That’s Google Buzz of course. Google botched the first rule of Internet Service — let the customer choose. I was introduced to Buzz by it just showing up on my Gmail account. Which I promptly turned off.

Google has since come to its senses on the deployment issue and is working on resolving certain privacy concerns. Buzz itself clearly shows it underpinnings as a response by Google to its social rival Facebook. But it also shows that Google is not immune to the ‘absurdity at the edges’ that befall many companies. The idea being that taken to extremes good ideas like Search and Gmail can be extended into places that are really not a good fit. Buzz as service in Gmail being a prime example.

Buzz is probably a much better fit if it were part of Google Reader, Scholar and News. I am sure they will figure that out.

Lets just get to the meat of it ok. Then more after the jump —

Google is planning to launch an experiment that we hope will make Internet access better and faster for everyone. We plan to test ultra-high speed broadband networks in one or more trial locations across the country. Our networks will deliver Internet speeds more than 100 times faster than what most Americans have access to today over 1 gigabit per second, fiber-to-the-home connections. We’ll offer service at a competitive price to at least 50,000 and potentially up to 500,000 people.

From now until March 26th, we’re asking interested municipalities to provide us with information about their communities through a Request for information (RFI), which we’ll use to determine where to build our network.

That’s from the website.

Now notice this is not some high speed to the head end sort of offer. They specifically say FTH. So they intend to go right to the curb. Their testing will test some 50-500k patrons. What is not clear, is that a single site or a mix of smaller sites.

Google goes on to say they will provide —

* Next generation apps: We want to see what developers and users can do with ultra high-speeds, whether it’s creating new bandwidth-intensive “killer apps” and services, or other uses we can’t yet imagine.

* New deployment techniques: We’ll test new ways to build fiber networks; to help inform, and support deployments elsewhere, we’ll share key lessons learned with the world.

* Openness and choice: We’ll operate an “open access” network, giving users the choice of multiple service providers. And consistent with our past advocacy, we’ll manage our network in an open, non-discriminatory, and transparent way.

What I find of particular interest is the commitment to an open transport layer. A place where anyone can play? ISP and Google? If true that would be a game changer in the data transport marketplace. Fact if true it would complete a vision that was the reason that this blog was created for — create an open backbone and permit service providers to battle it out in the marketplace of products and services.

We keep our fingers crossed.

Linky.

Which in this case means that if Google wants to deliver it, and you want to use it, Google WILL find a way to do so. Even if the device mfr says NO! Well in this case its AT&T/Apple saying no to a Google Voice app on the iPhone.

Now I understand why AT&T did not want it, it hurts their voice traffic income. But do both of these partners realize the semi truck load of a mistake they just made? Had Google followed their original plan they would have locked the Google Voice into the app space of the iPhone architecture. Doing so would have meant Google duplicating that for any subsequent smart phone with the attendant hassles and costs of handling multiple variants of software. Now?

Now Google has turned the software and the iPhone into a VoIP TERMINAL. Unleashed from the underlying architecture Google Voice can now live on any device capable of handling HTML5. Any smart phone, MID, Nettop, Netbook, you name it. That single denial has unleashed a monster, at least for a Telco.

Very dumb AT&T.

Linky.

Yes Dear Reader a little TCO analysis can save you money. We have been saying for years that the shell game of free phone, payback is a b!@#$ thru the contract is a bear. It also hurts your wallet. –

He’s considering buying a data-only plan from T-Mobile and relying primarily on SkypeOut purchases, with a backup of free Gizmo5 calls through Google Voice, although new Gizmo5 sign-ups are currently suspended. That means little to no mobile calling (unless you used the free Guava app). Then again, Ben sees some significant savings by the end of what would be a two-year contract, and considers himself a “near-total” dependent on Google services. Could you imagine making the data-only jump?

Just go over to the lifehacker article and see for yourself. Keep in mind that the author is considering only going with a data only plan, 2yr contact. There are other considerations one can also employ. For instance, does your spouse have a phone with a carrier who does a Friend and Family deal? Why not punch the Google voice into the loop? Then the calls to her are free. And if perchance one has a small VoIP server then a VoIP app on the Nexus might avoid all the Gizmodo fiddling as well.

While we are on the subject. The Nexus Launch. A captured live blog feed is here with pics. Initial take — very iPhonish. But that seems to be where the jive is at the moment. The wise move being made? You can buy the phone separate and go with any vendor you wish. That’s a damn smart move, especially for the consumer.

I just hope the carriers are prepared for the bandwidth assault. This phone screams — Songbird App. But your data store staying on the home server and streamed to the Nexus as an audio terminal. Oh and anybody out there developing a multiparty audio remix app for the Nexus. It would sell.

We have projected for 2 years that it was time for unbundling the phone. We would have expected it to happen before the smartphones took hold. But I guess it takes the extra functionality of the smartphone to force the issue on the carriers. Hope I am right but wrong.

Nexus one analysis.

Yeah, the Google charting API to be exact. This is not new news of course, but many times we forget that the service is there for the taking so to speak. Nor do you have to consider a lot of programming (like none) if your data is static. All you need to know is how to format the URL bar in your browser.

A very nice tutorial is available at Wired in the form of a Wiki How-To. Now if you know some programming in PHP, ASP or Python then your graphing content can be very dynamic. Like say a DB call in PHP to grab the data then a little magic to format it into a URL string that Google understands.

One last thing to consider. You can have your website generate the call every time for the graphic or capture the graph as an output image and display it statically. Your choice.

… In the billing system, or not as the case maybe. Consider YouTube. If they put up a ‘XX billion’ served like McDonalds, the number would 75 with a B. That is a ton of video to stream. The bill must be huge right? Not so fast –

I think Google’s transit costs are close to zero,” said Craig Labovitz, the chief scientist for Arbor Networks and a longtime internet researcher. Arbor Networks, which sells network monitoring equipment used by about 70 percent of the net’s ISPs, likely knows more about the net’s ebbs and flows than anyone outside of the National Security Agency.

Sound impossible? –

YouTube has been mum on its actual costs, for competitive reasons, but did say in blog post in July that it has homegrown infrastructure and that traditional pricing models don’t apply.

There’s been a lot of speculation lately about how much it costs to run YouTube…. The truth is that all our infrastructure is built from scratch, which means models that use standard industry pricing are too high when it comes to bandwidth and similar costs. We are at a point where growth is definitely good for our bottom line, not bad.

In fact, YouTube’s low or nonexistent bandwidth bill points to a very important shift in the structure of the internet, which is rapidly becoming much more complicated.

Couple of facts make this near zero billing possible –

Care for your own.

In this particular regard you maintain your own equipment and internals. No different from any other enterprise. But like anything else scale is to the big guys advantage in some ways. With service automation number of servers becomes immaterial. Fact as a provider one has to achieve a certain size to justify something like BigFix, InSight or Tivoli.

Dark Fiber.

In the heady days of the mid to late 90’s nearly anybody with a slit trencher was farming out as a fiber deployment contractor. People were burying fiber with intentions of filling in up with all those office buildings going up. Most of it private rated dark fiber, not controlled by State or Federal rate rules. (Hence the term.)

Well that little effort didn’t pan out and so that fiber sits there only partially used. So along comes somebody like Google who needs transport they can either lease a chunk or if pricing is really good they might even buy certain holdings along certain routes. They are buying the route probably for a lot less than it cost to bury that fiber originally.

Net Cross Billing.

The deals by the major ISP’s are for net billing. If ISP A transports $10k worth of bits to ISP B. The ISP B. transport $11k worth of bits to ISP A the total billing that goes into settlement is the net cost a $1k. Most of the agreements also have trigger points so that cutting checks may not occur between parties till say a $50k threshold has been reached.

That helps Google on the budget. Google might burn up a $100k/month bill in transport to/from NYC to a Barcelona carrier. However the Barcelona carrier is looking for a route to Chicago. Google just happens to have such a route. So the two do a trade. Over the long term an entity like Google looks for these trade opportunities to reduce transport expenses.

Edge Networking Providers.

In the same vein the Net Cross Billing above works with the edge storage providers (eg Akami). The point of a edge provider is that they store that video on a system close to the end consumer. No need to transport that video from San Mateo to Tampa when its on a server in Tampa.

A Google or Yahoo would trade free transport with the edge provider for consideration to storage on the edge providers servers. Rates determined in the trade before hand.

So it is quite possible that in all the trading, handoffs and give and take that Google and YouTube could in some months see cash flows in from all the deals. Its a form of arbitrage that would make Corporal Klinger proud.

Pretty neat trick for Google/YouTube that represents 10% of all the traffic on the Internet.

Read the whole thing.

Linky.

Yes I told you so. More than once. Net neutrality is a paper tiger. The duopoly is seeing to that handily. Rules written by the revolving door insiders at the FCC will never be a positive agent of change.  AT&T is using Google as the boogeyman in its quest to twist the new rules to effectively rub out any potential competitor. We may very well get new “net neutrality” rules that will only make the situation worse.

In a letter to the FCC (PDF) this week, AT&T went on the attack to portray Google as a big powerful company that’s trying to fool the FCC into believing that the rules shouldn’t apply to it. In the letter, AT&T is still trying to cover all of its bases. That means that, at times, it’s hard to follow which arguments it’s trying to make - the one about Google Voice or the one about net neutrality. And it doesn’t help that it stooped a little too low by referencing a convent of Benedictine nuns in a list of those who were handicapped by having calls to their numbers blocked to and from Google Voice numbers.  (ZDnet)

There are problems with AT&T’s posturing that could more permanently lock us into duopoly dominance. Since Google has gottten big and scary,  it’s an easy target, but there more to this. If enacted, net neutrality rules should ONLY apply to companies who have last mile right of ways and / or wireless spectrum. If the holder of spectrum will provide equal network access to competitors it should be exempt. Google owns no spectrum, no right of ways and does not charge for Google voice which does not even directly connect a telephone call. Calling it a competing phone service is like saying Colgate in in the dentistry business. The real reason behind AT&T’s attack on Google is to have rules written that will force providers of virtual services into the same regulatory framework that governs entities that have monopolies in last mile access or wireless spectrum. The net effect of the regulations AT&T wants would impair the ability of every VoIP, online entertainment and interactive online service to compete against a protected monopoly. There probably  are anti  competitive  issues in the way Google is doing business. They should be considered on their own merit and not used a lever to enslave us to a duopoly for the next several decades.

The only way to get open networks is with an open market. If a duopoly must exist. the only fix is to require it to divest from non access businesses.

Well unless you were on an airplane, sailing or camping far from any cell tower, GMail was down for a while yesterday. Such is the one pitfall of using cloud based services. Excerpt from Google’s post on the matter –

Gmail’s web interface had a widespread outage earlier today, lasting about 100 minutes. We know how many people rely on Gmail for personal and professional communications, and we take it very seriously when there’s a problem with the service. Thus, right up front, I’d like to apologize to all of you — today’s outage was a Big Deal, and we’re treating it as such. We’ve already thoroughly investigated what happened, and we’re currently compiling a list of things we intend to fix or improve as a result of the investigation.

Here’s what happened: This morning (Pacific Time) we took a small fraction of Gmail’s servers offline to perform routine upgrades. This isn’t in itself a problem — we do this all the time, and Gmail’s web interface runs in many locations and just sends traffic to other locations when one is offline.

However, as we now know, we had slightly underestimated the load which some recent changes (ironically, some designed to improve service availability) placed on the request routers — servers which direct web queries to the appropriate Gmail server for response. At about 12:30 pm Pacific a few of the request routers became overloaded and in effect told the rest of the system “stop sending us traffic, we’re too slow!”. This transferred the load onto the remaining request routers, causing a few more of them to also become overloaded, and within minutes nearly all of the request routers were overloaded. As a result, people couldn’t access Gmail via the web interface because their requests couldn’t be routed to a Gmail server. IMAP/POP access and mail processing continued to work normally because these requests don’t use the same routers.

Well of course they blame the router guys! In some 30yrs of IT it has always been, when in doubt on an issue, blame the network group. Lived that one so often in post action review committees to know better. But it could be the case. But it does not matter when you offer a cloud service. The service is represented by the totality of what makes it run, not just some servers. Which to the point, you would think that one of the steps in a swing over would be sending a test message from the backup resource and see if you receive it.

Am I down on Google for the mishap? Nope. You know the old line ‘Beggars can’t be choosers’ tends to apply here. Google provides an essential free service that on the main runs quite well. In the several years I have been using it this is only the second time I have not been able to reach the GMail in a span of an hour.

Linky.

In opposing petitioner’s application, the Anonymous Blogger contends that petitioner is not entitled to pre-action discovery because she cannot demonstratte a meritorious claim for defamation. The Anonymous Blogger asserts that the statements on the Blog, which appear as captions to provacative photographs which the Blogger alleges were posted by petitioner herself, are “non-actionalble opinion and/or hyperbole, “and that no reasonable viewer of the Blog would conclude that the statements referring to petitioner purport to convey verifiable statements of fact. The Blogger argues that the words “skank” and “ho” are not statements of objective fact which cabe proven true or false; rather the words are used in a “loose hyperbolic” manner, and “have become a popular form of ‘trash talk’ ubiquitous across the Internet as well as network television and should be treated no differently than ‘jerk’ or any other form of loose and vague insults that the Constitution protects.” …

Do you Dear Reader believe that one? I hope not. Conversation, even trash talk is composed as a duality. Regardless of the intent of the sender, the actionable component, legally is triggered by the reader/listener. One needs to keep that in mind before one pumps innuendo and presumptions out on the Net.

I am not saying go out of your way to not offend anyone. But a little common sense is in order. This is the kind of stuff in the physical world has been pretty settled law. The fact that it is on the Internet somewhere just puts a new twist to it.

Oh and by the way. Google DID cough up the who in that court case. So just because you use a handle does not mean you are free and clear of any consequence of your actions. The Internet has a long memory and never forgets.

More here.

In the last two weeks there has been a lot of buzz on the RSS and Twitter feeds about the new Android Scripting Environment. If its a lot of volume, and this is, its usually one of two things — either this is a ‘Big Thing’ or its from Google. Well it is from Google. But it could also be a ‘Big Thing’ –

The Android Scripting Environment (ASE) brings scripting languages to Android by allowing you to edit and execute scripts and interactive interpreters directly on the Android device. These scripts have access to many of the APIs available to full-fledged Android applications, but with a greatly simplified interface that makes it easy to:

• Handle intents
• Start activities
• Make phone calls
• Send text messages
• Scan bar codes
• Poll location and sensor data
• Use text-to-speech (TTS)
• And more

Scripts can be run interactively in a terminal, started as a long running service, or started via Locale. Python, Lua and BeanShell are currently supported, and we’re planning to add Ruby and JavaScript support, as well.

Here’s the deal. If you wanted to do development on Android you set up a box to do the development on. Wrote your apps, did the integration, cloned it then put the result to your target platform. Not impossible stuff but involved and required more assets to do the job. With ASE you are liberated from that.

For an application developer that means they can write a python app in ASE. So long as they keep in mind the limitations of each of the intended target platforms (not all platforms are required to maintain the same suite of APIs) then their code can run on all of them! So the flash app you saw on the coke machine could be downloaded and be running on your ASE enabled HTC handheld or netbook of the future. That is the ‘Big Thing’ about ASE.

But it also brings the world of Legacy Python, LUA and BeanShell to the Android world. Were I Apple, this announcement (June 8 ) would make me extremely nervous. This is a platform environment with no lock-in. We know how that battle usually ends up don’t we?

Read the announcement here.