The Viamentis Blog

Yesterday, I was at the PipesCamp organized by one of the little startups we share our office with, hover.in. They had actually requested me to give a talk, but things were so hectic over the weekend that I had practically no time to prepare, so I had to excuse myself.

But I was able to make to the event itself, if only as part of the audience. And it was loads of fun. The day started off with Bosky, the CTO of hover.in introducing Yahoo Pipes, it’s potential, and why it is a new paradigm worth watching. He then invited Prabhu, who then took the stage and showed us how you could do interesting stuff with Pipes and the iPhone. And then there was a panel on how Yahoo Pipes could be useful for the day-to-day work of a blogger, and they dragged me onstage, as they needed a developer’s perspective too.

For a question regarding what we thought Yahoo Pipes’ drawbacks, or why they aren’t as popular as they can be, I said I think that’s because it is very much a geek tool. Most of the bloggers are tech-savvy, but they couldn’t possibly expected to create something with Pipes, as it still feels like a light-weight IDE to me. I think something truly user-friendly, like a drag-and drop interface, regardless of the format of the sources, would help the adoption better.

And then there was a nice lunch, and people were encouraged to break off into teams and hack up their pipes, which was quite a bit of fun. I was about to start on my own, but  Moyeen seemed to be really keen on working on one too, but he didn’t have his lappie along with him, so I offered mine. Then I took a book and dozed off, only to be woken up for the demos. There were quite a few nice demos, which you can see on the PipesCamp page. There was also this very nice talk about Mashups and Monetization by Narain of Equvia. It is always a nice to catch up with him. All in all, a very nice, well-put together event.

Oh, this breaks my heart. I’ve always loved Google, and I would readily admit that I envy the awesome company they have built. But sometimes, you see little signs that the company, is no longer radically “not evil” or iconoclastic like before. Perhaps it is only to be expected, now that thousands and thousands of people work for them, and some amount of “regular big co” attitude will creep in.

But you see little things like Google keeping track of your search history, even after you logged off from one of their services (check the top right corner the next time you do a google search). That worries me. They have no business to track my search history.  And little puff pieces in the press like these. That press release sounds too flattering to me. Something just doesn’t sound right.

We’re watching you, Google. Here’s hoping you’ll keep inspiring us and stay “not evil”

I’m pretty impressed with Amazon these days - specifically about the web services they are offering. We are very lucky to get an opportunity to work with Amazon Webservices for one of our clients, and I always thought Amazon S3 and EC2 are amazing tools.

Now, they have followed that up with SimpleDB, which seems even more innovative and game-changing. In creating this service, Amazon seems to attempt to turn the traditional database paradigm on its’ head. Apart from being a web service, accessible through an API, there are many things quite special about SimpleDB: ‘Domains’, which are conceptually similar to database tables, can contain ‘Items’ which are similar to rows, and each of those items contain several ‘Attributes’, which are similar to columns.

The attribute values are stored in ‘Cells’, similar to database fields. However, these cells unlike traditional databases, can hold multiple values. You can have as many or as few attributes for each item. That is, each row/item need not contain a fixed number of columns/attributes. Each item to its’ own. Seemingly, they are indexed automatically. Even better, there is no such thing as a database schema. You can add whatever type of information you want in each cell.

Amazon seemingly created a simple query language to create and retrieve data. My first reaction was that it would be better if it created an sql-like language, but the SimpleDB query language seems to be much simpler than SQL - so why complicate our lives? After going through the developer docs, I am a little disappointed that there isn’t a Ruby interface to SimpleDB as yet. I’m pretty sure it won’t take too long before someone comes up with that very soon.

My only doubt would be how much lag is there going to be to retrieve and send data to this web service? At the end of the day, a database run by us on the same machine as the web server or a nearby server is going to be pretty fast to access. Can Amazon SimpleDB match that? Of course, we would only know that once we try it out. We should know very soon.

What is surprising is that Google or Yahoo is not competing in this space. Probably only developers and startups care about this right now, but with some polish, AWS can become enterprise-ready, and Amazon might end up becoming the company that becomes the IT infrastructure supplier for businesses very soon. That is a bit surprising, because Amazon, at the end of the day, is an online retailer. So how does this fit into their business strategy? So they want to sell IT infrastructure along with books, toys and electronics? That is a bit strange, because AWS seems to be the only thing that Amazon sells which is enterprise-oriented.

Finally, I don’t think it is Facebook which is the new “that” company to work for, which has the coolest problems for the developers to be solved and has a great future (I still think it is in many ways still Google) it just might be, surprisingly, good ole Amazon. Right on. It will be well deserved.