ReadWriteWeb´s Josh Catone posted about HuddleChat, the App used by Google to Demo their App Engine, and found a strikingly resemblance with 37Signals Campfire and discovered some good tidbits from that resemblance because 37 Signals Jason Fried stated:

“We’re flattered Google thinks Campfire is a great product, we’re just disappointed that they stooped so low to basically copy it feature for feature, layout for layout,”

And he would be right just judging from the screenshot:

I mean, this is Google, ok, that is already shielded because the HudleChat app was developed apart from Google ties eve if done by Googlers. but it is pretty obvious it is a complete rip off. if this guys are from Google and where building this to Demo Google App Engine and were indeed producing a Copy of Campfire why the din´t:

1. Changed the orientation of the layout?
2. Change the measures of the design so it don´t looks the same?
3. Change the look so it looked more separated from the source?

Those are 3 very simple things they could have done to avoid claims of rip off. but they didn´t. one would blame the Googlers that did this because after all Google denied connection to this. but then there is the background behind campfire as written by Josh Catone:

“Another interesting wrinkle to this story: 37Signals is supported by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who invested in the company in July 2006, and the Chicago-based company’s web apps all run on Amazon’s web services platform, a competitor in many respects to Google App Engine. Could it be that Google purposely chose to clone one of Amazon web services’ greatest success story specifically to show off the power for their new platform? Perhaps it wasn’t a coincidence that Google unveiled App Engine at an event it called Campfire …”

Then it don´t seems like a coincidence, does it?. the most incredible part is the pro google sentiments of own ReadWriteWeb commenters in that post where they blast against 37 signals and supporting Google.

Need to be read to be believed

Another rare moment in Google App Engine debut is that we have underestimated TechCrunch traffic power or there is something fishy on the supposed limits of the App Engine because Techcurnch very simple app went down too fast to be true. i just don´t buy this..

And it was true, the error message is used for any kind of outage because Google App Engine also showed the same error when it got down. so much for unlimited scalability indeed..

Google App Engine is out and the premise is clear: Google against Amazon and Google getting ready to battle Microsoft when the latter decides to enter into the game.

The Google App Engine has been seen in the same way Blogger was when introduced previously to Google buyout: The Easiest Solution and for the masses.  the question is if it works as it should?

It does but there is doubt if it can really be used to host big projects. and if big projects will be using it since unlike Amazon web services. you choose a whole predefined package and not only the parts you only need like in Amazon web services where you chose from 3 parts, being able to use just one or all 3.

The Promises of Google are:

“Leveraging Google App Engine, developers can:

• Write code once and deploy. Provisioning and configuring multiple machines for web serving and data storage can be expensive and time consuming. Google App Engine makes it easier to deploy web applications by dynamically providing computing resources as they are needed. Developers write the code, and Google App Engine takes care of the rest.
• Absorb spikes in traffic. When a web app surges in popularity, the sudden increase in traffic can be overwhelming for applications of all sizes, from startups to large companies that find themselves rearchitecting their databases and entire systems several times a year. With automatic replication and load balancing, Google App Engine makes it easier to scale from one user to one million by taking advantage of Bigtable and other components of Google’s scalable infrastructure.
• Easily integrate with other Google services. It’s unnecessary and inefficient for developers to write components like authentication and e-mail from scratch for each new application. Developers using Google App Engine can make use of built-in components and Google’s broader library of APIs that provide plug-and-play functionality for simple but important features. “

And the set of features is described as:

But as with everything Google, where all is half truth and half reality, the initial limitations are severe and cannot give a exact projection on when we will see the full service running as it was envisionaed and much less if it will run in such a way.

Via Google App Engine Blog and Techcrunch

This isn’t actually a $2.6 million pizza, just simply an image of a pizza. Allthough On Wednesday Gigoam mentioned that pizza.com was up for auction and after many bids finally it was bought and the original owner Chris Clark, who registered the domain 14 years ago, has turned $20 a year in renewal payments into millions of dollars.

I’m thinking of buying a pizza from Pizza hut for $20 and keeping it for 14 years and then selling it on ebay or… The web 8.0 equivalent.

Pizza.com is now a site which “has everything about pizza” on it including a Pizza forum. There is also Pizza coupons!

The sun micro systems sponsored project Open Office which I’m a big fan off myself, promises that Open Office 3.0 will be the future of word processing, spreadsheets and database management.

“For years, there have been talks of including Mozilla’s Thunderbird and Lightning (calendar) application with OpenOffice.org. However, not much has come of it yet. Perhaps with the financial resources of the new Mozilla Messaging Corporation, the Mozilla Calendar will get the boost it needs,” says the author.

A sneak peek on a developer blog OpenOffice Ninja shows a new and easier-to-understand start screen featuring the main applications, and overhauls of the Writer application to better compete with Microsoft’s Word. That application can now display pages side by side, allows notes to be added in the margins of copy a la Word, while the Calc spreadsheet also features a large number of small tweaks to improve usability.

The suite will be able to cope seamlessly with Office 2007’s XML-based file formats, though the blogger notes that the current development skeleton manages this with mediocre results.

It’s also apparent that OpenOffice 3.0 appears to be modeled on a layout one generation behind Microsoft’s Fluent interface, which admittedly not everyone has taken to.

Others maintain that the whole model of deskbound productivity applications is obsolete, foreseeing a future in which businesses and individuals instead use lightweight online applications such as Google’s Docs . It is likely, however, that all models will flourish in their own way– desktop behemoths such as Office, alternatives such as OpenOffice, and online apps — being embraced by users for different purposes.