blog.stacktrace.com

(This post is a work in progress and probably contains mistyping and perhaps factual errors.)

My brief take:

• GWT is awesome.  With the new version, the Javascript generated from your Java code will almost universally be better or at least as good as the Javascript you would write.  You also get incredible leverage you get toward targetting different platforms (including iPhone and Android,) and the productivity and satisfaction boost of using advanced development tools that give you refactoring, autocomplete, and no spelling mistakes - features only possible with strongly typed languages like Java.  Lombardi demonstrated a sophisticated process diagram application that they developed 3 times on different platforms (Flash, Dojo, and finally GWT.)  Their experienced conclusion was that you lose nothing by using GWT.  GWT doesn’t really hide anything from you - it just gives you Java and gives you the leverage of virtualizing your Javascript.
• AppEngine is a great platform, especially for startups since it’s free up to 5 million page views per month.  Here are a few bullets.
  • Learning the AppEngine datastore concepts (e.g. “entity groups”) might be tough for many people, and you need to follow some distributed programing techniques, unfamiliar to most web developers, to build scalable applications.
  • Python is back!  AppEngine is Python only for the forseeable future, so Django - an excellent web framework - is the likely platform for traditional web applications.
  • Serious limitations in the current version:
    • No full text search.  There are some hacks to get close right now, but it’s no Google.  This features is likely to be added.
    • No long running processes.  Your requests are limited to 5 seconds and a smidgen of CPU.
    • No data import or export.  You will need to do everything through requests.
    • No outgoing requests.  You can’t open a socket, but there is supposedly a curl library.
    • 500Gb of storage.  This only should be a limitation for a very few people.  If you have media files, store them on S3.  If you’ve got that much user data, maybe you should work on making money instead of porting your app.
    • No way to exceed the 5 million page quota, although estimated pricing for future versions was revealed at around 10-12 cents per CPU hour.
• Android is pretty darn cool.  I didn’t spend much time at these presentations, but the demos had some features that put the iPhone to shame.  I loved the pull down status bar.  Touch and pull down and the status bar shows expands to detailed interactive versions of your notifications.
• New APIs for YouTube, a Google Earth browser plugin, and a number of other presentations were compelling, but were not in my area of interest.

Regardless of your opinion of the ethics involved in either party’s conduct, craigslist’s case against Ebay seems to be based entirely on the fact that they feel betrayed.  There is no doubt in my mind that Ebay behaved poorly and manipulatively gained the trust of Craig Newmark and Jim Buckmaster and has been trying to stab them in the back ever since.  However that does not mean that Ebay will lose any rights they may have to acquire more of craigslist.  I’m going to attempt a layman’s analysis.  You guessed it, I’m not a lawyer - I just play one in my blog.

craigslist’s claim is that Ebay backed a cement truck over the feel-good intentions they layed out during “negotiations.”  I put “negotiations” in quotes because it appears as if craigslist had no say in what actually happened, despite the appearance that they were an actor in the talks between the former shareholder and Ebay.  This is apparent because Ebay ultimately purchased an option without the involvement of craigslist, and craigslist executed the option without objection.  At that time, craigslist was not yet comfortable with the acquisition.  Why then would they have gone along with the purchase if they actually had veto rights over the transaction?  It appears that while the former shareholder and craigslist made efforts to have an agreeable sale, that was really just out of the generosity of the former shareholder - a generosity which ultimately ran out when a multi-million dollar check was handed to him.

If I’m wrong and craigslist grudgingly went along with the sale, even with the power to stop it, then Craig and Jim were seriously hoodwinked by far more savvy professional business people.  Perhaps at the time Craig and Jim did not understand how companies, and public companies in particular, work.  Board members and executives turn over rapidly and are pushed around and out by demanding shareholders.  If the people running the show are turning down money because they made some vague oral promises to some company they invested in, shareholders will apply pressure and those executives will change course or be disposed of.  Any feel-good vibe does not mean a thing when transacting with a large company, and you believe any such vague promise at your peril.

Warren Buffet likes the saying “only invest in companies that an idiot could run, because eventually one will.”  A corollary might be, only enter into business transactions where it is still to your advantage if your partner becomes your adversary.

The craigslist motion is an interesting read, but it feels more like an appeal to good taste than a legal proceeding.  Based on that feeling, and a lack of substantial concrete violations, my intuition is that they have a weak legal case and are therefore making their case to the public.  They will succeed in temporarily getting Ebay off the board, stopping the deceptive advertising, recovering some damages, and perhaps limiting some shareholder request rights, but any economically valuable shareholder rights are unlikely to be terminated.  My sense is some powerful shareholder options are the real target here, but the private nature of the companies leave that unclear.  I have positive, but mixed feelings about craigslist and the way it is operated, but like Craig and Jim, I think an Ebay acquisition would be detrimental to the public.  Unfortunately, unless there are antitrust issues (which are extremely difficult to prove,) public interest is not the basis for decisions in these sorts of civil proceedings.

Links:

• Read the complaint yourself
• Industry Standard prediction: eBay announces bid to acquire Craigslist in 2008.

I have been using Amazon EC2 for a number of months now to host CribQ.

In a few words, EC2 allows you to spawn virtual servers whenever you need them and pay for them by the hour.

I thought it would be helpful to post a list of pros and cons based on my experience.  This is in response to a question about shared hosting, so the response is somewhat in that context.

Pros:

1. No long term commitment.  You’re paying by the hour.  ($0.10 - $0.4o cents)  Your balance sheet will thank you.
2. Internal expertise.  As opposed to using a shared host, you will have the internal expertise to set up your system from scratch, whether you choose to start with a LAMP image or a base Linux install.  There are many many free public images that will get you started, and may require little modification to run your application.
3. Play space.  You can create additional instances of your application for load testing (client and/or server), testing new architectures, rewrites, versions, etc.  I especially like the ability to create load testing clients, something that is very hard to do cheaply any other way.  How else can you pay $1.20 for 3 hours with 4 CPUs and free bandwidth to load test your application.  (Make sure to use the internal IP address to get the free bandwidth.)
4. Scaling.  You can easily scale vertically (upgrade to a larger 2 or 4 CPU instance) or horizontally (add instances).  Rather than trying to predict your needs, if you understand how to scale on EC2, you can scale as your demand picks up, and even scale dynamically from hour to hour.
5. You get tons of RAM.  A small instance has 1.7Gb.  A large instance has 7.5Gb.  Compare that to what you get with other virtual hosts.
6. You can more easily and cheaply leverage S3 for backup, storage, and serving of large files, and even SimpleDB for persistent storage.
7. They have excellent bandwidth.
8. Less worry about hardware failure.  Failures do occur, although it should occur less often than a dedicated server, and recovery is much easier.
9. No CPU throttling or other usage limitations.  At a shared host, it is common practice to kill long running scripts that are using significant CPU.
10. Dedicated IP address.  It’s yours and yours alone, as long as you keep your instance running.

Cons:

1. No static IP addresses.  You’ll need to look around and decide on how you want to manage this.  Hopefully Amazon will address this problem soon.  Basically if you change to a new instance, you will probably also get a new IP.
2. No international presence.  S3 storage can be located in Europe, but everything else is in the US - all in Seattle I think.  If you’re running a site targeted at Hong Kong, EC2 is not your best choice.
3. Virtualization does have a performance impact.  You are not getting something as fast as the specs would indicate.  The difference depends on what your doing and you’ll have to read around about this.
4. Lack of “persistent” primary storage.  This is a bit of a red herring, but if you shut your instance down you will lose the main storage where you database most likely resides.  You must explicitly back up your data.  I view this as a positive because it forces you to have a good backup/restore process, and S3 is knocking on your door.   Equate the extremely low chance of instance corruption with primary hard drive failure and you would be in the same situation.
5. Not the cheapest option.  The price starts at $72/month for a single CPU instance.  Shared hosting can be as low as $6/month.
6. Lack of support and management tools.   You’re not buying into a full service shared hosting solution with frequently updated install scripts and 24 hour support.

Patrick Altoft asks if people ever report paid links.

I’ve never reported paid links.  The idea had never even occurred to me since I’ve never been encouraged by a search engine or anyone else to do so.   It seems to be one of those things that you only know how to do if you are somewhat obsessed with the issue, like the four people who complain about wardrobe malfunctions when most people just shrug.

Beyond that, paid links are a form of advertising.  I don’t see how they are inherently wrong.  I think it is much more valuable to report splogs - sites with no original content and sometimes no meaningful content - that exist as advertising venues.  These do far more to ruin our collective experience than paid links.  How can I report splogs?

Some very respectable directories (e.g. Yahoo!) charge for the pleasure of being in their directory.  This serves a few purposes:

1. It destroys the economics of splogging and provides a first-level quality filter.  Sites that exist only to provide referral traffic would hopefully be priced out and newer sites that have real content, and few incoming links, can pay to be seen.
2. It allows high quality directories like Yahoo! to recover their costs when verifying that a site has legitimate content.  In theory, this should improve the quality of the directory.

In fact, and this is just a theory, it may be that if paid linking were more widespread, it might balance some of the overblown voices of the new media elite (e.g. the 100 top Diggers and Commander Taco,) and push splogs to the bottom of the results.  New voices could pay to be heard.  If no one liked what they said, they would have to keep paying.  If people did like it, the new site would get organic links and may be able to stop paying.  Sounds like a decent result to me.

As someone who is trying to build traffic to a new site, paid links can offer an attractive way to get some early users.

Back in the olden days, the old-timers felt the internet was dying when advertising first appeared on the inter-web.  Today, Google is making billions by putting advertising next to your baby photos and no one seems to mind.  My belief is that paid linking and even paid blogging will gain acceptance once the ethics of disclosure and honesty are better understood.