online identity with its services.

So what’s the business model? Google says:

During this preview period, only free accounts are available. In the near future, you will be able to purchase additional computing resources at competitive market prices. Free accounts will continue to be available after the preview period.

There are a few clues about what will constitute an “additional computing resource”. Clearly storage is one limit, and there is also a limit of 3 applications for free accounts. There is also a reference to bandwidth limits, the number of results you can return from a query (1000), and the length of time taken to serve a web request.

Apps communicate through HTTP or HTTPS requests. No talk of SOAP or even XML that I can see, though presumably you can use Python libraries.

Although we talk a lot about the largest applications that need to scale, this is a minority of real-world applications. Many of today’s web applications could run happily for free on Google’s new service, once ported. The economics interest me. Google is offering to subsidise our web infrastructure even further than it does already with GMail, Blogger and iGoogle gadgets. Therefore, if we choose to host our own services we have to pay for the flexibility and control that gives us, as well having to deal with scalability and security issues that Google will otherwise look after for us. In the light of generous app hosting offers like this, how much are we willing to pay for that freedom?

A real-world account of Google Adsense – and it doesn’t look good

Advertising is “the economic engine that powers the Web”, according to Microsoft’s Ray Ozzie. Google’s rapid ascendancy, enabled by advertising revenue, is the primary evidence for this. That said, Rick Strahl’s post on Google advertising highlights several problems with Google’s approach. It is about Adsense, the mechanism by which third-party sites (like this one) host Google advertising. When someone clicks an ad, Google gets paid, and an undisclosed percentage of the fee goes to the site owner.

Strahl runs a small business and uses Google both as advertiser and web site owner. He’s puzzled by the stats he’s gathered at both ends. As advertiser, he says that 30-40% of his hits come from link parking sites, plus another 10% which have no referrer, and reckons that these hits are worthless and in many cases possibly fraudulent. That’s up to 50% of wasted ad spend. Google tells him there is no way to opt out of link parking sites, other than by excluding specific sites; but since there are thousands of such sites and they change constantly, that is impractical.

At the other end, Strahl sees frequent deductions from the clicks on his own site, presumably on the basis that they are fraudulent or accidental (such as robot clicks). In fact, deductions from his site, which he controls and which has good, genuine content, appear to be far higher than those from the link parking sites which have no real content at all. In other words, Google seems happier to make deductions from what it pays to him, than from what he pays to Google.

He’s also curious about the ad bidding process, which always seems to end up charging him the maximum possible.

It’s possible that he has some of this wrong; but there is no way to audit Google’s figures:

In the end it feels like black magic. Google (and other advertisers as well to be fair) control the process so completely that if there’s any foul play either on Google’s part or for cheating publishers that contest clicks on the other end there’s almost no real way to tell that it’s happening and unless you have the time to keep very close tabs on it there’s no way to follow the money all the way through – on both ends. And who has that kind of time?

I find this unsurprising. The pay-per-click model has always seemed to me far too vulnerable to abuse, especially bearing in mind all those botnets. Who pays for any fraud? Not Google, but Google’s customers, the advertisers.

Some level of click fraud is inevitable, but Google’s willingness to let any old worthless bot-driven link parking site run Adsense ads is a disgrace. This stuff poisons the web, because it provides a financial incentive to post junk.

Advertisers can opt-out of Adsense, by disabling the “content network” for the ads they place. If enough advertisers do this, Google will take note.

Disclosure and to add a personal note: I am an Adsense publisher, though not an advertiser. I also use Blogads, which to my mind has a better business model for advertisers, since they specify exactly which sites they wish to use. In addition, I get to approve each ad, whereas with Adsense I have to take whatever comes. The snag is, Blogads is tiny in comparison to Google, which can seemingly always supply ads for my site.

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Reality strikes for Blog Friends Facebook app

Just spotted this sad note from the developers of one of the few Facebook apps I’ve enjoyed using, Blog Friends. The app combines blog aggregation with social networking, and does a good job of highlighting interesting posts you might otherwise miss:

Although it appears simple on the surface, Blog Friends is actually an unusually complex and resource-intensive application to maintain and grow …. the way that Blog Friends is currently tied into the Facebook Platform means we have been at the mercy of Facebook’s frequent modifications of their Platform specifications, and that has also been another disabling factor for us.

What is needed is a complete rewrite of Blog Friends, one that makes it properly scaleable and independent of Facebook. As you can imagine, this is a huge undertaking and unfortunately we don’t have the resource or money to do this; we have never inflicted any advertising on you our users, so we haven’t made a penny in revenue from Blog Friends.

We’re shutting down, as of today.

It’s tough to prosper without a sane business model; and it’s tough to survive on some third-party’s proprietary platform.

Proprietary platforms love developers (Ballmer’s battle cry, remember), because they add value. They are risky for developers though, because the platform owner can change the rules.

Is Bubble 2.0 going to end the same way as Bubble 1.0?

Small Business Server 2008: no ISA Server, no built-in tape backup

I have caught up a little with what is coming in Small Business Server 2008, code-named Cougar. Short version: Microsoft is focusing on ease of use but omitting some of the features that made previous versions attractive. This will be an upgrade headache if you used those features.

The new version is 64-bit only and includes Exchange Server 2007, Sharepoint Services 3.0 and WSUS (Windows Server Update Services) 3.0 as standard. Go Premium to get SQL Server 2008 and a license for a second server (which can be 32-bit).

Program Manager Sean Daniel says in an interview (video) that the install is easier than before, and that wizards are scenario-based rather than task-based. I think this means that more decisions are taken for you. However, two changes have caused some consternation.

The first is that tape backup is no longer built in. The new backup system only supports external USB or FireWire drives. I’m not sure about backup over the network; it would be silly to omit this, but who knows? It is based on differential backup, which means you can backup in 10 minutes and do it every hour if you like.

Microsoft says this is because external drives are cheaper than tapes, and that most SBS users have moved to hard drive backup in any case. This is true unless you have a lot of tapes. However, tape advocates point out that tapes are more robust in transit and safer for archiving. Personally I’ve had problems with the cheapest bus-powered external drives, mainly because of the power being inadequate, but I’d hope that up-to-date hardware fixes this. If you still love tape, the solution is to buy a third-party tape backup system.

The other big omission is ISA Server, Microsoft’s firewall and proxy server. This is a bigger deal. ISA is a complex but sophisticated product that requires two network cards to be installed. If you can work out how to administer it, it provides extra security in conjunction with an external firewall, and numerous features for publishing internal servers and services. Why has it been dropped? Daniel makes a curious comment in this Q&A:

I am as disappointed as you with this. Certain circumstances with the changes in Longhorn server left us without firewall solution in our standard product. We attempted to move ISA into the standard product, but legal issues prevented this. There was nothing we could do.

Legal issues? This is a Microsoft product bundled with a Microsoft product. I wonder if he means internal politics?

In particular, note that there is a new multi-server bundle called Windows Essential Business Server 2008, which does include ISA.

So what do you do if you have a full-works, dual-NIC SBS 2003 box and want to upgrade? There’s no in-place upgrade, because this is 32-bit to 64-bit; and the disappearance of ISA means you have to rethink your network architecture, or upgrade to the aforementioned EBS.

Two things disappoint me here. One is that Microsoft is pushing small businesses towards multiple servers, in SBS Premium or EBS. Although this has administrative advantages, it’s not very green, it’s losing the essence of what SBS was about, and seems out of tune with the more general industry move towards fewer servers and virtualization.

The second disappointment is that Microsoft seems to be pretty much ignoring the cloud. I may be wrong: the blurb says “Integration with Microsoft Office Live Services Small Business”, though I’m not sure what this amounts to. Personally I reckon the cloud is the future for the niche that SBS fills. I’d design SBS Next as a local cache for cloud services.