So come on, Googs, help him out.

Case in point, this hit from today over at Social Alerter:

Is it just me or is this beyond comical now?

Is this a bug or account specific? Each of the reports I see are different.

I just had an "OMG this will change the world!" kind of moment while playing for just 5 minutes with Google's App Engine. Let me explain.

A bit of background first: The Google App Engine is a newly-launched service from Google, that for a change, seems to be well thought out. The service offers a Python-only environment (for now) to build applications locally and host them on Google's vast infrastructure. The idea here is that you don't have to worry about scaling your application to handle massive traffic and let the App Engine running on Google's servers deal with it. The Engine comes with lots of goodies like handling database stuff, user logins (and what a boon that will be for Google accounts), and others. All in all, a nice comfy environment for rapid application development and reliable hosting.

But from all the buzz on the net, I think there is something missing that I just hinted at above:

to build applications locally and host them on Google's vast infrastructure

App Engine comes with its own development setup that runs off your computer (available for Windows, OSX, and Linux). You develop the application on your computer, run it, test it, add features, and then upload it to Google's computers. My question is this: What's stopping Google from turning the local development code into a full desktop-based runtime for web applications? Why keep it as a development-only environment?

Let's look at this from another angle: the desktop-webapp integration market. Adobe recently released their oddly-named AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime). In the AIR-world, you can write applications in HTML/CSS/JS or Actionscript and package them into desktop applications that run within AIR or within the Flash player in the browser. The AIR environment is available for Windows and Macs, and Linux support is on the way. Brilliant move: one code base, both browser and desktop functionality.

Microsoft also has a similar play in the form of .Net, and more specifically Silverlight. The .Net runtime is available for many devices and platforms (mobile, desktop, and I think even the XBox). With Silverlight, Microsoft's play is to give developers a platform to use .Net in the browser; this is coming in Silverlight 2.0 this summer. So with this, again, one code base can be used on the web and on the desktop to give true multi-platform programming.

There are other entries in this market, Mozilla Prism being a prominent example. They all promise the same thing: one code, many places to run it with varying details.

Now back to App Engine and to the question I posed: imagine Google comes out with a desktop runtime/environment that turns App Engine webapps into desktop-based apps. This will be directly parallel to Adobe's AIR but with a big difference: the same code will also be easily deployable on a reliable and scalable infrastructure - Adobe doesn't have that.

There is another difference: because of the way App Engine works, you could easily imagine it talking to Google Apps like Google Docs etc. A desktop App Engine will bring Google's applications onto the desktop and open up a market-disrupting war: direct office productivity competition with Microsoft. To rephrase, App Engine could be Google's way to enter Microsoft's turf on the desktop.

So any evidence for this? Nothing solid, so it's all speculation, but I'll point to three hints:

• The name. It's not App Server or App Service but App Engine. Google understands branding well enough (it's arguably the main source of their traffic) so their choice of words here is intriguing. And I can't help but think that Google's App Engine will drive some sort of Google Gears. Nudge, nudge, wink, wink.
• When creating an application, you can specify that only users of a certain Google Apps domain can use the app. This integration with Google Apps is perhaps hinting at bigger things to come.
• The APIs available in App Engine: already App Engine supports dealing with mail, and given the point above, you can imagine an API for the other Google Apps. This would enable a go for the desktop market.

What do you think? I think this is the best move out of Google yet and as disruptive as AdWords was.

I've had it. The live.com spambot, aka msnbot, is officially not welcome either here or at Social Alerter. Why? The bot is still referral spamming. How much? 100% of my live.com referrals at Social Alerter are actually the bot's spam. Granted the absolute number of hits is only in the low tens, but it is not right and such behavior is no longer welcome. And no, the constant lies that this behavior has stopped do not help.

For a background on this, start here, then read this post, and close off with the follow up.

Bye, bye. I hope to see you never.

The question is *what* will I do with the account? It may be a few days before I dive in properly See you @twitter

First things first. We're not dealing with hackers. Nosiree, we're dealing with crackers. A hacker is a well-seasoned coder. A cracker is a hacker who exploits security holes for nefarious purposes.

With semantics out of the way, here are some suggestions:

• Googlebomb yourself: If you get attacked with, for example, the Slash One Wordpress exploit, essentially you're going to get a lot of spammy "content" pages and lots of links to them. So what happens if you use .htaccess or otherwise to redirect all request to wp-content/1/* to, say, your site's home page? Or why not to your newly minted, specially created, [Texas holdem play online] site? Hey, you're probably going to get a lot of traffic, so use it! Here is the code:
  RewriteEngine On

  RewriteRule wp-content/1(.*)$ http://my-new-spammy-aff-site.com [R]
  Essentially, you'll googlebomb yourself with their links and use their traffic.
• Use robots.txt as a defensive tool: A search engine doesn't need to see wp-content anyway, so block it:
  User-agent: *

  Disallow: /wp-content
• It's the keywords stupid: you just got someone dump a load of keyword-laden pages with targeted keyword links back to them. Hello? Anyone care to turn this into a keyword research tool? Here is the pseudocode for the tool:
  Do a Google search for [inurl:wp-content/1]

  Scrape the URLs from the SERPs

  Scrape the spammy URLs

  For each spammy URL, do a [link:] search

  Scrape the backlinks and extract the anchor texts

  Save the keywords along with the spammy HTML

  Write a front-end to search the database
• Report them! Figure out the IP address of the person who uploaded the spammy pages and report them. If you get trackback spam to the spammy pages, find the IP address of the trackback spammers and report them. Most SEO spammers will be using hosting services and their own computers. It is possible (although I'm guessing unlikely) they'll be using a proper botnet.

So like pretty much in SEO, perhaps even this can be dealt with using some creativity... I'm sure there are better ways to deal with such spam, and the idea is to think about the opportunities here. Good luck!

I'm seeing this on my new service Social Alerter. The request details:

• Remote: livebot-65-55-165-77.search.live.com (65.55.165.77)
• UA: of Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.2; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)
• Referring URL: http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=social&mrt=en-us&FORM=LIVSOP

Full list of IP addresses doing this:

1. 65.55.165.90
2. 65.55.165.43
3. 65.55.165.96
4. 65.55.165.120
5. 65.55.165.100
6. 65.55.165.76
7. 65.55.165.16

The fake search queries are all either [social] or [alerts].

Anyone else seeing this? It's clearly not fixed as they claimed and is starting to get annoying.

Well now you can get a warning. Over the past few months, I've been slowly building a service called Social Alerter. Social Alerter is a free service that alerts you when your websites are about to go popular on Digg and delicious. You can monitor as many sites as you want and once it finds one, it sends you an email. You can use it to monitor your own sites, your competitors' sites (ha ), and your favorite sites. You simply sign up and know that there is an eye out doing all the leg work.

This is the service in a nutshell. I've written a huge help section and if you read just one page, read the Social Alerter crash course.

January

January is probably the best month of 2007. It kicked off the year with my first ever digg home pager, me doing a live podcast/talkshow, and the first rant of the year which set the pace for the months to come

It wasn't all fun and joy though: in January, eKstreme.com suffered a DoS attack.

February

February brought lots of developments: I started moderating at Cre8 a Site Forums, easily the friendliest place on the net. The second Digg home pager arrived too, and a major statistical analysis of the Socializer data got a lot of people interested.

March-July

Very quiet period. In March, I was busy thinking about my online strategy about eKstreme.com, blogSci.com, and the other major property I owned back then, fontfox.com. The outcome of that is a major change (for the better!) monitization effort of eKstreme.com, a decision to keep blogSci.com ad-free, and realizing that I wasn't doing much with fontfox. In the end, fonfox got sold in May.

In July, this blog got its first ever guest post. It was a great piece. However, this effort to bring fresh blood into this site was a dud: a lot of other people agreed to blog post but none actually sent me stuff Waaah.

Of course, lots of ranty anti-Google posts were written in this period. Back then, Google thought it was OK to abuse user data in many ways. To this day I still think they are abusing our data and it will probably get worse in 2008.

June-August

While the blogging was quiet, a lot was happening in the background. The CMS of eKstreme.com has been showing its age and slowing things down. The strategic review in February concluded that this has to be fixed. So the whole site was moved to use Wordpress as the CMS, which involved a lot of hacking to get WP to like my SEO tools and not break them. I also moved hosts.

July onwards

I started taking a very close look at the bots/crawlers hitting eKstreme.com and blogSci.com. This research resulted in a lot of bot-related posts and insights. I'm still collecting data to learn more about how bots look like. By bots, I mean the more malicious scraper spammy types, not the nice ones like Googlebot and Slurp!.

Out of this also came the realization that msnbot was misbehaving. First, the authentication was broken, second, it was not obeying the robots.txt file, and thirdly, a very strange pattern of bot activity from live.com was detected. This resulted in third Digg home pager. A few weeks later, MS backtracked. I don't know if it had anything to do with my post or not - I doubt it.

All in all, a great year. Stay tuned for 2008 because there is a lot of great stuff coming. They'll be announced here as always.

Predictions for 2008

Now the really fun part What will happen in 2008? Here are some of my predictions:

• Online office: Microsoft will release Silverlight 2.0 in early '08 (we already know that). Shortly afterwards, they'll release an online version of Office based on that. This will disrupt the market, making Google's Apps look like toys and Zoho very very vulnerable. Zoho will get acquired.

• At least one major privacy scare on the web. Top contenders are Google and Facebook, but Microsoft cannot be discounted. My prediction is that it will be related to user profiling for ad-targeting purposes.
• Rich Internet Applications (RIA) will arrive in full force. Everyone will look at each other and go 'eh' until a killer app is released. That app will probably be the online MS Office. Top contenders are Silverlight and Flex from Adobe. Flex has no chance against Silverlight because Adobe doesn't know how to write web-friendly software (like Acrobat Reader plugin for browsers, which sucks) and certainly is no match for the developer-friendly MS. Flex will live through 2008 though because end-consumers will think it's the Flash player.
• In Search: Google will continue to dominate, but slow down its growth. Semantic search engines like Powerset (which I'm a member of the public beta testers) will rock. Hakia will figure out that its biggest obstacle to world domination is its index: full of spam and very stale. Their technology is great though.
• Yahoo will chug along. A few gem products will come out of their R&D efforts along with the continuous stream of half-baked ideas. The new delicious service, which finally loses the an.nno.ying dots from its name will be a great hit.
• Generally: more memes and more bloggers working in synchrony for a common cause.

So... will I eat my words in December 2008? Stick around and you'll find out