Changing Way

Mashable Kristen seems positively giddy over the news.

Even before Google acquired Feedburner last year, integration of Google ads into Feedburner feeds was an exploratory wonderment that many wanted to blossom into fruition.

I see ads as weeds rather than flowers. I won’t be planting any in my feeds. If I were the polling type, I would ask: what’s more annoying, a partial feed, or a feed with ads?

Here’s what Salesforce announced today.

With Salesforce for Google Apps, you can now run your favorite desktop applications and your Salesforce applications side by side by accessing Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Talk, and Google Docs all seamlessly from within Salesforce.

Erick at TechCrunch has more details. To quote Erick, “Google is in effect becoming Salesforce’s productivity suite.” To quote him quoting Salesforce founder and CEO Marc Benioff:

Certainly the enemy of my enemy is my friend, which makes Google my best friend. I have spoken with a lot of customers who want to get off of Microsoft Word.

It looks to me as though this alliance makes more sense than would an acquisition. I admit that I’m looking from a literal distance of several thousand miles, and that I don’t have any insider knowledge. But acquisitions can be expensive, in terms of time, attention, and morale as much as money. Just ask Microsoft and Yahoo.

A few days ago, many of us posted about Google App Engine. Most of us made some sort of comparison between GAE and AWS (Amazon Web Services.) I remarked that I didn’t understand why GAE seemed to arouse much more concern about lockin than did AWS.

Dion Hinchcliffe compares the two “Plafform as a Service” offerings, concluding that:

The decision for many startups will be an easy one; the benefits of using these platforms for their new products are compelling across the board despite minor concerns about platform lock-in even though the models used by both companies are actually surprisingly lock-in free.

So maybe the perception that GAE poses significantly greater lockin risk than does AWS is a perception about the difference between Google and Amazon, rather than a reflection of technical differences between the two platform as a service offerings. It’s a feeling that one should be wary about being locked in by the “don’t be evil” company.

Yes, this is another post about Google App Engine, which you either don’t care about, or have already read about. Actually, it’s more about how such things are reported on the web, using two prominent blogs/publications as examples.

My favorite account of AppEngine so far is the account of building and launching an app provided by Henry at TechCrunch. I sometimes weary of reading account of web services obviously written by people who haven’t actually used the service. To provide the one-sentence summary: Henry was impressed with the speed with which he and Mark McGranaghan could get the app going.

Turning now to ReadWriteWeb and to Marshall Kirkpatrick, I was struck by the concern about lock-in.

It’s very, very important that there be no barriers to leaving App Engine and that the service retains customers based on price and superior service. Anything else, any lock-in, will drive a stake through the heart of innovation.

The concern is striking, not in itself, but in contrast with the comparative lack of such concern about Amazon’s competing offerings when they were launched. In fact, I don’t know anyone who expressed concern about getting locked in to Amazon Web Services besides me.

That’s one of the most interesting aspects of Google App Engine: the competition with Amazon Web Services. It promises to drive the cost and time of building and deploying web applications yet further down.

Almost a year ago, Google released Gears, a browser plugin to enable web applications to work even without internet access. Many of us thought at the time that it was a big deal.

Some of us are still waiting for our Google Docs to get geared up. Google started rolling out Gears for Docs a week ago, but it hasn’t rolled as far as me yet.

Harry McCracken has a good post at PC World about the (so far) Unfulfilled Promise of Google Gears.

The fact that Google itself hasn’t done that much with Gears-enabled applications yet–at least in any form that it’s willing to make public–is probably the best evidence that doing great stuff with Gears is far from a cakewalk… Google is clearly pretty serious about Google Docs (and Google Apps, which rolls in Gmail and other applications). And full-fledged offline functionality would be such a major step forward for Docs and Apps that you gotta think that Google will make it happen if it can.

As for Web developers other than Google, I’m not sure whether they’re struggling with Gears, or whether there’s simply less interest in offline apps than I hoped and guessed there would be.

I hope that the gearing-up of Google Docs will be a turning point (or tipping point, for the trendier among you) for Google Gears. I also hope to be able to try it out soon, and that it works better for me than Google Reader did.

You can build your own vertical search engine using Topicle. Topicle is a platform for vertical search engines, rather as Ning is a platform for social networks and BricaBox is a platform for social content.

That’s about as exciting as I can make Topicle sound. It’s less of a platform than a veneer on top of the Google Custom Search platform. I set up a Custom Search engine about a year and a half ago. There’s a link to said engine in the sidebar of this blog, since it provides Directions Along the Changing Ways: it enables search of, not just this blog, but the whole happy Changing Way family of sites.

I did create a search engine for Boston at Topicle. I remain underwhelmed. It’s essentially a list of site URIs. Note that you (yes you) can edit the list.

The most interesting part of the exercise came when I tried to make the engine understand the Boston-ness of this blog. Posts I put in the Boston category should be searched. Posts I put in other categories (e.g., WordPress) should not be searched by the Boston engine.

So I included the Boston category by specifying the URI http://changingway.org/category/boston/. Although Topicle/Google accepted the URI, it doesn’t appear to do the corresponding search. I got similar results, or lack of results, when I included the feed for the Boston category.

I know that eclectic blogs like this one present problems for vertical search, but I think it’s a problem that vertical search engines need to solve. Lest you think that this blog is alone in its eclecticism, I give you the example of Fred Wilson.

There’s more enthusiastic coverage of Topicle at RWW and at Mashable. It notes that “former Google Product Manager Steffen Mueller” is behind Topicle.

So I set up a site on PTO (Putting Things Off), mainly so I could try out Google Sites. As Glyn points out, Sites:

• is to some extent a repackaging of JotSpot, the wiki outift that Google acquired over a year ago.
• isn’t packaged as a wiki, but as “a kind of super-duper easy-peasy Web site creation tool that even idiots like us can use.”
• thus is rather similar to Google Pages.

In fact, an idiot like me could find himself using Google Pages when setting up his site, even though he meant to use Google Sites. It’s not the first time that I have found “easy-peasy” software rather confusing, and I suspect it won’t be the last.

For those of us hosted at WordPress.com, there are multiple ways to include music in a post. the simplest is to point the WordPress audio player at an MP3 file.

This raises the question of where to stash the MP3 files. In a recent support forum thread, DZonson suggested the use of Google Pages. You use Google Page Creator to set up a site, upload the MP3s, put them on a page, publish the page, and you can then use the WordPress MP3 player at the MP3s.

You can take one more step in order to make such GPC pages available as playlists. You can edit each page’s html to add a line of javascript invoking the Yahoo Media Player. I like this simple, lightweight player, and I like the way it turns a storage bin for MP3s into a page that can be made interesting in its own right.

I should note that GPC is part of Google labs, which is a place for projects “that aren’t quite ready for prime time.” GPC imposes space limits, currently 10MB on a file and 100MB on a site (but you can have multiple sites).

I should also note that Yahoo Media Player can’t be used directly at WordPress.com itself, since it is javascript. I wish it could be made available, in much the same way as services such as Sonific are available.

Just a few comments on goings-on at the web BigCos in the last week.

• Microsoft and Yahoo obviously top the bill. I still think that Microhoo will happen. As Mashable Adam put it, there simply does not appear to be another way for Yahoo to create as much value for shareholders as by simply accepting Microsoft’s bid. That most of the board is tellng Jerry Yang the same thing makes the deal more likely.
• Amazon’s S3 outage, as Om remarked, shows that a lot of work needs to be done before we can completely rely on the cloud. It’s more of a reflection on the cloud in general than on S3 in particular: Amazon knows uptime as well as pretty much anyone.
• Google has started testing video ads on some search pages. When I first read this (at NYT BITS) I thought it was a terrible move. But I can see the logic of Marissa Mayer’s explanation. “Now that Google’s main search results pages include more images, video links and other elements, it is more appropriate… to have corresponding advertising formats.”

This morning the OpenID Foundation announced that Google, IBM, Microsoft, VeriSign, and Yahoo! have joined the board. This is good news, since OpenID is good.

However, there are limits to the goodness of the news. As Michael Arrington points out:

OpenID looks like it’s going to be a winner, so big companies making their user accounts OpenID compatible is a good hedge. Everyone, of course, wants to be an ID issuer, since they get to “own” the user. Less attractive is allowing users from other sites to log into your services, so don’t expect that functionality to come for some time.