Tech

A reader of Kevin Drum’s writes in response to Kevin’s piece on the new dotcom bubble:

See, this is the kind of crap you get when people look at "Silicon Valley" and see Facebook. The investors I have spoken to accept a fairly stable universe of Google, Facebook, Twitter, Apple, Amazon and Netflix into the mid-future. Nobody likes to look any farther down the road than two to three years anymore, so that’s the horizon.

The excitement, the "bubble" if you will, is not about creating another Facebook, it’s about finding a way to enhance and monetize an established internet ecosystem. It’s the cloud, it’s big data, it’s Hadoop, Cassandra and Mongo on commodity hardware, it’s faster, cheaper storage subsystems, it’s scalability and flexibility, the sudden newfound ability to just "switch on" five hundred new servers with no capital cost, and turn around and switch them off on Tuesday. It’s deep, low-latency analytics, clickstream analysis, social media mining, and targeted marketing. It’s mobile localized communications. It’s seamless integration between the OS, the browser, the web application server and the data, all stored in remote indexed and optimized servers that autonomously move the data closer to the user.

It’s really interesting and exciting stuff, and all the pieces are almost there. They’re still trying to figure out how to scale web properties to hundreds of millions of users, which is incredibly hard, especially because most of them were built on the previous generation’s technology — think LAMP stack with sharded MySQL and Memcached. But the infrastructure is catching up. The hardware is actually moving backwards: lower-power, cheaper, slower processors, memory and disk, but now in a clustered and distributed environment that, because failures in that kind of environment are a common event, protect themselves against failure (think multi data center replication, autonomous P2P status monitoring, disk writes to append-only tables before memory writes…).

But most people don’t know or care about that stuff. They just know about Facebook and Amazon and Apple, and they get frustrated when they don’t work. And that leads to these articles that get the core part of the conversation so dreadfully wrong.

I am getting this:

(hat tip)

Ezra Klein thinks Google + could succeed because it gives you a chance to start over. It also gives you a chance to filter who sees what, and you can always delete your account. Now that people understand their own roles in social networking, we might behave differently online. Google also might be better at privacy than Facebook. It would be hard to be worse.

I only heard of Google + yesterday, but I’m already on the beta and … well I think it’s pretty outstanding actually. I’d like to see full Reader integration, but overall it’s quite sleek, user friendly and attractive. Better on all counts than Facebook.

More importantly for many, it’s not Facebook. And that may be enough.

I don’t mean to brag or complain or anything, but this whole idea of various circles of “friends” “family”  “acquaintances” etc. was something I came up with a couple years ago. Admittedly, I came up with it in my own head on a hike in the woods and never did anything with it, but still. This reminds me of some of the changes in AD&D 3rd Edition which I swear they copied right out of some of my notebooks when I was designing my own paper-and-pencil RPG.

Bastards. I’ll probably switch to Google + from Facebook, though. I’m more of a Google lackey I guess.