Apple’s new push notification service API
http://www.crunchgear.com/2008/07/31/apple-hands-out-push-notification-service-api-to-developers-background-apps-ftw/
This should open up interesting transaction model for application developers. But this is a two-edged sword, cuts both ways. On one end applications can provide more real time information , to the point notifications which can serve like a virtual assistant to iPhone users. On the other end if not used right this can potentially be a spam/annoyance.
I’m sure API will mandate developers to provides user options to decide if device owners want application developers to push notifications or not. Depending on how important the app is users can drive the destiny of this interesting feature.
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Google AppEngine disappoints Twisternow ?
When Google AppEngine launched it was match made in heaven between developer/entrepreneurs + launch of their dream startup/project. It is true up to certain extent no doubt about that. Apart from being a great platform for developers to jump start their idea which took them weeks if not months before, It is not considering apps like Twisternow for rapid scalability in terms of request/user/bandwidth quota.
Absorb spikes in traffic. When a web app surges in popularity, the sudden increase in traffic can be overwhelming for applications of all sizes, from startups to large companies that find themselves rearchitecting their databases and entire systems several times a year. With automatic replication and load balancing, Google App Engine makes it easier to scale from one user to one million by taking advantage of Bigtable and other components of Google’s scalable infrastructure.
- They wrote a code (in python), deployed on AppEngine - Great!
- They get to have their own domain instead of twisternow.appengine.com - Great !
- People started noticing their app and liked the simple idea of Twisternow - Super great!
- More and more people come to your site - Super super great!
- Then what ? - Over quota from AppEngine - Not so great!.
- new infrastructure
- time associated with the move
- The most important - Impact of user mind share shifting somewhere else. As this is a key factor always for new startups, competitors launch every minute.
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Google FriendConnect Preview video
Google FriendConnect Preview from googledevelopers.
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Amazon S3 Storage downtime today: Another trick to shake things up?
My brother paged me early this morning around 6:30 am about MessageDance not rendering CSS , I woke up came back to my laptop and I see everything is working OK. My possible suspicion that S3 having issues proved to be true as I read this on TechMeme. It is impressive how S3 can scale the infrastructure right from static content on S3 to dynamic device/application configuration and launch (EC2).
Number of startup companies moving their infrastructure to S3 has grown rapidly over the period of time and it is growing more. Small downtime might create a pinch to all these startups (including us at MessageDance) but peace and scalability you get with Amazon’s infrastructure can not be beaten.
Robert Scoble wrote an interesting post today about his interview with Jeff Barr (Evangelist for Amazon Web services).
In his article Robert mentioned that “Because he’s asking enterprises to do something pretty darn revolutionary: turn off their data centers.” Thats impressive statement to make. Going back to today’s event of S3 downtime and Amazon going full throttle on pushing all these companies towards Amazon web services with bold statements like above, could this downtime be another trick from Amazon to shake people up?.
Google is missing out on big thing here as they are the one of the companies who can do this very well what Amazon is doing for infrastructure scaling.
MessageDance Twitter’ng now
This long awaiting feature of MessageDance is out. Yes!. MessageDance talks Twitter now :-). We have integrated with Twitter, adding to our existing list of Social media sites and more.
Twitter status update from MessageDance opens up the whole new world for active Twitter users. Details is on MessageDance Blog. In short users can do content rich twittering (video/images/any other forms) that any email can accommodate. Yes that brings up another important point. With this feature users can send status updates from their email itself. Users can do bunch of other things as well. All the options are listed on Sam’s Message.
Let me sum it up. With MessageDance-Twitter combo, You can
- Send twitter status updates right from your email
- Send just more than 140 characters, the details follows on MessageDance site
- Decide to send email subject or body to twitter (more options…it keeps coming
- If you do not want to send all messages from MessageDance to Twitter, you can directly send message to twitter by sending an email to tweet@messagedance.com or do the same within MessageDance dance floor. (We honor user’s wish to message specific twittering)
- Your messages are flagged with twitter icon in your MessageDance widget
- Tweet awareness in your MessageDance message detail (@username feature of Twitter for direct linking Twitter user on the status update)
More Twitter possiblities with MessageDance…
MessageDance: So it starts.
We have been working on MessageDance for couple of months writing prototype , building blocks and testing the basic end to end promise to see how it works within ourselves. It is a very interesting idea and right now we are on our way to execute this for next cycle which would be public beta.
MessageDance is started by 3 founders (including myself) and we all working full time on this. Work is in full swing from Product Management, Operations, Engineering and Architecture perspective. We recently moved to PlugAndPlayTechCenter. Its a great incubation for emerging technology startups. Energy of this place is very positive and encouraging.
I will have a lot to share here as we progress in our plan but for now we are dancing our way to the next interesting thing in social media.
You can read day to day update on MessageDance Blog and stay tuned to our progress.
You can become one of the first to access MessageDance’s service by signing up with us. Once we are ready for public beta you will be the first one to hear from us.
Facebook micro application success trend started
Angel community was watching when Facebook platform launched and they were expecting plenty of applications to launch under Facebook umbrella rapidly and eventually some one will cash in the success in terms of user base.
I guess exactly same thing happened to Where I have been. Here is the news ( TripAdvisor buys Facebook app for $3 million). This again proves few simple things about consumer space
- User base, User base, User base
- Data is more valuable than Technology
Now the race is on and applications will be more aggressive to pan out, attract more and more people. Facebook proved its platform strength after all.
Our first Ajuby meetup
Even though we have been in quite a few silicon valley ruby meetups with low key Ajuby push by dropping one page Ajuby brochure on the front door, We had our first formal Ajuby meetup today. It went well . Not everyone showed up who RSVP’d for the meetup, there were handfull.
We started with little introduction of Ajuby on how it started, why kind of slides. Then we dived right into high level features of our last release 0.5 ( which I blogged in a seperate post last time). As we were passing thru slides, audience were curious and questions about vision, business model and eventually couple of guys were interested in looking at actual code. I eventually opened Textmate and started walking everyone thru the Ajuby code base. I guess people were curious to know how different Ajuby is from conventional Rails application. Answer was simple, Ajuby is an Rails application with additional directories custom to Ajuby.
Whole take from this exercise was wonderful, curious eyes with valid questions, Discussions will possibly take feedback to feature path, we are helping ourselves and others.
We have a long way to go in this process, lot to learn, lot to provide to the community because we have got from community so much all these years.
Here are the meetup presentation slides
iPhone Frenzy.
I just could not stop writing about iPhone. Looking at the craze generated by apple’s usual brilliant marketing machine, people went nuts buying iPhone and there are huge group of people who bought iPhone just for pure tinkering and push the mobile development to its limit.
We have seen mobile development for so many years, but what is happening with iPhone front is nothing like any other mobile revolution we have seen so far.
Look at the applications developed for iPhone in a hack-a-thon. If you go thru this list, quite a few of them are potential crowd pullers. If executed well can lead to big money making machine.
On the other hand, I’m wowed ! by speed of development. We will see more of these. iPhone can possibly build parallel world of social communication and media and convert lot of people use mobile phone to do everything that they would do on a personal computer, I mean everything right from emails, chatting with friends, business collaboration and transactions. For developers and nerd community Apple might come up with lightweight portable programming platform , where you can dock iPhone , pipe it to big screen and do your application development.
Ajuby releas 0.5 brings business mashup building one step closer
We are glad to announce Ajuby release 0.5 today. It is very exciting get this release out after long and late hours of work, with tons of fixes and UI consistency across browsers (IE/Firefox/Safari).
This is a milestone release for Ajuby team in terms making integration platform availability (for building Web services/SOAP/XML exchange) , sample applications demonstrating possibility of mashups (SugarCRM and Basecamp conglomerate).
Here is the release information in detail
You can also check out the Ajuby blog for up to date information
To get your hands on this release
It just keeps getting better as wide adoption Rails based application increases, Ajuby slides itself in a right spot to make developers and user community to build integrations to popular business applications like Salesforce, SugarCRM , productivity tools like basecamp and storage solution like Amazon S3 rapidly.