Notable Thoughts : Weekend Edition

“A thought which does not result in an action is nothing much, and an action which does not proceed from a thought is nothing at all” - Anonymous. Few notable thoughts that kept me thinking and are worth sharing and spreading.

In the HuddleChat Debacle, a Lesson for Web 2.0 Startups
As open source takes hold — in the form of software, platforms and even the development environment itself — the ability to imitate will only increase. In such an environment, the only meaningful defense for Web 2.0 app developers and startups is their ability to build a community in large numbers. The data of a community is the only defense, and perhaps the only real value, in a Web 2.0 company. And unless they can achieve this quickly, many Web 2.0 apps/startups are going to meander into mediocrity, only to see their ideas inspire larger players to roll out their own versions of their apps

Google App Engine for developers
On Monday 2Google launched Google App Engine, a hosted dynamic runtime environment for Python web applications inside Google's geo-distributed architecture. Google App Engine is the latest in a series of Google-hosted application environments and the first publicly-available dynamic runtime and storage environment based on large-scale propriety computing systems. Google App Engine lets any Python developer execute CGI-driven Web applications, store its results, and serve static content from a fault-tolerant geo-distributed computing grid built exclusively for modern Web applications.

An extra mile there and a mile short here…
When you are in the Corporate world, one of the common things that you hear is that you HAVE to “walk the extra mile”. That is a good advice and there is no harm in following that. There is only one problem though. If you don’t design this well, your “extra mile” will be treated as a part of your “standard offering” and you are always forced to walk ANOTHER extra mile. Meanwhile, walking these “extra miles” on the professional front is leaving you no time to work on yourself and you are constantly “a mile short” on the personal front.