Here Comes… Google.
So I am thoroughly enjoying reading Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky, but at the same time I think this review by Tom Slee sums up the negatives of the book really well. The book is full of great insights, but some of the conclusions it seems to draw strike me as very optimistic or naive.
Meanwhile Google unveiled its Google App Engine service earlier this week. So far I’ve just done the tutorial and uploaded the “Hello World” app. I love the dashboard for the applications. Obviously I’d love to see Ruby support baked in, and if I had more time I certainly wouldn’t mind doing some Python hacking. It would be fun to throw up some situated software on that infrastructure, but clearly I wouldn’t think of putting anything of potential Business Value on it. It will be interesting to see how this drives the development of Heroku and other competing services.
The whole hoo-ha about the Campfire clone (that was subsequently pulled down) has been a big PR disaster for the “Don’t be Evil” PR Masters. Damned for releasing a blatant clone of an existing product and damned again for pulling it down.
And in a week that seemed to have had a lot of Web Application Hosting news, some interesting news about Rails deployments. Could Passenger finally make Rails deployments as easy as PHP? Here’s hoping.