The New York Times has an article titled How Google Decides to Pull the Plug which talks about the rationale behind the rash of abandoned and cancelled projects that have come out of the Big G in recent months. The article contains the following interesting excerpts

GOOGLE recently set the blogosphere abuzz by announcing that it was pulling the plug on several products.

The victims included Lively, a virtual world that was Google’s answer to Second Life; Dodgeball, a cellphone service aimed at young bar-hoppers who wanted to let their friends know where they were hanging out; Catalog Search, which scanned paper product catalogs so they could be searched online; and Notebook, a simple tool that allowed people to take notes on Web sites they had visited.

Google also said it would stop actively developing Jaiku, a microblogging service similar to Twitter, and instead turn it over to its users as an open-source project they could tinker with as they wished.
…
All of the shuttered projects failed several of Google’s key tests for continued incubation: They were not especially popular with customers; they had difficulty attracting Google employees to develop them; they didn’t solve a big enough problem; or they failed to achieve internal performance targets known as “objectives and key results.”

You’d think that Google, a highly profitable engineer’s playground, would keep supporting quirky side projects as long as someone wanted to work on them. The company, which is best known to consumers for its search engine, is famous in business for promoting innovation by letting engineers devote 20 percent of their time to projects outside their main responsibilities.

But in this difficult economy, even Google is paying more attention to costs.
…
Lively, Google’s entry into three-dimensional virtual worlds, was publicly unveiled last July. Four months later, when the company decided to close it, only 10,000 people had logged into the service over the previous seven days. That was well below the targets set by Google’s quarterly project review process, and far behind Second Life from Linden Lab, which had about half a million users in a similar period.

“We didn’t see that passionate hockey-stick growth in the user base,” said Bradley Horowitz, Google’s vice president for product management. Management decided that the half-dozen people working on Lively could be more productive elsewhere.

It will be interesting to see what the long term effects of these changes in perspective will be on Google's culture around launching new products out of 20% time projects and the veneration of side projects at the Googleplex. One expected change is that employees will be more conservative around what 20% projects they choose to work on so that they don't end up wasting their time on the next Google Page Creator or Google Web Accelerator which is received with initial hype but quickly discontinued because it doesn't see "hockey stick growth in user base".

You can already see this happening somewhat by looking at how many side projects are being shipped as part of Gmail labs. Checking out the list of Gmail labs offerings I see over 30 big and small features that have been added to Gmail as side projects from various individuals and teams at Google. It seems on the surface that a lot of Google employees are betting on tying their side projects to a huge, successful product like Gmail which isn't in danger of being cancelled instead of working on new projects or helping out smaller projects like Dodgeball and Jaiku which eventually got cancelled due to lack of interest.

This expectation that a new Google product will need massive adoption to justify its investment or be cancelled within four months, as was the case with Google Lively, will be a significant dampener new product launches. Reading Paul Buchheit's post on the early days of Gmail I wonder how much time he'd have invested in the project if he was told that Google would cancel the project if it's user base growth wasn't competitive with market leaders like Yahoo! Mail and Hotmail's within four months.

I suspect that the part of Google's DNA which spurs innovation from within is being killed. Then again when you look at Google's long list of acquisitions you realize that a lot of their most successful projects outside of search including Google Maps, Blogger and YouTube were the results of acquisitions. So maybe this culture of internal innovation was already on the way out and the current economic downturn has merely sealed its fate.

Now Playing: Metallica - Fade To Black

 

The MIX '09 conference site has announced the panel I'll be moderating at this year's conference in the post titled Opening the “Walled Garden” of Social Networks which is excerpted below

As social networking sites become more and more numerous, and consumers are looking to simplify their online lives,  providers are scrambling to define the path forward for social network aggregation.  Join us at MIX for a special guest panel on “Standards for Aggregation Activity Feeds and Social Aggregation Services”. 

Check out this killer line-up of panelists - big names and leading companies in the online and social networking space:

Dare Obasanjo (Moderator) – Microsoft

Kevin Marks – Software Engineer at Google; formerly principal engineer for Technorati; one of the founders of Microformats

Marc Canter – CEO at Broadband Mechanics; founder of Macromedia

Monica Keller – Dev Manager at MySpace; formerly Architect at SumTotal

Joseph Smarr – Chief Platform Architect at Plaxo

If you haven’t registered for MIX09 by now, what exactly are you waiting for, an invitation?  Consider it delivered.

This should be a fun panel and if you'll be at MIX and are interested in where activity streams and social network interoperability is going then you should attend.

PS: I believe John McCrea may be replacing Joseph Smarr on the panel due to scheduling issues.

Now Playing: Wu-Tang Clan - Reunited

 

This past weekend, I bought an Apple iPhone as a replacement for my AT&T Tilt which was slowly succumbing to hardware glitches. As a big fan of Windows Mobile devices and their integration with Microsoft Exchange I was wary of adopting an iPhone. I was concerned about it not having all of the features I'd gotten used to but on the other hand I was looking forward to replacing my iPod+AT&T Tilt combination with a single device.

Here are my positive and negative impressions of the device after five days

The Good

There are lots of things I like about the iPhone experience. Below are my favorite aspects of the experience thus far

• Visual Polish: The visual polish of the 1st and 3rd party applications on the iPhone is amazing. There are so many nice touches in the phone from the coverflow browsing experience when playing music to the transparent pop over windows when you receive an SMS text. The few 3rd party applications I've used have also seemed similarly polished although I've only downloaded less than ten apps. It's like using a futuristic device that you see in movies not an actual phone from real life. 

• Browsing and Purchasing Applications: As someone whose used Handango and ActiveSync to install applications on my Windows Mobile device, I have to say that experience pales in comparison to being able to browse, search, purchase and install apps directly from my phone. Having the app store integrated into iTunes actually seems superfluous.

• It's also an iPod: I used to think my iPod classic was a fantastic music playing device until I got my iPhone. Now it seems rather primitive and ugly. I shocked at how much better the music playing experience is on my iPhone and have tossed my iPod classic into our junk drawer.  Now my pockets are lighter and I got an iPod upgrade. Nice. 

• The Web browser: The browser supports multi-touch for zoom and it does AJAX. Hell, yeah.

• Autocomplete when sending emails: When sending a mail, it uses autocomplete to fill out the TO/CC/BCC line by looking in your contact list and the email addresses of people in your inbox. This is a very nice touch.

The Bad

There are also a number of features I miss from owning a Windows Mobile device which I hope are addressed in the future or I might eventually find myself switching back

• Email Search: Windows Mobile devices can search emails in your Exchange inbox by sending a query to the server. Using this functionality you aren't limited to searching the emails on your device but can search at least month of emails and get the results sent down to your phone. The iPhone has no email search functionality.

• No integration with the Global Address List: On my AT&T Tilt I often needed to send emails to co-workers whose email addresses weren't in my contact list. All I needed to do was type out their names and then I could pull up their information (email address, phone number and office location) down to my phone to either add them as a contact or insert their email address into an email. I've felt rather handicapped without this functionality.  The autocomplete feature which uses all the email addresses from your local inbox has been a slight mitigation.

• No Flash in the browser: After getting used having a Flash-capable browser on my AT&T Tilt via Skyfire it is rather irritating that I've now lost that functionality by switching to an iPhone. You don't really notice how much Flash video content there is on the Web until you start missing it. My last post was of a Flash video which is a broken link when I browse my blog from my iPhone. Lame.

• Managing meetings is awful: As a program manager at Microsoft I schedule a lot of meetings. Every once in a while I may be running late for a meeting and have to either send a mail out to the attendees telling them I'll be late or cancel the meeting. Neither of these options is available on the iPhone.

• Reply flags not set in Exchange: With a Windows Mobile phone, when you respond to a mail via the phone it is properly marked as a mail you've replied to when you view it in Outlook on the desktop. The iPhone developers remembered to track which emails you've responded to on the device but failed to propagate that information back to Exchange. For a while, I thought I was going senile because I remembered responding to mails but they weren't marked as being replied to in my inbox. After I found my replies in my Sent mail folder, I realized what was wrong. 

• Tasks: Although I've never tried Getting Things Done, I am a big fan of Outlook Tasks and often add new tasks or mark them as complete from my phone. The iPhone does not synchronize your Outlook tasks from Exchange which is a glaring oversight. For now, I've gotten around this by spending $10 on KeyTasks for the iPhone which is somewhat hacky but works. 

The Ugly

So far there have been two aspects of the user experience that have been facepalm worthy

• Ringtones: On my AT&T Tilt it was pretty straightforward to make any MP3 snippet eligible to be used as a ring tone simply by dropping it in the right folder. The iPhone requires that I pay $0.99 for a song I already own to use it as a ring tone. Seriously?

• Using your iPhone on multiple computers: I typically purchase music and burn CDs on my home computer while using my iPod as a music library at work. This functionality is disabled out of the box on the iPhone. You can only sync your iPhone to one computer which includes only being able to play music off of your iPhone on a single computer. This is pretty ridiculous given multicomputer households and people who use their iPhones at home and at work. Thankfully, the Internet is full of workarounds to this foolishness on Apple's part. 

Despite what looks like a long list of complaints this is probably the best mobile phone I've ever owned. It just isn't perfect.

Now Playing: Jay-Z - Can't Knock the Hustle

 

<a href="http://video.msn.com/?playlist=videoByUuids:uuids:533e05d2-9f12-4a86-bdda-efd0455fcd36&amp;showPlaylist=true" target="_new" title="Kylie uses Windows Live Photo Gallery">Video: Kylie uses Windows Live Photo Gallery</a>

Now Playing: Cranberries - Linger

 

There used to be a time when all you needed when building a Web site was a relational database, a web server and some sort of application server or web framework (terminology depending on whether you are enterprisey or Web 2.0) that acted as a thin layer to translate requests into database queries. As we've grown as an industry we've realized there are a lot more tools needed to build a successful large scale modern web site from messages queues for performing time consuming tasks asynchronously to high availability cloud management tools that ensure your site can keep running in the face of failure.

Leonard Lin has a [must bookmark] blog post entitled Infrastructure for Modern Web Sites where he discusses the underlying platform components you'll commonly see powering a large scale web site in today. The list is included below

I’ve split this into two sections. The first I call “below the line,” which are more system level (some things straddle the line):

• API Metering
• Backups & Snapshots
• Counters
• Cloud/Cluster Management Tools
  • Instrumentation/Monitoring (Ganglia, Nagios)
  • Failover
  • Node addition/removal and hashing
  • Autoscaling for cloud resources
• CSRF/XSS Protection
• Data Retention/Archival
• Deployment Tools
  • Multiple Devs, Staging, Prod
  • Data model upgrades
  • Rolling deployments
  • Multiple versions (selective beta)
  • Bucket Testing
  • Rollbacks
  • CDN Management
• Distributed File Storage
• Distributed Log storage, analysis
• Graphing
• HTTP Caching
• Input/Output Filtering
• Memory Caching
• Non-relational Key Stores
• Rate Limiting
• Relational Storage
• Queues
• Rate Limiting
• Real-time messaging (XMPP)
• Search
  • Ranging
  • Geo
• Sharding
• Smart Caching
  • dirty-table management

Leonard Lin's list comes from his experience working at Yahoo! but it is consistent with what I've seen at Windows Live and from comparing notes from publications on the platforms behind other large scale web services like Facebook, eBay and Google. This isn't to say you need everything on the above list to build a successful web site but there are limits to how much a service can scale or the functionality it can provide without implementing almost every item on that list.

This brings me to Google App Engine (GAE) which is billed as a way for developers to build web applications that are easy to build, maintain and scale. The problem I had with GAE when I took an initial look at its service is that although it handles some of the tough items from the above list such as the need for high availability cloud management tools, deployment tools and database sharding, it was also missing some core functionality like message queues. These oversights made it impossible to build large classes of Web applications such as search engines or email services. It also made it impossible to build asynchronous workflows in ways that improve responsiveness of the site from an end user's perspective by reducing request latency.

So it was with some interest I read Joe Gregorio's post on the Google App Engine blog entitled A roadmap update! where he updates the product's roadmap with the following announcement

The App Engine team has been plugging away and we're excited about some pretty big announcements in the near future. In the meantime, we decided to refresh our App Engine roadmap for the next six months with some of the great new APIs in our pipeline:

• Support for running scheduled tasks
• Task queues for performing background processing
• Ability to receive and process incoming email
• Support for sending and receiving XMPP (Jabber) messages

As always, keep in mind that development schedules are notoriously difficult to predict, and release dates may change as work progresses. We'll do our best to update this roadmap as our engineers continue development and keep you abreast of any changes!

The ability to send email and the ability to perform background processing tasks are key features you'd need in any modern site. I've been wanting to try out GAE as a way to keep my Python skills fresh but have balked at the lack of background tasks and message queues which artificially limits my creativity. Once these announced features are done, I may have to take back my comments about GAE being only useful to toy applications.

Maybe next time C|Net asks Is Google App Engine successful? the answer will be "Yes".  Or at least the possibility that the answer will be "Yes" will go up a few orders of magnitude since it definitely doesn't seem to be successful today.

Now Playing: Playa Fly - Feel Me