I joined Facebook on June 7, 2007. It was a great time to discover what had been just available to College students. But what excited me the most was their approach to social media: they weren’t just a destination, they had become a platform.

Today that platform has become a vacuum of activities that happen in many other external services, like Spotify, Twitter or the Wall Street Journal. But those services are becoming too much half and half in my Facebook News Feed coffee.

According to Facebook’s IPO filing, they have lofty plans to connect the world: “There is a huge need and a huge opportunity to get everyone in the world connected, to give everyone a voice and to help transform society for the future.”

An article on the Guardian challenges that statement in not so romantic words, saying that Facebook should simply say the truth:

We help people connect in safe, convenient and innovative ways. In doing so, we’ve built a business of historic proportions. We make money selling advertising that is finely tuned to reach our users in cost-competitive ways. Because we believe in Facebook’s unlimited potential, we will manage ourselves for the long term rather than for short-term profit. We have built an ownership and control structure to accomplish this goal.

I believe the IPO will increasingly transform Facebook in a data-mining company that sucks everyone’s social graph for their own monetization goals, and will surely become more and more aggressive as stockholders usually request from a public company.

I refuse to be the cow to be milked to fund that business.

It’s a mystery to everyone how Facebook selects items to show up on the News Feed. But I seem to have received the worst part of the algorithm. I was careful to use Facebook for my real life friends and family. But I never saw them posting anything. Is it that I don’t have the right family and friends? Should I move to Silicon Valley to make social-media-active real life friends? Or is it that more and more Facebook falls into the 80/20 rule: 20% of the people post and 80% are stalkers? There is talk of Facebook fatigue:

The latest data shows Facebook Fatigue is spreading in the US from the early adopters who it identified as “disengaging” in the GWI.5 report. Declines in social networking activity such as messaging friends fell 12% over the six waves of research, searching for new contacts fell 17% and joining a group 19% among all Facebook users in the US.

To spice up my New Feed, I decided to follow a handful of people whom I have established “web friendships” on other social sites like FriendFeed, Twitter and Google+.

Now my feed is dominated by these people and I see even less of what my friends and family post. The Facebook “subscribe” feature has allowed it to become more like Twitter (with asymmetrical relationships) and thus, a platform for broadcasting. Again, not so much connecting. I think Twitter already does that and much better.

These days the main form of communication between me and my family is WhatsApp. We are also giving a chance to Path, which has already done a much better job with their mobile application than the crappy thing Facebook calls their mobile app.

Influential bloggers, like John Batelle, are crying out that all these silos like Facebook and Twitter are destroying the ecosystem that the original web was.

Then there are unsettling things like the fact that Facebook never deletes photos. They are working on a solution to erase them — in about 45 days.

But very much apart from that, I think Facebook, for me, has failed in its mission: it no longer connects me to the people that matter to me.

So, is Facebook still working for you?

Since the introduction of the NoSQL database model to the world, there’s been a flurry of proponents and detractors that seem to fall into a 50-50 distribution. Some of the discussions have become very heated, others are just laugh out funny.

One of the things that have been talked about in the blogosphere is that you shouldn’t embrace NoSQL as the first solution to your problem. There is time — they say — to scale it using NoSQL later on. To me that makes no sense: NoSQL engines have become mature technologies that can be used by any enterprise, big or small.

Reddit user cogman10 mentions on this blog post:

Picking Tech A over Tech B is NOT a premature optimization. Would the author claim that “Using InnoDB is a premature optimization because MySQL is better supported!” It is called planning, you do that whenever you write a new application.

Use the database that best matches your data. If some non-relational database is a perfect match for the data you want to store, by all means use it. Don’t give two shits about people like the author that think SQL is the one and only query language. (hell, I wish that SQL would die in flames, but it is heavily built into current business models. Not because it is the best, but because it is common.)

Insisting on the wrong tech is not premature optimization. It is stupidity.

But in some cases, there might be a mixed option available: using both SQL and NoSQL.

High Write / Low Reads

Writes are expensive on SQL engines. This is because, unless you use sharding, you usually write on a Master Server. But sharding (in effect writing to multiple “masters”) makes your solution to not be ACID — “Atomic, Consistent, Isolated, Durable transactions” — anymore (i.e. a write on master 1 might no be available for some time on master 2).

This is where NoSQL shines: writes can happen on any box and even though they’re BASE – ”Basically Available, Soft State, and Eventually Consistent” — the “eventually” piece is usually really fast.

The Mixed Approach

If you have relational model that you would like to still use, you could potentially leave the read data on a SQL engine (being careful to avoid super complex joins, which are also very expensive in terms of load) and then host the write-heavy tables on a NoSQL engine.

Why not code everything using NoSQL from the start? Because there are benefits to using SQL, like joins and or other features that you might not want to give up. You could also potentially need to write much more code to adopt the different data approach that NoSQL requires.

Take a look at the diagram below (click to enlarge):

As you can see on the diagram, we have web users coming into a load-balanced cluster of web server instances that have connections to both MongoDB server instances (NoSQL) and a connection to a MySQL slave server instance on a cloud environment. This part of the network can grow or shrink horizontally very easily, by adding web servers, mongo servers or MySQL slave servers. I would probably group up to four web servers per MySQL slave, and then create a new MySQL slave instance for every new group of four.

The MySQL Master lives in a physical colocation environment and there are processes running there that update the relational data.

Let’s see an example. Say you have a heavily visited shopping website where you need to have complex product information that contains many joins (product to manufacturer to inventory levels; that would be the SQL piece), but you need to track the product pages people are visiting, sort of a log of their activity. You could have this high-write activity happening on the MongoDB NoSQL servers. And because they will actively be written in the sharded MongoDB servers they will be scalable.

As traffic grows, you can add more MongoDB servers and the load will be distributed properly. The product information might change once per day or some other low frequency schedule, which makes it perfect to have on a read environment. Remember, reads are cheap.

If you need data from the MongoDB servers from your colocation environment, you could potentially run cron-based jobs that download the data from the MongoDB servers securely in a scheduled form.

You could also potentially put a load balancer on front of multiple MySQL Slaves, if you wanted a quickly scaling setup.

The main point I’m trying to make is the following — use the right data solution to your problem. SQL, NoSQL or both. Don’t be fixated on the technology, but on what you need to accomplish.

A new developer joined our tech team this week, and I’ve often seen how it takes some time for new recruits to get the hang of a new development environment. I thought it’d be a good idea to sit down with him and give him some pointers so that he can move in the right direction.

If you have read the The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People you will see some similarities in these tips. That is one of the books that have influenced me the most, even though I read it back in college, and to this day I still remember and apply those rules.

Here are the 7 tips I gave our new developer. I think these are good for any developer at any stage, so I thought it’d be great to share them.

Listen

I think this is the most important, if not the most important one of all. We, developers, are famously trigger happy and are always eager to start coding without spending too much time in “boring” specs. In our mind we are always coding even when we’re being told important business rules. We also tend to be a step ahead thinking we have figured everything out.

Don’t. It’s important to really listen when we’re in that specs meeting or when we’re talking to a fellow developer. Put your mind in pause mode and really try to understand what you’re being told, and don’t interrupt every 30 seconds with “Yeah, I know”. There’s a big chance you might not know.

Don’t try to impress

There’s an inherent competitiveness in all of us developers. We’re always trying to show off our knowledge in the dark corners of our computer languages or how we solved the most challenging coding problem. The problem is that this can become an issue with communication. It’s fine to do a “I told you” dance every now and then, but be on the lookout if you’re always minimizing your team member’s opinions.

It can also become an issue if you’re doing this with your supervisor. Most likely he’s already heard that “clever” solution you’re showing off with and in most cases it’s not an original approach that you just came up with.

This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t offer ideas when the setting is right (i.e. a brainstorming session) or when you’re asked for any thoughts on how to approach a problem.

Be proactive

There’s nothing worse than a developer who finishes his assignment and then just starts to surf the web for the rest of the day, pretending he’s busy, or goes to his IM window to chat with friends. A developer should always be ahead of what’s next and prepare himself for the upcoming tasks. For example, if you know you’ll be working with MongoDB in an upcoming project, make time to start learning it ahead of time.

It’s also very important is to check the workload of the rest of the team. If one of your fellow developers is banging his head on the wall with work and you’re done with your project, be sure to offer your help. He might not take it, but he will be grateful for it. And in a future occasion, he might help you when the tables turn.

Sharpen your skills constantly

The cool thing about software development is that there’s always new stuff to learn. Don’t become one of many developers I’ve known over the years that fall into a “maintenance” cycle and do the same repetitive tasks over and over. You might not feel it, but you’re being left behind. Subscribe to development blogs, join social networks and buy books on languages that you work with or that you hear other people praising. Catching up after years of not being up to speed is painful and might mean losing a cool opportunity in a new position.

Don’t assume, ask

This is related to the first rule. When you get the full explanation of what the project entails, make sure you understand everything correctly. Don’t skim the emails or functional specs and never assume you understand something you’re not clear on. Always raise the flag when you’re not 100% sure of any piece of the project. It’s always better to ask early before coding than when you’re 100,000 lines in.

Be a perfectionist

Don’t settle for poor code. It doesn’t matter that you’re pressed for time. Always write code you’re proud of, and make sure you improve it as time goes by. Think that this code might be seen by your supervisor or by a coworker and that you could potentially share with a prospective future employer.

Beat deadlines

It’s not enough that you meet deadlines. It’s up to you to set a date that you’re comfortable you’ll be able to deliver. That doesn’t mean sandbagging it or doubling the time. Make some buffer for Q/A and unexpected issues, but set and communicate a deadline and then beat it every time.

If you follow these tips, I am sure you’ll become and continue to be a great developer for time to come.

What about you? Do you have other tips to become a great developer?

A pivot is defined as a quick turn by either a company or a project. Sometimes it’s like a shift in focus in a small startup. Other times we see it in companies as large as Google, when it announced  it was shutting down Google Buzz, a service that it announced to great fanfare but had not quite caught up.

As you can imagine, a pivot is something that can be quite stressful for any entrepreneur, as it means changing the direction of the business, sometimes radically. It might require an extra amount of cash or runway that you don’t have. And of course, no one will guarantee that this shift will mean success for the project.

One of the companies I previously worked with, ExpoTV, had not one, but two major pivots. In a candid interview, Bill Hildebolt shared some thoughts about this process with Zack Mansfield:

Having been an entrepreneur for a few years now, I believe the truism that every technology start-up pivots. That said, I also believe successful entrepreneurs start with an idea that they are passionate about. So it’s somewhat paradoxical: to be a successful entrepreneur, you need to be passionate about an idea. But to have a successful company, you have to throw that idea out and do something different. I think this goes a long to explaining the failure rate at start-ups and also why you see so many founders leave relatively early in a company’s development.

Eric Reis, who has written The Lean Startup book talks about pivots in this blog post:

I want to introduce the concept of the pivot, the idea that successful startups change directions but stay grounded in what they’ve learned. They keep one foot in the past and place one foot in a new possible future. Over time, this pivoting may lead them far afield from their original vision, but if you look carefully, you’ll be able to detect common threads that link each iteration. By contrast, many unsuccessful startups simply jump outright from one vision to something completely different. These jumps are extremely risky, because they don’t leverage the validated learning about customers that came before.

It is important that your recognize the signs that your startup needs to pivot well in advance, so that you change direction and align the resources before it’s too late. Some of these signs can be:

• Internal: like the sales department that reports that it’s becoming too hard to sell the client, or technology constantly having to change features on projects that had a committed deadline.
• External: like customer service calls ramping up or competitors becoming all of a sudden successful in areas where you dominated, thanks to a better approach to the business requirement.

So when is the right time to pivot?

• I think it’s a gut feeling more than anything. As a founder, or as a CTO or VP of Engineering, you feel that something’s not right. Gather the group and talk openly about the issues.
• When the project fails to hit specific goals in its allotted time. For this to work you need to be clear on your metrics: for example sales revenue goals or millions of unique visitors.
• When your customers tell you to change. Don’t get too sold on your idea, be open to hear criticisms and embrace change. It might not mean that you’ll change your business plan every time a customer tells you to, but learn to see trends from your customer feedback.

The most important thing is not to trash everything you’ve done. A pivot, in essence is changing direction by leaning on what you’ve learned. In basketball, the pivot is done by rotating the body, but anchoring one foot in the ground. If a pivot means starting a completely new idea, don’t do it. But sometimes a small change of direction can mean the difference of continuing afloat or joining the startup graveyard.

In a recursive theme, this blog post is a pivot to this blog. I’ve decided, after three years of blogging about technology in general that I want to start writing about all the things I’ve learned as a tech lead in startups in the last 10 years. If you want to keep reading about social media and technology in general, there are many blogs out there that do a better job at it. But if you work in startup, either you’re a founder or you’re thinking about starting one, I will be a good resource as I go through my experience in participating in the crazy world of technology entrepreneurship.

Blogs are becoming harder and harder to maintain. Some are calling blogs dead.

My blog hasn’t been the exception. It’s not that I don’t have ideas that I want to continue discussing with you, my faithful readers. It’s more that the platforms where to put those ideas are becoming more and more powerful.

Take a look at this Google+ post. Aside from blowing your mind because of its great concept, it contains two of the things that any dream blog post has: amazing content and great feedback (1,344 pluses and 1,686 shares). It even made Techmeme and Philip Kaplan calls it “one of the best blog posts I’ve ever read”.

But it’s not a blog post. Or is it?

This begs the question: why maintain a blog anymore? Why would someone come all the way here, to my little dark corner to participate, if I could just type this same text on Google+ or Tumblr or any of the other great social platforms?

Here are some reasons I can think of:

• A blog can become a community of people that doesn’t necessarily participate in one of those platforms. Even though those posts can be read by anyone, participating might require people registering in that platform. In here, anyone can come in and leave a comment just by entering their name and email.
• I still believe that personal branding might be better managed in your own blog. For example here in my blog I have my posts, my Google Reader shares and my full bio. I could have links to personal projects, and other useful content areas that might not be possible using other platforms.
• There is a slight chance that these services disappear, taking your content with them. Even though this is hard with more established companies, just look at what happened with Google Buzz. Is there a guarantee that Google+ won’t close in the future? No.

There is also something about perseverance. Continue building something that didn’t exist and slowly see it become something bigger as time goes by. It’s not about fame or making it your full time job. It’s about the little seed that becomes a small plant.

So for those 190+ faithful readers who wait for my posts to come around, hang tight. I will continue writing my ideas right here.

I ain’t goin’ nowhere.

As many people can attest to, specially if you are a Generation X’er, I used to buy vinyl records when I was a teenager. Yes, they were fragile, could get scratched easily and if you played them too many times, they would become unusable.

But for me, vinyls represent the long form of an artist’s vision. You would listen to each side in its entirety, just like reading a novel, each song had a place in the story, like a chapter. I would specially like to hear my albums late at night, when everyone was asleep, using a pair of huge leather headphones my dad used to own. I would close my eyes and really listen to the music.

After years of licensing battles, Spotify, a music service that comes from London and has been available there for a long time, finally launched this week in the U.S. After struggling a bit for an invitation, I was finally let in. And all I can say is that I was like a child again, seeing all my vinyl records in front of me, but this time in digital format.

The Battle for Legal Music

When Napster came out it was a revelation. You could potentially build a library of all your favorite music, but the effort at times was really hard. A lot of times albums weren’t complete, or the quality of the music wasn’t very good. Sometimes the songs weren’t even the songs, but some teenager’s joke.

And of course, it was all illegal.

A few years passed and Apple came out with iTunes. This time it was okay to get the albums, because you were paying for them, so they had to be legal, right? Unfortunately, it was more like a lease. Apple had a lock on all songs so that you were limited to have it in a small number of Apple devices and don’t even think you could share it with any of your friends. Also their catalogue was tiny and it was very hard to get any of those old records.

Lately my hopes were put on Google Music. But after negotiations with labels fell through, Google Music was no more and no less than a music library in the cloud. But it was your music, so you had to upload your whole library, and of course without the capacity of looking for songs outside of your library.

A music tool that finally gets it right

Spotifiy (which Napster’s original founder brought to life in the U.S.), gets all the previous points right.

First and foremost, their library is huge. Yes, there’ll be the indie lovers cry of despair that their records are not in Spotify, but for the vast majority of music fans you will find all the records from your childhood to the latest Arctic Monkeys. And everything is hyperlinked, so you can jump from artist to albums to recommendations… you will lose yourself grabbing as much of this content initially as a hungry man who’s let in on a free banquet.

But then you’ll discover some other nice things. For one, Spotify is a desktop app, not a web portal, which I love, because that means I get a fast response for any action and can manage better my offline content. The first time you download the application, Spotify will identify, using advanced song recognition, what it is exactly that you have in your computer, then it will match with its own cloud content, and at the end you will have a beautiful creature that’s half your library and half Spotify’s library. But it’s a complete creature nonetheless.

Then you’ll see how spot on its social aspect is done. Its integrated with Facebook, so you’ll be able to start off with that social graph, but then can start augmenting that with other Spotify users across other social networks (you can find me here). Sharing playlists and recommending music is a one-touch experience. All playlists, albums, artists and songs have a unique Spotify URL that you can share, tweet or email to other Spotify users. After you use Spotify’s social layer, you won’t be able to look at Ping ever again.

Finally you will appreciate the mobile app that lets you decide which playlists or albums you want to have on your cellphone and which you want to stream, as long as you have internet connectivity. It’s all very intuitive. If you have an Android and an iPod like I did, you’ll just ditch the iPhone.

The future of albums

In an interview with Om Malik, Daniel Ek, Spotify’s founder, says the following:

The reason we had an album with 10-14 songs was because of the physical limitations of the format. It was the same with vinyl records. On digital there is no physical limitation so the very idea of what is an album can be different. Now an artist can release one song every two weeks. Or she can create an audio-visual experience around the song. I want Spotify to become a platform around music so artists can innovate around Spotify. And at the same time music listeners can vote with their hands and attention and become involved in the creation of the music experience itself.

I can certainly see that vision becoming a reality. It’s just a matter of time before artists start thinking in terms of long-form music again, and not selling songs as one-hit wonders, the market that iTunes has been killing them with.

I look forward again to putting those big leather headphones and listening to a story, and not just random chapters.

When I first got into Google+ (thanks to my fellow blogger Rob Diana) I was expecting to see, as everyone else, what Google had developed to finally put a good dent into the social media space. We all saw this chart emerge from AllThingsD where Facebook was basically killing, in terms of time spent on site, all other websites. It was not only in the best interest of Google to put out a good social product to compete with Facebook. We’re talking about the possible death of a massive corporation.

But as I used Google+ more and more, it finally hit me. This is not a Social product. It’s a curation product.

I think Mahendra Palsule is on the right track with his post.

Unlike Quora, where users/moderators need to manually tag Questions to fit their taxonomy, Google could easily auto-tag questions. Further, it could easily AutoComplete your Question in a way Quora could only hope. And even further, in many situations, Google could answer your question without waiting for a human being to respond.

You see, Facebook’s approach has been from the inside out. Post updates for your friends to see. Google on the other hand is taking the outside in approach. Let’s put the +1 button all over the web, make it the web’s most ubiquitous “Like” button and then make a place where people can add more metadata around those pieces of content.

I read yesterday’s piece on Forbes and I was laughing out loud.

By all accounts its a collection of things already offered by Facebook and others, without any remarkable new packaging (see BusinessInsider.com“Google’s Launch of Google + is, once again, deeply embarrassing” or “Google Plus looks like everything else” or “Wow, Google+ looks EXACTLY like Facebook.”) With Facebook closing in on 1 billion users, it’s probably too late – and will be far too expensive, for Google to ever catch the big lead. Especially with Facebook in China, and Google noticably not.

Google+ is not trying to go after Facebook. That is not what they’re trying to do.

Robert Scoble might be right. People won’t just abandon Facebook. But they will see the +1 button and they will see the ever present black navbar with the red notification counter staring at them and they’ll have only one way to go.

And let me just remind you a little tidbit. People basically hate Facebook.

There is a strong wind blowing the Cloud space these days, and we are about to be part of a great shift in computing.

Web apps seem to be the next logical frontier to be reached, where URLs will be a thing of the past. ReadWriteWeb wrote the following about the new version of Google Chrome:

With the address bar disappearing further into the background, Web apps will again take on an increased relevance, as users navigate by clicking on Web app icons, rather than typing in URLs – much as they are used to navigating OSX or Windows. In many ways, URLs are a holdover from a past time. Just as we don’t type command line strings into a DOS window on a Windows machine very much if ever anymore, Google wants our Web experience to consist of point and click, not mistaken backslashes and misspelled domain names.

We all have heard about Google’s new Chromebook:

Today Google announced a new netbook offering, called Chromebook. It’s being touted as a new kind of computer that offers “nothing but the web.” A chromebook will look like a laptop, only it won’t have any software programs or storage space. The only thing it has is a web browser, from which you will be able to access your email (from Gmail or other online mail services), calendar (Google calendar), documents (most likely from Google Docs), social networks (like Facebook) and any other web-based service.

Yes, you read that right. It has no storage space. Are we falling into an always connected paradigm where internet connections don’t fail?

Fred Wilson wrote recently:

On the flight west to SF this past week, I did the entire 6 hour flight on my Nexus S with gogo inflight mobile. I was streaming music using rdio, blogging on typepad, doing mail and calendaring on google apps, and reading blogs on the android browser. It worked great.

What would’ve happened if Fred was flying JetBlue, which famously doesn’t support wifi on their planes? Or what if the plane itself had an issue with its wifi antenna?

That is where I thought Apple, with its iCloud announcement, would finally teach the world how Cloud computing is done. We need local storage, people! Jobs did reveal some interesting things, but unfortunately with one major flaw: all the content lives in all the devices, not part of it. So it’s an all or nothing proposition. There’s a couple of  other major gripes, like the fact that all the iCloud music that you lose is Re-DRM’d when you download again, as Om Malik comments:

Until then, Apple’s practice of serving up DRMed downloads to paying customers more than two years after the company announced with big fanfares that it would abandon DRM serves as an important reminder: Once businesses and consumers buy into a copy protection scheme, they’re gonna have a hard time getting rid of it.

I also hate the fact that the iCloud for photos will only store the last 1,000 photos of your library. Why? Why not let me pay extra and have my 10,000 photos on your service?

There are two Google applications that I think are doing the right Cloud approach:

1. Google Music Beta: Yes, it’s painful to watch your whole library get uploaded via a crappy upstream connection, but once it’s up, the sky is the limit (pun intended). You can listen to your whole library in any computer or Android phone without having to download any of it. But, if you want to consume certain albums in the subway, you can flag albums or playlists for offline use in your Android device. The Google Music for Android app also lets you do smart caching of songs or albums you listen to often without having to mark them manually.
2. Picasa: This was a piece of software I tried several times over the years and was never convinced about it. I decided to give it another try this week and I was amazed at how good it has become (I tried the Mac Version of it). What I love about most about it is that it’s a hybrid: it’s a local client (or app) that let’s you scan your iPhoto or other folders locally, and then you can edit them, crop them, rotate them, geotag them, and once your content is up to par, you create albums that then you can “smart sync” with Picasa’s web albums. Once this is done, any changes to the albums either on the web or on your local computer, are synced with other machines. If you need more storage, you can pay (cheaply) for it. Once you have all your photo libraries up, they are synced automatically to your Android device, without downloading them. I believe a low-res thumbnail is downloaded to your phone and once you click on any photo, the high-res version is streamed down from the cloud.

Gmail and Google Docs are the 900 pound gorilla here, as they don’t offer offline access for your data. This is such a priority in my mind that I don’t understand why Google hasn’t solved it yet (reportedly they’re working on it).

The best approach for a successful cloud model, I believe, to have the cloud as the central repository with all the data in it (and pay for whatever space is needed), but allow users both online and offline selective access from any device anywhere either via apps or web portals.

Anything else is just an unacceptable fog.

I’ve been an EC2 customer for 3 years now, and have been using Rackspace for the past 3 months. But I’ve been reading or hearing this question for what feels like an eternity:

Which one is better, Rackspace Cloud Servers or Amazon EC2?

To add fuel to the fire, Dave Winer recently posted an article where he claims that the Rackspace servers he tested were “meatier” than the EC2 instance he was using:

I chose the cheapest option on Rackspace, a 1GB 32-bit Windows 2003 server that costs $0.08 per hour, which works out to $59 per month. Significantly less than the $90 a mini-server costs on Amazon.

I find it very dangerous to throw out an assessment like this, just based on a specific application that happens to have more memory requirements or more I/O (hard disk operations) and specially without putting some context around it.

So in this post, I wanted to share with you some personal insights on both services.

The Cost

To be able to do a fair comparison, I chose an Amazon Small Instance versus the Rackspace 2048 MB RAM/80 GB HD.

According to the Amazon pricing page a Small Instance is defined as:

Small Instance (Default) 1.7 GB of memory, 1 EC2 Compute Unit (1 virtual core with 1 EC2 Compute Unit), 160 GB of local instance storage, 32-bit platform

The normal cost for that is $0.085 per hour, which comes out at an average of $62.064 per month.

However, using reserved instances, the cost comes down to $0.03 per hour. To get a reserved instance, you pay a one-time yearly fee of $227.50. If we now recalculate the yearly cost and divide by 12, we end up with an average of  $40.85 per month.

Rackspace’s closest offering is a server with 2,048 MB of memory and 80 GB of local storage. Bear in mind you have more RAM but half of the hard drive. The cost for that server is $87.58 per month.

That means that, with a one year commitment, a similar server in Amazon costs almost 50% less than in Rackspace.

Performance

Each application is very different, and it’s always good to keep a close watch at your database bottlenecks, caching and memory usage. But I have to say I’ve had complex applications running in both Rackspace and Amazon and I could not tell you in definite terms which service was more robust or powerful. Virtualization is a complex operation but as long as you keep lean on the hardware requirements, both services are very similar in performance.

The Advantages

Amazon feels like a more robust cloud service with the many products that live around the EC2 ecosystem. I’ll illustrate that with a story.

The first instance I started with Amazon ran without any issues for more than 3 years. I had an uptime of 1,200+ days on this instance where I run my blog and other personal projects. About a month ago, it started giving some memory issues and Amazon sent me an email saying that they would have to retire the server where the instance was hosted.

The first Rackspace server I started died two days later, losing all of its data.

This is where Amazon beats Rackspace: EBS’s or Elastic Block Stores. Simply put, these are “attachable” hard drives that you can connect or disconnect to any Amazon server. When you lose an Amazon instance unexpectedly, and you are storing all your data in an EBS, you can start a new instance and connect it to your EBS without losing a heartbeat. With Rackspace, the data lives in that instance’s harddrive, so if you lose it, you lose the data, so you better have timely backups in place.

This is one of many services that Amazon offers, like NoSQL databases (SimpleDB), Load Balancing, Queues, CDN and Email. Rackspace just offers servers and their CDN (CloudFiles).

Latency

One thing you want to avoid is to have a slow response time. Google has announced that it will even cost you SEO ranking if you have a slow site.

There is an amazing study done by Cedexis, where they measured the latency of the top cloud providers. After 15 Billion measurements in 220 countries, the answer was clear: Amazon servers were the fastest to respond.

The Bottom Line

I have to say cloud service are always dependent on what your specific needs are. To get the best ROI on Amazon, you need to commit to a server for a least a year in order to get the best prices. Some companies might have an issue with that.

I’ve also heard that Amazon’s support is no match for Rackspace fanatical customer service. The truth is there is a community of AWS fanatics that are more than happy to help out on the forums and on other social networks. There is a learning curve with Amazon that doesn’t exist with Rackspace, but once you’ve done your fair amount of practice (I’d say about one or two months) you will become an Amazon fan for life.

My wife works in television and film production, and one thing I can tell you is that producing quality content is very, very expensive. It takes a lot of effort by a lot of people (and don’t ask me about those fancy dressing room requests by actors).

On May 20, Google officially confirmed at their annual Google I/O conference that they had teamed up with Intel, Sony and other high profile companies to produce a media OS for Televisions that would “bring the Web to the TV, complete with a search box that finds content, no matter where the source”. Geeks like me were cheering. Louis Gray commented how this was the opportunity that Apple did not take:

The reason this has a much better chance to succeed than Apple TV ever could? Commitment. Commitment from the company’s leadership, from partners, and to the word they keep smacking us with – openness.

But back in August, before the official launch of the hardware units, there were reports of trouble brewing between studios and Google. According to the Wall Street Journal:

Google has met with officials of TV networks including ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC to encourage them to work with the service, according to people familiar with the matter. Content owners, though, are skeptical that Google can provide a business model that would compensate for potentially cannibalizing TV owners’ existing broadcast businesses.

Basically the issue is monetization — how will broadcasters recoup their production costs with banner ads? Even though the cannibalization of TV ad revenue continues to get worse, thanks to DVRs and Torrents, the content producers have an ecosystem that brings millions of dollars via distribution channels. Mark Cuban writes:

I personally can’t think of anything stupider for the big broadcast networks to do than give their shows to Google for free. Why ? Because they are finally getting BILLIONS of dollars in retransmission fees from their distributors.  This is new money. It is found money. It is money they are fighting for.  Just ask Fox and Cablevision what they think of each other this week.

Yesterday we heard how CBS, NBC and Disney started to actively block Google TV units to consume episodes from their websites including Hulu. A Google spokeswoman confirmed:

Google TV enables access to all the Web content you already get today on your phone and PC, but it is ultimately the content owners’ choice to restrict their fans from accessing their content on the platform.

So why didn’t Google strike partnerships with these major studios and networks before approaching manufacturers? I think it’s because they want to follow their product launching pattern: throw it at the wall and see if it sticks.

This, of course is not good news for Google TV’s other partners. They could end up with thousands of unsold units and repeat the fate of, say, HD-DVD.

Compare this to Netflix. Studios love Netflix because they offer a highly controlled distribution channel that is monetized from the start and with a controlled released window. Netflix is also being embedded on hardware units, so it’s a win-win for everyone.

Is it too late for Google TV? I don’t think so. Potentially Google could strike the right deal with the television studios. They have the green light from HBO, TBS and the NBA so far. It will be up to Google to strike the right business deal with the major networks, but of course this is easier said than done.

Users still get other benefits with the Google TV sets, like communicating with Twitter friends while watching a show, but the main attraction of Google TV is to do a search for content and consume it immediately no matter where it is. Take this functionality away and it will feel like a DVR with Twitter on it.

P.D.: Check out this thread on FriendFeed talking about this issue (thanks Higlet) and also this brilliant post by Om Malik

Illustration by Charlie Sorrell