Google Application Engine vs Facebook f8
April 13th, 2008 by David Stone. 3 Comments »A quick search around the web and you’d think Google’s Application Engine announcement was Google taking aim at Amazon’s Web Services. While there maybe some cross-over, for the most part I don’t believe Google is taking aim at Amazon, but Facebook’s f8. I’d also like to point out that amongst all the news everyone seemed to forget about Microsoft’s SSDS, while not an application engine yet is a large part of the offering. Also missing are the startups, e.g. Zoho creator.
So, from the top…
Your phone is your social network.
If you don’t believe this in my opinion you’re mad, bonkers, a fruit cake. I carry my social network, my contacts, my friends in my pocket. I have access to them via voice, text/sms, and email from my iPhone. I had the same access on my Nokia N73 before that. Blackberrys do it, Skype does it, everyone does it. I’ll assume you do as well.
Enter Jaiku. For those that don’t know, Jaiku was acquired by Google on October 9th 2007, many people talk about Jaiku as a competitor to Twitter, Joi Ito described it as a ‘bunch of Helsinki mobile jocks getting into the Web 2.0 of it all whereas Twitter is the Web 2.0 crowd “getting” co-presence.’. The Jaiku vs Twitter discussion is for another time, but of relevance here is Jaiku’s J2ME client. Even while it was a battery sucking beast it proved it’s worth, it linked the online-ness of Jaiku into you phone contacts, synchronized and kept you updated.
p.s. this thinking makes all the ‘Sign into your Gmail/Facebook/Twitter to get contacts’ some what redundant, but we’ll wait for everyone to catch up. (oh, if you’re a J2ME guy/gal with time and are interested in that, ring me…)
The mobile platform, Android.
If the phone is your social network, what are companies doing? Well, the long and short of it is, not much. Sure, Facebook has possibly the best iPhone application in the market, and a mobile friendly version, however it’s not enough (and if you know of a mobile social network with traction please let me know). Contacts integration? Application platform? Oh, wait, yes, Android. I’ve not looked at Android, but I’m pretty sure it’ll allow contacts integration. Jaiku is moving to Google Application Engine, what about the mobile application? It’d make perfect sense to move it to Android as well.
… a summary in my theory so far…
- Contacts, integration of the new[er] thinking of ‘your phone is your social network’ with the worlds current thinking of ‘your mail client is your social network’. CHECK
- Data portability, see Contacts Data API. CHECK
- Mobile application platform, Android. CHECK
- Web application platform, Google Application Engine. CHECK
- Mobile & Web application platforms that are open as a platform and ecosystem, while solving a number of issues for entrepreneurs making adoption an easy process. CHECK
- A great demo application to show it all off, Jaiku. CHECK
Voila, an open application platform with more features than Facebook and I believe Google has more users then Facebook. I’ve not touched on OpenSocial, however isn’t this just Google taking a step back from OpenSocial and aiming for the bigger picture? e.g. Google Application Engine powers OpenSocial applications, that distribute onto all social networks.
p.s. no disrespect to Jyri Engeström and the Jaiku folks, Jaiku’s much, much more then a demo application.
The knowledge worker
Knowledge worker, a term coined by writer Peter Drucker in the late 50’s and related thinking summarized basically is: hire the top-notch, smartest, most efficient people you can find… put them together, and let rip. Good things will come.
I am a believer of the knowledge worker model and to quote my own Twitter, “API’s basically allow for the Knowledge Worker pattern to exist outside your business, while on-topic to your business”, so what does that mean for Google? They’re in the business of among other things, web applications, they’re opening their internals to the world via API allowing the world to build on-topic applications to their business (changing their famous 70/20/10 to 70/20/10/100). The proof in that is the launch of OpenID provider, built on Google Application Engine, in under 24 hours development.
Leaving notes
Many questions are unanswered, at least from an outsiders point of view. I’m sure I’ll post observations as and when, probably on Twitter. But, for now I’ll be thinking about:
- What does this mean for us? Among other things, that the first Google acquisition that runs on their Application Engine will be a notable event.
- How will Google Application Engine and Android integrate? Will they?
- Google Gears is mobile, no talk about integration yet. Maybe a Google Gears SQLite to GQL synchronization?
- Google Checkout integration. It’ll happen, follow the money…
- The google.appengine.api.urlfetch inside Application Engine fetchs URL’s, a long shot, but they could pump those straight into their Googlebot. Another way to boost their main business?
- Yahoo is embracing the Semantic Web, is this an attack on Yahoo? They’ll be a lot of semantic data in GQL. Mix that with Google Base.
- How’s users data ownership/privacy going to work across the board on this?
Please leave me your thoughts.
