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Links for Wed 7 May 2008

Posted on May 8th, 2008 / 1 Comment »
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Payment Systems As A Strategic Advantage

Posted on May 7th, 2008 / No Comments »
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A couple of days after suggesting that Sun should offer cloud services they announced that they would be supporting Amazon EC2 by having it run Sun’s OpenSolaris and offer MySQL support for instances running on top of EC2. Nice, but not any where near what I’m hoping for. So I started looking at the other side of the coin, what things are keeping Sun from being able to offer pay as you go consumer services? One thing quickly came to mind: dealing with many payment transactions, often for small amounts.

The beauty of pay as you go cloud services is that you pay for what you use. If you only use a small amount, you only pay a small amount. My S3 bill each month rarely goes over $5, because I only use it in small amounts. Amazon charges my credit card and sends me an email with the details. But for most companies doing lots of credit card transactions for small amounts simply isn’t worth it. The fees associated with credit card transactions add up fast when dealing with such small transactions. At least for most companies.

Amazon has been doing large volumes of credit card transactions for a number of years, I’d be very surprised if they don’t have some custom fee structure for processing them. When you do the volume of transactions that a company like Amazon does, that gives you a little more leverage. So part of what has allowed Amazon to grow into the pay as go cloud services market is the fact that they already had a large payment system in place that allows them to process even fairly small transactions efficiently.

This gives Google Checkout an even more important role than just being a competitor to PayPal. With AdWords and AdSense already going, Google already has plenty of reason to want the same sort of leverage Amazon has for processing payments. With Google App Engine expected to have a similar pay as go structure as AWS, there will be even more focus on processing small amounts without taking a big hit on fees.

Now back to Sun. As far as I know Sun has nothing that even comes close to Amazon’s volume of transactions or Google’s small fee services. So they’ve had no reason to build up an efficient payment system that can handle small amounts. This leaves them with two choices, build one to try and gain the needed leverage to reduce the fees involved, or partner with someone else who already has. So far they’ve gone with the later, specifically Amazon and their EC2 service.

One way around the small transaction amount problem is to have customers pay in advance. Sun could still offer pay as you go services, but you have pay for them upfront in $100 increments. Each month your usage fee would be deducted from the amount you already paid them. If I only used $10 this month, I’d still have $90 left in my account. This isn’t nearly as attractive from the small customer side as simply paying $10 per month from their credit card, but not horrendous either, especially if you could get the minimum pay in advance amount down to something under $50.

I’d really like to see more competition in the cloud services space, but so far Amazon has it pretty much all to itself (which a small niche potentially going to Google App Engine). And unless companies like Sun can find ways to process small payments efficiently we might not be seeing any for a long time to come.

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What’s TechCrunch?

Posted on May 2nd, 2008 / No Comments »
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You may have heard about Flickr launching their new video feature last month. The real gem though is the video they did to announce it:

I don’t know why, but the ending still makes me laugh :-)

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WordPress.com - 3 Million Blogs

Posted on April 29th, 2008 / No Comments »
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WordPress.com 3 Million Blogs

WordPress.com has passed 3 million blogs. Here are the current sign up rates, any guesses for when we’ll hit 4 million?

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Sun Should Be in the Consumer Cloud Services Business

Posted on April 28th, 2008 / 2 Comments »
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When Google App Engine was announced one of the features that was heavily pushed was it’s ability to scale. Combined with Amazon’s AWS products, I’ve been thinking about other companies who could/should be in the cloud services business. There’s the obvious ones that everyone talks about like Microsoft and Yahoo, but then another name came to mind: Sun.

What service should Sun offer to the world? I’ll give you a hint, they recently spent $1 billion dollars acquiring the company behind the product. Yep, none other than MySQL.

Love it or hate it, MySQL is widely used by many companies and individuals. What I’d like to see from Sun is a MySQL cloud service that works just like your current MySQL server(s), only better. It should scale such that I don’t have to worry about performance and replicate data sufficiently that I’ll always have access to my data. There’s no need for a new API, since MySQL already supports network connectivity.

With MySQL already in such wide spread use, the benefits would be easy to see. For instance, I could use such a service to power my WordPress blog with only a few changes to my wp-config.php file. Effectively requiring zero code changes.

Pricing wise I’d expect something similar to EC2 or S3, a general pay as you go schedule. Perhaps even with a very low use free option, just enough for people to get hooked. But if I were Jonathan Schwartz I wouldn’t stop there.

As nice as it is to have an easy to use pay as you go web service, there are many companies that would like the performance, scalability and reliability of such a service but don’t want to send all their data to Sun. Enter Sun’s Modular Datacenter, a.k.a. data center in a box. Okay, a very big box, but a box none the less. Take all the lessons they learn making the MySQL cloud service work and put them in the data center box and sell it.

This would also appeal to hosting companies, who could then offer the same sort of service to the users. Imagine some place like The Planet having a few of these in their data centers. They’d get the benefits of the cloud service without having to haul all that traffic over their Internet connections.

In my ideal world this wouldn’t be limited to MySQL. I’d love to see this same sort of thing for PostgreSQL, since Sun has also been pushing PostgreSQL for Solaris as well. Sadly I’m not holding my breath on that one. With PostgreSQL being a much more community based project, there’s nothing to stop some other company from providing this service.

Perhaps Sun should have changed their stock ticker to MYSQ instead of JAVA.

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Twitter Updates for 2008-04-27

Posted on April 27th, 2008 / No Comments »
  • @john_lam there really wasn’t much, the presenter spent all most the whole time telling everyone that they were doing it wrong #

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Twitter Updates for 2008-04-26

Posted on April 26th, 2008 / No Comments »
  • At Utah Code Camp, say hi if you are around! #
  • @libel_vox Turn out for code camp seems pretty code. I think probably more people here than for podcampslc. #
  • @libel_vox I believe that it is wordpress.com only for now. #
  • in project management using Scrum session *p #
  • this ironruby talk seems to be just this guys view on what programming should be, ignoring everything else #

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Google Docs Spam

Posted on April 21st, 2008 / 1 Comment »
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One of the neat things about Google Docs is the ability to share the document with others. You can do this with anyone just by knowing their email address. Google will then send an email out that looks something like:

I’ve shared a document with you called “Spam sharing test”:
http://docs.google.com/a/example.com/Doc?id=xxxxxxxxxxxxxx&invite=

It’s not an attachment — it’s stored online at Google Docs. To open this document, just click the link above.
—

Shared this doc with you.

Which is a really handy way to collaborate with others on a document. And it seems the spammers have discovered this as well.

I’ve recently started seeing emails for documents that I’ve been invited to, which turn out to be just a bunch of spam. They’ve taken Google Docs and are using it in an attempt to mask their spam from email filters, by providing link to a service you might normally trust. I suspect that Gmail is unlikely to mark any doc invites as spam.

Currently this seems to be pretty limited, the spammers have to paste in the email addresses into an invite box. Google could do some basic things to prevent spammy looking invites from going out (do you really mean to invite 3.78 million people to share your document?). I’m not aware of a Google Docs API that allows you to script doc invites, but if there is one (or if they come out with one later) then you can bet the spammers will make use of that as well.

This will turn into another wack-a-mole situation, where Google will (hopefully) revoke accounts and API keys for users who are sending out spam in this way. Then the spammer will just start using another one of the 324,834 accounts that they’ve already created at Google until it gets blocked too. Rinse, lather and repeat.

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Four Years of WordPress, One Year at Automattic

Posted on April 15th, 2008 / 10 Comments »
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On April 16, 2007 I started working at Automattic, amazing how fast the last year has gone by. As I started gathering up details for what I’ve been doing this past year, I found that in April 2004 was when I started using WordPress to power this blog.

Four Years of WordPress

My first post on this blog was from April 30, 2004, using a beta of WordPress 1.2. First though, a little history.

In mid-2003 I figured it was time for me to get in on this “weblog” thing. Although I’d had various sites on the web since 1995, there was something about the order and structure of a blog that appealed to me. Like many others during this time I took a look at MovableType as one option to power my blog, since all the cool kids were using it (like Jeremy Zawodny, one of the blogs I’d been reading regularly). That didn’t last very long. I went on to try every piece of blog software that I could find, none of them really worked the way that I’d hoped they would.

Feeling that all the available options out there weren’t going to cut it, I started writing my own (another thing that seemly everyone else was doing at the time). I quickly got it up to the point where publicly it was good enough. I used that for months, while continuing to look at other options.

Fast forward to March/April 2004 where I finally found WordPress. It was being actively developed and was easily the best out of all the other options that I tried. And I had installed pretty much everything out there.

Since then I’ve published more than 1,000 posts with over 1,500 comments. I started using Akismet, which has blocked more that 500,000 pieces of spam.

One Year at Automattic

It is amazing that a whole year has gone by since my Friday the 13th post. Fortunately though it’s pretty easy to sum up. This job is freaking awesome!

The people at Automattic are amazing. At one point I had met everyone in the company, which is saying something since we are scattered all across the globe. Since then more people have come aboard, and I look forward to meeting them face to face latter this year.

Before joining Automattic full time in April 2007, I had been doing contract work starting back in January 2007. The result of that work was the new wp.* XML-RPC methods. For the most part I really enjoy working on XML-RPC, though some of the specific APIs that are built on top of it are a bit quirky.

Working on WordPress.com has been absolutely fascinating. The scale and growth are pretty impressive. Check out some of the stats and you’ll see what I’m talking about. We are fast approaching 3 million blogs. Not bad considering we hit 2 million in December 2007, some 4 months ago.

The Future

There are so many ways in which WordPress still has amazing amount of potential. In the social network sphere we are seeing things like BuddyPress and Diso. From the WordPress as a platform department there’s Prologue (which reminds me, I need to get a new version out the door, keep an eye on prologuetheme.org) and WP Contact Manager. Even good old XML-RPC will continue to see improvement as time goes on.

The next year will bring a few more releases of WordPress. What’s really exciting though is seeing how people will continue to take WordPress to new and different places.

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Search WordPress.com

Posted on April 14th, 2008 / No Comments »
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WordPress.com has a new search feature. Now you can comb through all the posts and pages on blogs hosted at WordPress.com.

http://en.search.wordpress.com/

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Twitter Updates for 2008-04-09

Posted on April 9th, 2008 / No Comments »

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Reminder About WordCamp Utah Planning

Posted on April 9th, 2008 / 1 Comment »
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Quick reminder that we’ll be meeting Thursday (tomorrow) night to start plans for a WordCamp in Utah. If you are interested in helping out and making this happen then now is the time to step up. Details for Thursday night’s meeting are on the Upcoming event page.

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Google App Engine

Posted on April 8th, 2008 / 6 Comments »
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Today’s big news was the announcement of Google App Engine. Plenty of people have been covering the details, I just wanted to leave a few thoughts:

This looks like an amazing service. Being able to make use of Google infrastructure for your web app is a wonderful idea. Currently limited to Python, so all the Python fans are going nuts.

What Google App Engine (GAE) isn’t is a direct competitor to Amazon’s web services (EC2, S3, etc). What Amazon provides are virtualized services, what GAE provides is a specific platform. While that platform is pretty amazing, it is also complete and total vendor lock in. If you needed to move your application off of GAE, how would you do it? This might give pause to those interested in buying your startup.

There’s an SDK for starting your app before going live, but no way to migrate data from your test system to the live server. I imagine as people begin to use this new platform they’ll find other issues as well. That isn’t to say that GAE isn’t worth while, just that it isn’t a miracle cure.

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Twitter Updates for 2008-04-03

Posted on April 3rd, 2008 / No Comments »

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Get Involved With WordCamp Utah!

Posted on April 3rd, 2008 / 5 Comments »
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Recently I’ve been talking with a few people about the idea of a WordCamp ( WordPress conference ) in the Salt Lake City, Utah area. This isn’t something that one person can do alone though, so I’m putting out the call for help and feed back. If you are interested in helping make this happen we’ll be getting together for a planning meeting:

Applebee's in Draper
105 E 12300 S
Draper, Utah 84020

Thursday 10 April 2008 @ 6:30pm

Upcoming Event Page

One of the reasons we chose that Applebee’s location is because they have free WiFi, so feel free to bring your laptops.

In addition to people helping, I want to hear from Utah WordPress users about what they’d like to see in a WordCamp. Any thoughts on potential locations (in the greater SLC area), sponsors, topics and speakers? If you are interested in presenting let me know. And if you are interested in sponsoring WordCamp Utah, then I really, really want you to contact me :-)

First order of business is to lock in a date and location, so that everyone can make plans.

Also, a big thanks to Thom Allen for being willing to get involved and push me to get moving on this.

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