Google will host the world…
Posted on April 8, 2008 by Chris
So the big announcement yesterday was that Google is entering the hosted application space with their Google Apps Engine. So far in this space, Amazon has been generating the most press with their web services offerings and specifically S3, their hosted database server (which incidentally went down again recently).
While the blogsphere has lit up on the topic of cloud computing based on Google’s announcement, as someone who has launched an Internet based startup and would in theory be a target for these services, I continue to struggle with them conceptually as I’ve written before.
In launching TravelGator, the things we struggled with were not the things that Google or Amazon is trying to solve. Granted, perhaps once our traffic is at a level that requires resources to handle millions of users we might need some of their infinite scalability, but I’d argue at that point a company has the resources to manage their own infrastructure and actually wouldn’t necessarily want to suffer through the problems that full outsourcing can cause.
That being said, the real problems that an emerging or mid-market online company struggles with have nothing to do with large scalability. Ours included:
- Feeds integration - we get data from lots of partners in lots of formats (some of it really dirty). It was a HUGE task to write all the code to standardize it and even to date I’ve not found a good infrastructure to handle it. Even cool tools like SnapLogic don’t seem to be able to handle complex feed integrations where the data is excessively dirty.
- Search - OK, here is a place that Google should be able to help. The issue we ran into though is that the tools that are available for searching structured data rather than unstructured data are very difficult to get working correctly. If you want to search your site text - no problem - but try figuring out a way to take a search for “Hilton” and return “Hilton Head”, every Hilton Hotel and anything else with the word “Hilton” in it all organized and filtered by the type of data being returned. It is really difficult (and no, straight SQL doesn’t work in this case).
- SEO - again, the folks at Google should know something about this. The dos and don’t for search engine optimization are well known but very few application stacks automate it (Ruby on Rails being one exception but as a framework it limits your flexibility in numerous other ways).
- Front end design - this is a real killer. The libraries and tools that exist for doing true, template based website design are stuck in in 1990s. It is about time someone created a front end, WYSIWYG editor that was a powerful as PhotoShop and Illustrator and creates clean, HTML code that can be easily integrated with an application server. This is a problem worth solving as much of the cost for developing a site goes into the creation of the user interface.
- Ad serving - much to our surprise, third party ad serving engines aren’t very sophisticated. There is an opportunity here for a innovative company to abstract away all the ad networks and affiliate networks and allow sites to properly monetize their page views. A better solution should exist and should be part of the application framework.
I could go on but these are the biggies. Databases and Python engines are all very well and good, but to really get me to jump out of my seat I’d have to see all the other services come together into true building blocks. Then I’d get really excited.
Sphere: Related Content» Filed Under Cloud Computing, Content Driven Commerce
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