Super Volatile

Late yesterday, Google announced perhaps the biggest change it has ever made to its massive network of web services: Starting in March, your search and surf habits across all of Google’s products will be combined to form the mother of all behavioral profiles. On March 1, Search will know the contents of your email and the videos you watch on YouTube. If you use Google Docs for work, Search will know which company you work for and which industry you work in. Via Google Reader, Search and YouTube will know what content you like to consume. And of course, the kicker: Google’s ad networks — AdSense, AdWords, DoubleClick — will have full access to all of your search and surf habits from every Google web service.

Google has all the right to do it. They are also trying to communicate it in a sensible way. Yet, not much of the past innocence has been left after Mr Page's statements issued after he became the CEO.

In order to help identify these hot spots and warn developers, we looked at bug prediction. Bug prediction uses machine-learning and statistical analysis to try to guess whether a piece of code is potentially buggy or not, usually within some confidence range.

How Google uses statistics to find troublesome places in the code.

In case you haven’t read it, “GoogleBot is Chrome” outlines a theory that Google’s Search Crawler GoogleBot is actually built off of the Chrome Web Browser, and may even have been the primary reason for the development of Chrome. If this is true, it leads us to believe that GoogleBot is a lot more intelligent and capable than Google is letting on, and we’ll have to totally abandon the dated notion that GoogleBot is looking at a website in a manner similar to Lynx or other text-only browsers.

Badly written article on important subject: apparently Google Bot is now capable of indexing JavaScript content.

Another effect this will have on the start-up scene is that if you build your company in 'The Valley' that companies like Google will be competing with you for talent. You may have an upside from being in the SV eco-system in the first place, however you may find yourself paying a lot more for developers than if you were in a place where parties with pockets as deep as Google are rare.

Headquarters in Silicon Valley, development somewhere else might be a good strategy if you want to keep the burn rate under control.

Implications of high salaries at Google.

When you release sub-par products, you look sub-par yourself. Customers don’t care what platform it’s on, and don’t care what politics are going on behind the scenes at the company. If you release shit, you look like shit. It’s much better to release nothing at all.

The author loses faith in Google's ability to deliver great products.

All service interfaces, without exception, must be designed from the ground up to be externalizable. That is to say, the team must plan and design to be able to expose the interface to developers in the outside world. No exceptions.

Ever wondered how Amazon has embraced a service-oriented architecture that works? Or why exactly Google has to fear Facebook and Amazon? This rant has it all and is an excellent read.

It was written by Steve Yegge and aimed only at people from Google, but got out accidentally with a big splash on the web. Yegge had been working for Amazon for six years before he moved to Google in 2005.

Just as Facebook is trying to accumulate data about your activity through an awareness of what you are sharing via its “social apps” and its “frictionless sharing” approach, so Google wants to aggregate as much as it can about you and your interests via all the services it offers — and how you interact with those services and others through Google+. Some of it might come from connecting YouTube with Google+ Hangouts, so you can watch a TV show with others; some might come from connecting your Gmail to Google+, so that profiles of people you follow and your shared interests appear next to emails from them.

Google aims to integrate Google+ much more with its services, meaning that they will become less private and more aware of your identity. Because who needs privacy anyway, right!?

Very large-scale distributed systems, like ours, demand that time be well-synchronized and expect that time always moves forwards. Computers traditionally accommodate leap seconds by setting their clock backwards by one second at the very end of the day. But this “repeated” second can be a problem. For example, what happens to write operations that happen during that second? Does email that comes in during that second get stored correctly? What about all the unforeseen problems that may come up with the massive number of systems and servers that we run? Our systems are engineered for data integrity, and some will refuse to work if their time is sufficiently “wrong.” We saw some of our clustered systems stop accepting work on a small scale during the leap second in 2005, and while it didn’t affect the site or any of our data, we wanted to fix such issues once and for all.

Since most of us have already sold our privacy to Google company, it's at least some consolation to know that they care even about such seemingly minor issues like leap seconds.

But the world has changed, and Google can’t seem to keep up. Amazon has become the polar opposite of Google, empowering every developer on the planet to make incredible technology. Want MapReduce? Amazon has you covered. Want to play with terabytes of data like it ain’t no thing? Check. Want to launch thousands of servers to handle a tough computation? Check, check, and check. Want to launch thousands of human brains to solve otherwise unassailable problems? No problem. Heck, want to simply send email to your users? They have that too.

Amazon embraced much more pragmatic and commercially-driven approach to technology than Google. While the latter company may seem more open, eventually it may lose the hearts of developers for its inability to successfully commercialize the results of its R&D, effectively reducing them to impractical toys.

The bottom line is that it is much harder to compete in payments using the same path PayPal took 10 years ago. Creating yet another network based on existing methods is a “me too” strategy that doesn’t provide real incentive for merchants to switch beyond the very specific uses Google and Apple provide today (and, based on the response to Apple’s 30% take rate, even that is not promised).

Interesting analysis of why it might be hard for Google and Apple to offer a payment system that could replace PayPal, by a former PayPal employee.