Slowly but surely, Amazon keeps adding capabilities to its cloud computing services. What started out as pay-by-the-drink storage (S3) and computational processing (EC2), now includes a simple database (SimpleDB), a content delivery network (CloudFront), and computer-to-computer messaging (SQS). And today Amazon added a web-scale file system with Amazon Elastic MapReduce
This is actually a big deal because it allows developers to better take advantage of the massive computing power Amazon has to offer and create applications which process huge reservoirs of data (conveniently stored in Amazon S3) in parallel. MapReduce is the name of the file system Google created to index and search the Web. It literally breaks up huge computational tasks and spreads them to different servers. This is called mapping the data. Once each processor is done with its portion of the math problem, it sends the result back so that all the different partial answers can be combined and then “reduced” into one final answer.
Amazon is using Hadoop, which is the open-source version of MapReduce. Yahoo also started using Hadoop last year. While Google and Yahoo use this technique for searching the Web, it can be used for any data-intensive computational problem → Read More
Those of you who remember MeasureMap are long time readers of this blog. It was a blog-centered analytics service that first surfaced in August 2005. The service was created by San Francisco based Adaptive Path. The first details emerged in October 2005. It was Google Analytics but just for blogs. It told you stats based on posts and other key blog features. By November 2005 Google had copied some of the features. And a couple of months later, before MeasureMap had even officially launched, they just bought it outright. Since then, nothing. Founder Jeffrey Veen became the User Experience Manager and has been associated with a number of projects. Measure Map simply faded and was forgotten. Except, not completely. Today Google emailed early MeasureMap users and said: About your Measure Map account Remember Measure Map? A couple of years ago, we gave you an account on an early alpha test of our blog analytics software. Since then, a lot has happened. We got acquired by Google, we redesigned their Analytics app, and we’ve since rebuilt Measure Map from the ground up. I’m writing you because we need to move everyone over from their Measure Map accounts to the new version at Google. If you’re no longer interested, no problem. You can stop reading this now. But if you’d like to try out the new service, here’s how: [instructions followed] I went through the signup process, which requires a Google Analytics account and tracking pixel. They then said “Great! You’re all set. We’ve got a few things to set up on our end. We’ll send you an email when we’re ready (soon!) and explain how to log in.” I’m emailing Google now to see if they’ll give more details on the planned launch and how it will be different from Google Analytics. CrunchBase Information Measure Map Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Google just announced that they have acquired Adaptive Path’s Measure Map (one of my most loved companies, more posts on them here). No word on price…my wild ass speculation is $5 – $10m. Measure Map has not raised outside capital, and seems to be more of a drain on Adaptive Path resources at this point than an asset – the service has lagged very badly over the last few month, becoming unusable for larger blogs (although it has improved significantly recently). This will be a good addition to Google Analytics. Note that Jeffrey Veen of Adaptive Path wrote the post on Google’s blog. Jeffrey and other Measure Map employees will be moving over to Google along with the acquisition. Here’s what I love the most about this acquisition: Measure Map is still in private beta. → Read More
There have been numerous 2005 “best of” and 2006 “predictions” posts over the last few weeks as the year comes to an end. I’m not going to write one of those. Giving out “best of” awards seems presumptuous to me, given that I’ve been blogging all of six months. And while predictions are fun, they aren’t all that useful in the end. What I do want to write about as I reminisce about the year ending in a couple of days are the Web 2.0 companies that I love and use every day. I’ve tested over a thousand products this year, and have written about hundreds. And while some of the companies I write about get very positive reviews, I find that the only true test of the value of a product is its staying power: do I continue to use the product, and maybe even pay for it, as the days and months go by? So for those of you that are curious, here is a short list of the companies that have held my attention, and that I would not choose to live without on the web: Bloglines I have a love/hate relationship with Bloglines, but they’ve recently improved performance dramatically, and I really like that I can see the number of subscribers for each feed. This was the hardest one to include on the list, but at the end of the day I couldn’t leave them off. Del.icio.us I use Del.icio.us multiple times every day to store and retrieve bookmarks. I freely admit that there are better solutions out there and I may very well switch to one of them in the near future, but you have to hand it to Del.icio.us for inventing the social bookmark phenomenon. FeedBurner I love the statistics Feedburner provides on feed readership and has lots of advanced features that are important to me. And despite what I’ve written in the past, I know and trust the FeedBurner team. I just wish they’d get rid of the advertisement on my feed page. Flickr I enjoy Flickr more and more every day. I like seeing what my friends are up to based on the photos they upload as well as getting comments from others on my pictures. And I am starting to go back and upload old sets of photos from years ago. Flickr is just perfect. Measuremap The Measure Map blog analytics → Read More
Google took the wrapper off Analytics today. It is a rebranding of their Urchin acquisition from earlier this year. It works in much the same way as MeasureMap – using it requires the addition of javascript into a couple of files on your blog. It has deep integration into Adwords as well. Google Analytics is mostly free (up to 5 million page views per month), or completely free if you are an adwords user. Registration for Analytics is currently suspended but I’ll be doing a full side by side review against Measure Map in the next day or two. The screen shot provided by Google (to left) is encouraging. One thing I’d like to understand is whether Google Analytics takes a holistic approach to blog analytics like Measure Map does, or whether it is a more generic application for measuring general website statistics. Measure Map is awesome at monitoring traffic at the post and comment level and has used flash and Ajax integration in a very intelligent way. More on the Meme. UPDATE: The site has been down all day and they have suspended registrations for now. The bigger problem appears to be that Google didn’t notify Urchin’s paid subscribers ($200/month) that the change was going to happen, and those subscribers have no access to their data right now. Ethan Stock tells the story and he is pissed off. Google isn’t acting like a real business, they are acting like an over-enthusiastic Golden Retriever puppy. Oh, they just knocked the vase off the table with their tail, but aren’t they cute? Um, no. Google, grow up. → Read More
Jeffrey Veen of Adaptive Path writes about Measure Map for the first time today. Measure Map is an incredibly easy to use flash and ajax application that monitors blog traffic and analytics in many, many different ways. You can slice data almost every way imaginable. I’ll do a full review as soon as I have their permission. In his post, Jeffrey provides a screen shot of the dashboard of the application, the first to appear publicly on the web. I took this as permission to post my own screen shot to the left. They have not finalized pricing, but my understanding is it may be free for everything except real-time data. Jeffrey also says that the application should be launched by end of year. If you want to try it out sooner, request a beta account at their site. Here is our quick pitch: Measure Map is a Web application that helps people get to know their blogs. We do this by collecting and analyzing blog-specific traffic statistics and presenting them in a browsable interface that encourages exploration. It is an experience that offers meaningful insight into the effects caused by small changes in how you blog, rather than the overwhelming complexity of most web stats tools with their query/report-style analytic methods. Measure Map provides understanding by refocusing the difficult problem of web statistics and solving it just for blogs. We do this with a few lines of code in your blog’s template; there’s hardly any configuration to worry about. We collect your traffic data continuously and in real time and display it through some innovative Ajax-based techniques. But even though we’re a hosted service, you own your data. An open API will empower you to do whatever you like with your numbers — we’ve already built an OS X Dashboard widget, for example. Imagine what else you could do with your blog’s stats… We’ll be opening the doors soon — probably towards the end of the year. For now, we’re metering our growth with an invitation system to ensure that we can provide an appropriate level of service for our users as we grow. You can sign up for one at measuremap.com. In the coming weeks I’ll be writing more about Measure Map, the experience of building it, and what our plans for it are. But for now, I’m just so happy our little team has reached this milestone. → Read More
We’ve been beta testing Measure Map, Adaptive Path‘s new blog analytics tool, for a couple of weeks now. We previously wrote about Measure Map here and Heather Green also wrote about it here. Measure Map is an extremely useful tool for bloggers. It uses ajax and flash intelligently. Integration is very simple (adding a javascript snippet into the blog template). It provides detailed analytics on every aspect of your blog – how readers get to your site, what they read, whether they comment and what links they use to leave. We can’t post screen shots or feature comparisons yet, but I will say this: tools like Measure Map, Mint, and Feedburner that track blog analytics are extremely useful. They take a much needed step past existing server log analyzers. Not only are the statistics much more readily available (and real time), but they also provide very granular data on exactly the areas bloggers care about – things like comments, trackbacks, links in and out, etc. The conversation aspect of blogs. Anyway, Measure Map is evolving and stats are erratic this weekend. I realized just how much I’ve grown to rely on it when it wasn’t fully available to me. Kevin Hale has a list of additional analytics services here. → Read More
I just heard a very juicy rumor (some stuff already on Technorati about this) that Adaptive Path is coming out with a very cool new Ajax application called Measure Map. The site is taking registration requests now. People who are participating in the alpha are drooling. It’s apparently a blog analytics tool that crushes everything else out there. I also heard a few other things about it but am sworn to secrecy. I’m looking forward to seeing this first hand. → Read More
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