1. Google released Friend Connect, which is a way for web developers to "sprinkle" their existing sites with social features.
2. Facebook released Facebook Connect, which is a way for web developers to allow users to log in to their existing sites using Facebook credentials.

Now, admittedly, there is a lot of overlap here, but let's get one thing straight. These are not direct competitors. TechCrunch says "it's mano-a-mano." Please. Give me a break. They have very different feature sets.

I've looked at both sites for all of 5 minutes (and enough to enable some Friend Connect features on my own site), and they're not even all that subtly different.

Facebook Connect is a clear competitor to OpenID. Both are attempting to solve the user-credential nightmare. Facebook Connect also has features such that you can post some of your actions on the site back to Facebook (and have it show up in your minifeed, say).

Google Friend Connect is a not-so-clear competitor to Facebook itself. Instead of trying to tie websites in to the existing Facebook platform, which web developers will subconsciously fight (who wants to move their content inside of Facebook when it's already free from their walled garden?), Friend Connect allows developers to put widgets on their existing pages. Users can log in or not, but now web developers can drop in a Facebook-wall like feature on any of their own pages (not Facebook's pages), and even allow anonymous posts. Friend Connect clearly has an emphasis on hosting social widgets and making social website features a breeze for existing sites.

Now, it's true that both products' feature sets will probably begin to converge, but right now? At release? Not the case. Facebook Connect is an authentication platform with some pizazz. Friend Connect is Facebook for the rest of the web.

First, a bit about how hard drives work.

A hard drive is simply a circular disk (or a collection of them), kind of like a CD, except the data is stored magnetically instead of optically. To read the magnetic data, a little arm with a magnet on the end sticks out over the disk while the disk spins. The little arm reads data off the disk as the disk spin past.

The disk is moving very fast (common disks spin at 7,200 rpm, or about 86 miles per hour at the edge of a 3.5" disk). The arm is also very close to the disk (the head of the arm is 3-7 millionths of an inch away from the disk in modern drives, floating on a pocket of air). Scaled up, hard drives move at speeds similar to an airplane traveling nearly 16 times the speed of sound (mach 16) a width of a human hair (18 micrometers) above the ground!

So, as you can imagine, the worst thing that could possibly happen to a hard drive is for this drive head to crash into the disk, destroying your ability to read the data and scratching up the disk platter. I suppose it's worse if you shoot the drive with a shotgun.

But only barely.

It's very hard for hard drive manufacturers to make disks that don't crash when they're dropped while spinning. They try, but it's just hard to do. Recent laptop drives have gone as far as putting motion detection in so the drive head can be locked away from the disk platter if the drive detects that it's falling. Laptop makers generally recommend that you keep your laptop off (thereby locking the disk head) during any traveling. I sort of think that's silly though. What's the point of a laptop?

Calamity!

So, this week, my sister's laptop suffered an untimely and completely accidental calamity. As the laptop hit the ground, I thought, "boy, it's a good thing it's off."

It wasn't.

Then I thought, "boy, it's a good thing her brother works for a backup company and backed up all her homework for her."

I didn't.

I mean, I work for Mozy, but I'm one of those crazy Linux guys, and Mozy currently doesn't have a Linux client. As a result, I don't use Mozy on my own laptop, and therefore often forget to recommend it to others. I'm a big fan of the adage "practice what you preach;" in this case, I argue software companies should eat their own dogfood and use their own products. Whoops! I guess I'm the odd man out here. I am totally practicing some of the things I'm preaching already: building incredibly distributed, fault tolerant, relational metadata management systems to increase performance for Mozy's backend is fun! But I haven't been practicing or preaching "Back the F:\ up!".

Well, this week, that changed. Be safe, use Mozy.

• Subprime timeline
• The crisis: A timeline
• New: 5 Easy Pieces

Implementation

• The Python Mock Module (http://python-mock.sourceforge.net/)
• pMock (http://pmock.sourceforge.net/)
• Python Mocker (http://labix.org/mocker)

• cost - App Engine is free under certain very reasonable limits, AWS is not.
• elasticity - load balancing and replication are automatic with App Engine, not AWS
• simplicity - the only work involved with App Engine is writing some Python code; you don't have to manage your own virtual machine images

1. The barrier to entry for scalable website design is totally lowered. Tons of developers see this and go "ooh, neat, I can write that personal project pretty easily now" and do so.
2. Some of these projects become financially viable from Google Advertising, but where the costs would usually go straight into maintenance for the growing user demand, Google manages it all very cheaply and efficiently. Instead of developers having to choose between killing their project due to too much demand or quitting their day job just to support it, Google eases the maintenance of the site considerably. Futhermore, the cost-effectiveness of running your own service is now much better due to the low over-head costs. Developers actually could quit their day jobs.
3. Many new, innovative services start springing up like wildfire, and don't be surprised to find that they're all only one or two man shops.