I logged into my Google Analytics account this morning and was presented with the following notice:

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System Message: Analytics Processing Delay from April 30th to May 5th

Google Analytics experienced a data processing error from April 30th to May 5th. Almost all of the data has been recovered and is currently being reprocessed. The recovered data will be reflected in your reports within a few days. Please note that a small percentage of data, particularly in the area of e-commerce reporting, was not recoverable from those dates.

We sincerely apologize for this processing issue and are taking every precaution to prevent such disruptions from occurring again in the future. For more information, please read through our common questions.

The Google Analytics Team

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The Gods of Internet not only had an outage in which they lost data, but some of that data was not recoverable! I guess running a 24×7 system is hard even for the masters and their thousands (millions?) of servers. Mind you it wast just Analytics but still…

The moral of this story…everyone has outages and they are really hard to plan for. The thing that bugs me is that even after a decade of investment in Internet technologies, it is still nearly impossible to build a self healing system without massive expense (and even then). Maybe we need to take a break from all the “cool” things that are being developed by all the startups in the space and invest in hardening our infrastructure as it is pretty creaky (as Comcast recently found out).

With all the chatter these days about the high price of oil and gas, the impact of global warming on pretty much everyone and the general destruction of this planet we call home, I thought it might be valuable to point out the most obvious way to make a major positive impact as I just don’t see it talked about enough.

It is pretty simple and will have an effect way beyond solar panels, wind power, more insulation in the attic, energy efficient appliances and the continuously talked about and never available electric car. It is even cooler than Google’s biofuel buses.

Are you ready for it? Simply stay home. Commuting to work has got to be one of the most ridiculous concepts in today’s broadband, highly connected, 24×7 online environment. As someone who hasn’t had a real office job in seven years and has built two companies in that time yet never paid a dime in office rent, I can assure you that it is completely possible to stay connected with a global team of people, accomplish great things and never wear pants. All this wonderful technology we talk about and blog about allows you to do it with ease (and actually rather cheaply). And the environmental numbers speak for themselves.

Plus, you get to see your kids grow up. I highly recommend it.

You always read about Moore’s Law and how it can only be maintained as long as the transistors on chips get smaller and smaller, something that is getting increasingly more difficult over time due to good old physics (electrons don’t like to behave the smaller you get).

I wonder how Moore’s Law applies to soccer?

I tip o’ the hat to Engadget for pointing out the video.

Wow…I remember when Priceline first went public in the beginning of the dot com craziness and it was the company many of my clients were watching - mostly because of their name your price auction format but also because they seemed to be able to do no wrong. Now they are a decade old and pretty much mainstream.

I must be getting old…

A fun site to waste time on: passive aggressive notes.com. One of my favorites:

It would seem that Michael Arrington has a thing for bashing TheFunded.com. His post today was overwhelmingly negative but I actually disagree completely. TheFunded is a great resource for early stage companies to get a handle on the good VCs and the bad VCs out there (and there are plenty of both). As a founder, the one thing you have very little of is time and to waste it chasing a fund that is never going to invest is nearly the worst thing you can do. It can take your company down if you don’t watch it.

Now I’m not usually a fan of online reviews as they tend towards either very negative or very positive and hence uselessness but in this case the network on TheFunded is rather specialized (only CEOs need apply) and having watched postings there for about six months, I can say that for the most part the experiences being shared are spot on based on my own experience pitching for money.

I’m a fan even if TechCrunch isn’t.

Thanks to CrunchGear for posting this video. Wish I knew how they did it…

Maybe this was common knowledge and I just missed it (entirely likely), but while trying to convince Google that even though I’m currently physically in Mexico, I still want to search in English, I discovered that you can actually tell the Google search engine that you want to converse in “Elmer Fudd“.

You’ve got to give a company credit when they allow their programmers to implement functionality like this. Other options included “Bork Bork Bork!” (the Swedish Chef), “Hacker” (didn’t get it - lots of random numbers and letters…maybe I need another character font installed), “Pig Latin” and of course given the density of engineers at Google, “Klingon“.

I expected to see binary as well but perhaps there wasn’t enough screen real estate to handle it.

A short post as I’m actually on vacation this week but I caught an article in the San Jose Business Journal that profiled a new solar roof that eBay has installed across a number of the company’s buildings. It is a 649.6-kilowatt installation consisting of 3,248 solar panels.

Very cool. I’ve been looking for an excuse to put solar on my house for years but the financials just don’t work yet. I guess that is the difference between living in Boston and San Jose.

I stumbled upon an interesting article written by Robert Cringely at PBS in January of last year. It is a decent presentation of the argument about why Google will eventually power most of the Internet based on an analysis of the dark fiber that they have under contract.

I read the article, thought for a moment and concluded that the argument was plausible if a little 1984. Google is pretty dominate in a lot of areas, although they’ve failed pretty miserably in others like social networking. They have also bought a lot of their capability (e.g. YouTube) when their own efforts came up short. In other words, they are acting a lot like a well run large company - spin out something cool every so often from internal R&D and buy the rest using the cash flow from their mainstream operations. Microsoft is the same, as are most large, growth oriented corporations.

So maybe we will all be running our lives on Google infrastructure a decade from now. I wouldn’t bet on it though. Big growth companies have a habit of turning into… big slow growth companies. And big companies have a hard time attracting innovative, risk takers who start new trends. Google is no different.