Yostivanich

I keep find­ing that there is a ton of stuff day in and day out that I want to talk about but I don’t have the time or it isn’t really need­ing a full blog post to devote to. How­ever I still wish to inform peo­ple about some of the most inter­est­ing stuff I find around the web. So I am going to be try­ing to do a basi­cally a list of some daily news sto­ries that I come across. Today gets to be the first of these and there will be more if the feed­back is positive.

Flickr Adds Video — Flick added videos today, the videos how­ever have to be both 90 secs or less as well as under 150 mb. So if you want to upload longer videos look else­where. Also to upload videos you have to have a pro account. Here is a video I uploaded to Flickr if you want to see how they look. Peo­ple on Twit­ter are lik­ing it to Twitter’s 140 char­ac­ter limit, forc­ing you to have to say what you are going to say and move on. I’m not too sure where I fall in there, it could be nice being con­strained but how hard is it cur­rently to upload videos to other sites and who doesn’t know about YouTube?

Google App Engine — Google last night released a way for you to run your web appli­ca­tion com­pletely on Google’s servers. You get access to a data­base using BigTable, which is Google’s Data­base sys­tem, and stor­age on Google’s servers. Dur­ing the beta, there are lim­i­ta­tions on page views, queries and such. How­ever when it gets released full time you will be able to pay for more ser­vice, but there will still be a basic free account. This is really cool and easy way for devel­op­ers to get started with a web appli­ca­tion with now lit­er­ally zero cost to start.

Cou­ple of Prob­lems I am foreseeing:

• Cur­rently only Python sup­ported though other lan­guage sup­port will occur, Ruby and PHP are a given will be even­tu­ally sup­ported. Still this is going to slow down adop­tion for Google.
• One of the test appli­ca­tions, Hud­dleChat, is a lit­eral clone of Camp­fire. This is a major no, no for any com­pany espe­cially Google. This also cre­ates fear in devel­op­ers that Google could “steal” their appli­ca­tion once it becomes pop­u­lar enough. Your code and data is already on Google’s servers, who says it couldn’t hap­pen? (Google pulled Hud­dleChat from AppEngine today)

I did get into the intial beta, lim­ited to 10,000 devel­op­ers, how­ever I don’t have the time to play around with it at the moment. Finals are get­ting ready to start here at Texas Tech, how­ever when I get done with that I will review the service.