Status

So, while I was in Vancouver for the Olympics last week, I didn't pick up too many souvenirs... I noticed that stuff wasn't exactly flying off the shelves, and figured I might wait a week and get much better deals. Surplus stocks of hats, t-shirts, and maple syrup are no doubt going to be hitting the market at much reduced prices after the hordes of tourists leave town. Anyway, this being my plan, I thought idly as I watched the Closing Ceremonies tonight that I would drop by the official store and see if the discounting had yet begun. Instead, I saw the message at left, and thought, "Wow, that was some tremendously poor timing."

But then I checked back a while later and saw this instead:


Server meltdown! Apparently, I wasn't the only one with that bright idea. Looks like the market may show a greater demand after the Games are over than while they were ongoing. The bad timing was mine!

http://www.directionsonmicrosoft.com/samples/49-samples/912-five-essential-resources-for-microsoft-licensing.html

From Directions on Microsoft, a list of five important resources for deciphering and appropriately setting up your Microsoft licensing.

So most people have probably at least heard of Twitter, the micro-blogging site that started the trend of putting out short, quick updates on where you are or what you are doing or thinking about at any particular time. But unless you are a geeky sort of person, you probably haven't yet heard about Google's recently released answer to Twitter, Buzz.

Buzz is actually a part of Gmail, the company's free e-mail service, so if you have a Gmail account, you already are automatically in Buzz. It shows up as an icon on the left menu panel near the inbox. It works pretty much exactly like Twitter; you just have a box, where you type in whatever you want (although Buzz doesn't have the sometimes annoying 140 character limit that Twitter is either saddled with or blessed by, depending on who you ask) and click post and it puts it out there. You can also make posts public or private, restricting it to just your allowed Gmail contacts, or showing them to everyone.

Why does anyone need another micro-blogging service? Well, you might not. But Buzz has snared me in a way that Twitter never managed to. A lot of features that Twitter either should have or could benefit from are already in Buzz. With Twitter, you can get those things, but either only through third-party services, through some geeky hacking, or by waiting a long time for Twitter itself to slowly add them, frequently messing them up in the process. Buzz gets a lot of this stuff out of the box because it is so tightly tied with other products and services Google already offers.

You can comment on or "like" posts from others, which provides a more complete conversational tool than Twitter's homegrown @ or # adaptations. It's similar to Google Reader in that way, and in fact broadcasts items you share from Reader when you share them. You can go back and edit posts, or choose to e-mail them to others who don't have or use Buzz.

One of the neat things is that public posts can be viewed by location. So, I can choose to see updates from my contacts most of the time, but other times, such as when we are up here at a big event like the Olympics, I can switch to see what people nearby are buzzing about... and find out what fun stuff is happening nearby. A killer part of this feature is that it also integrates with Google Maps; so I can pull up a map that shows me exactly where people were when they made those posts. If I want, I can have it give me directions (by car, public transit, or on foot) right to that location.

You can also embed a picture in a Buzz post, or, Google's Picasa photo-sharing service automatically adds your recently posted pictures to the service.

Or, if you like, you can also set it up to add your activities from other popular sites like Flickr, Youtube, or Blogger (where this blog lives) automatically. Another site you can add to automatically update Buzz: Twitter.

I've always thought that is a great way to eat another company's lunch, and what it means is that it's easy for Tweeters to make the transition. With all the other features available, the personalization seems to me to be much more amenable to the sorts of friendly conversations that this sort of social networking tool should be about. In some ways, it's more like a Facebook feed in that way, but even more flexible.

But I don't actually believe the two services are in competition. Twitter has evolved, at least in terms of utility, into more of a marketing and informational site. It's public and web-based nature is a great way for companies to disseminate information and gain adherents to their message and products. Mechanisms the company has put in place to confirm identities and monetize the information stream are well-suited to corporate use. Genuinely useful social networking features make little difference to that sort of use.

Buzz, on the other hand, provides most of those features, and does so in a thoughtful, understated way that simply pulls people further into the Google Universe. I'm sure that many Twitter devotees will refuse to make the move, but it's worth noting that in terms of penetration, Twitter still has very little reach and the market for this sort of tool is wide open (although it's also worth pointing out that Gmail itself still has relatively small mass compared to other web-based mail services). I expect to see companies continue to adopt and use Twitter as part of their marketing and customer service strategy, but I think Buzz may be the place people end up if they are genuinely interested in keeping up with friends and associates and even just people nearby.

"But almost all commercial hosting environments are scalable," you say, scratching your head at the premise. "If you don't like the shared server plan, go to a VPS, or get your own box!"

Of course, that's the answer we've become accustomed to in the hosting realm, and of course, that is a certain sort of scalability, but it's not the sort I am talking about. What I am looking for may in fact belong in the realm of fantasy, but on an Internet where I can give an online pedicure, by god, anything should be possible.

What I am talking about is service scaling rather than capacity scaling. Capacity is what you get when you move from GoDaddy's shared hosting to one of their dedicated servers. But you still deal with the same old crappy GoDaddy service at either end of the scale, no matter what you are paying. At some point in your evolution of requirements, it's not so much the capacity that matters, but the service.

I am probably giving GoDaddy too little credit in the customer service department; they have always been cordial when I have taken a problem to them, but with their volume of business and their low prices, it seems that the first reaction in any situation is: "It's your fault, and because it's your fault, we're not going to help you with it. You're not paying us enough to do that!" But that's the thing; they won't let you pay them for better service. It's just not available. So, whether you are some punk with a shared server that gets three hits a year or a business with a host of dedicated servers pushing serious traffic (and that gap is more narrow these days than it may seem) you still have to fight with the first-line "just say no" brigade to get to a second-level response where someone might actually provide you an answer to your question. That's just a waste of time for the customer.

(EDIT: It's been brought to my attention that GoDaddy does, in fact, offer a premium tier support package, their Assisted Service Plan. I don't immediately see what the pricing is on that or what the scalability might be, but it's a step in the direction I am talking about, at least.)

"But if you want good service," you say, "go to Rackspace! They are fanatical about service!"

Yes, they are; even says so in their slogan. And as you might expect, you pay a premium for that service. But, in the opposite of GoDaddy's problem, you can't not pay that premium.

Switching providers or hosting techniques as you expand is the accepted method for growth among website owners now, but it strikes me as being less than optimal. It detracts from business focus, takes away development and operations resources from improving the site itself, and is ghastly inefficient.

What would be better for the consumer would be a company that offers the full spectrum of capacity and service, from the entry-level shared instance with minimal support, to full cloud scale with dedicated support. The new, accepted model of the Internet startup, after all, is the small one or two person concept site that blows up into the next Facebook or Twitter... but no hosting provider out there today is oriented toward fostering and subsequently benefitting from the growth of such sites.

This isn't exactly the cloud concept, but it is a concept that many cloud service providers certainly could adopt. After all, the great promise of cloud computing, or utility computing as Nicholas Carr describes it, a more useful term conceptually, is that it will eventually commoditize the power and storage of these vast server farms. Today, early in the cycle, there is novelty, wonder, and the impression that first-movers like Amazon are minting money, but the business model itself is oriented toward driving profits down by providing computing cycles for the least cost. Differentiation in such environments is made by service.

So far, service doesn't seem to be doing much differentiation. Amazon is cordially amenable to developers and users, and their services are tiered to some extent, but they are all high-end services. There is no entry level at the level of the non- or minimally-technical user. As of yet, I'm not aware of anyone fronting their service with a more structured hosting product line (although, who does Squarespace use on the back-end? My impression is that it is their own product but if it's not, then they are already doing something of what I suggest), but it might be an interesting exercise if the math could be made to compare with the like of 1and1 or GoDaddy.