ashot

I was wondering, why are there no google ads on the swine flu search term: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=swine+flu&btnG=...

is this not a reliable way to tell if there are ads or not? or is it that not enough ads have been bought?

if the virus spreads as well in the real world as it does in the virtual one we're screwed

I think the bigwigs call this a "brand" or "voice" Twitter has an great branding: happy, fun, lighthearted, and yet still cool. And it accomplishes all that without trying too hard and remaining a neutral utility.

this sounds like something that spans the (rather wide) gap between google and aws + public data sets. I wonder how far you can go in terms of combining data/hacking on it?

For example they mention real-time financial data. So can I write something that would connect online discussion/activity to stock movements?

A platform for doing large scale, real-time data analysis in a rich descriptive language without doing any of the dirty work would be quite something.

compare to the half dozen failed attempts by microsoft and other big co's to solve this problem

this is a performance art. a relatively simple an awesome addition would be something that would record a session and replay it.

then build a simple social net/comments ratings on sessions.

the interesting thing is to look at countries that had dominant social networks already, like Germany:

http://trends.google.com/websites?q=www.studivz.net%2Cfacebo...

It looks like fb is going to be able to dominate in the long term. My guess is people have enough friends that are in different countries. At least this is true in Europe where having all people in Spain and France is valuable to Germans.

China on the other hand may not have this dynamic and could be a lost cause for facebook at this point:

http://trends.google.com/websites?q=www.xiaonei.com%2Cfacebo...

Its a nice thought, and I feel where he's coming from, but it feels like one of those rants thats a bit in denial about human nature.

this would be a great addition to public data sets, though I imagine for that to happen it would need some sort of viable plan to keep the data in sync

Please don't use "M$"

these scores are not comparable because they are missing a critical piece of the puzzle: the likelihoods of your predictions. I predict everyday for the rest of the year that the dow jones will be above 2 and below 4 million.

The right measure is to take the difference between market and pundit opinion (you know like a real market, except unlike companies these always end at 1/0 on a certain date - like a covered option) and average that.

This is their real performance.

does facebook's do the same?

Facebook beat them to it ;) Agreed, though I predict it will quickly fall to the same fate as the popup. It will go beyond a certain threshold of annoyingness and then websites, users, and browsers will block them out of existence.

ala twitter, sf geek crowd

Sorry, I hate to be that guy and keep arguing, but I'll just say google does not fit here at all because: 1. there are huge up-front costs and a lot of IP to building a competing search engine (not the case here)

2. google is a consumer company where brand and user behavior are important (not the case here).

3. most importantly, they make their money with an ad network which has network effects and where they charge enormous margins

you'll notice in all the discussions between yhoo/msft the most important thing for both companies is their ownership share of the search ad network. this is key to the bottom line and long term relevance and its why you see proposals along the lines of we'll give you a bunch of money and a guarantee of a portion of revenues in exchange for ownership of your network

The point on rising above infrastructure only applies if they begin adding some sort of ip or secret sauce. Then they can get network effects if they have people building on a platform that is not easy to replicate, but we've seen nothing like that. Hadoop is not that.

You can install hadoop on your own machine today if you want: http://hadoop.apache.org/core/docs/current/quickstart.html

I understand thats harder and thats why consumers are using them, but its not hard in the sense of competing business.

In fact most large web companies _already_ do all of this stuff internally.

they are cheaper and lower margin

thats my point, its all based on an open stack. so while innovative and important (i no longer use my regular host) its reproducible. In fact there are already several players converging on this space (slicehost et al, appengine).

Long term this business is analogous to the hosting business: low margin and commoditized. is it a market? yes. Is it a big market? no. Why? because there is no lock-in.

If you can't understand this consider the scenario where 5 or 10 years from now Amazon is providing the infrastructure for 20% of the web, taking in 20% margins above the cost to operate the data centers and making a hefty profit. What stops Microsoft or Google or any other player for that matter from getting in on the action by undercutting them in price?

If you look at any (amazon scale) money maker online there is some sort of lock-in involved which is central to their business. Most often its a network effect of some kind. Go ahead, go down the list of the top 10 web companies and take a look yourself.

Just because something is technologically cool does not mean its going to make enough money to be significant to amazon's bottom line.

Also don't insult people if you can't grasp what they are saying.

how much of that stack is proprietary?

dna analysis is a niche, this is a service which by its nature is very easy to commoditize. To be useful it has to be invisible, and to be invisible it must have zero switch cost

I don't agree. Though I think its great and technologically the next step forward this will never be a high margin business and will quickly turn into a race to the bottom as the switching costs are zero.

short dell, appl, hp?

I'm not a ruby dev, but could you be more specific? Assuming you are refering to syntax, not speed: how is it good for prototyping but not "data-intensive tasks"

virtual currency

agreed, this is not a good metaphor

if it is a "bad trade" then the salary levels are wrong by definition

"relational databases are really good solutions to problems we don't have"

That maybe true (Capistrano which you reference was pulled out of 37 signals) but I think my general criticism still stands (+ standardization in and of itself has benefits in that it helps people help each other).

The rails community from the beginning has had a more holitstic view of the problem it is solving.

The third tab on the rails site is about deployment. There are three performance monitoring companies and 6 different rails specific hosts.

Other examples: db schema evolution (migrations) and rake tasks. There is also a litany of useful maintance tools you can find on github.

This is not just in reference to code either, its everything else too, including documentation.

I like django, I prefer django, but in this one critical area, the last mile, rails does better. And its frustrating because its not a hard problem.

I went there, its true

It seems django would benefit by brining some of this "in-house", either officially or through blessed third-party tools in the same way that rails does.

If deployment and testing is something that everyone has to do in a very similar way should it not be a problem that is solved by the framework the same way that sessions are?

so like an email?