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This weekend I revisited the Google AppEngine – a project that has kicked around Google for some time but was heretofore confined to the company’s developer sandbox. But now Google has brought the AppEngine front and center, aiming it squarely at small businesses and setting off the latest salvo in the saga of Google v. Everyone (in this case, Google v. Microsoft and its entourage of high-priced application builders). I think it’s particularly cool that the Guardian, a British newspaper, has written about its own use of the AppEngine and development of its suit of company-specific, task-oriented apps or “Micro Apps” as they call it. Take a look and let me know what you think.

- M. Hedayat, Hacker in Chief

Today we’re launching a brand new product and framework called MicroApps which the diagram above describes. However, just as Google dogfoods its new products before launch, so do we, and we wanted to share some of the things we’ve been building as MicroApps using Google AppEngine for the storage and application development part. With 36 million unique and very engaged readers, everything we make has to scale, which is why AppEngine is ideal. With it’s highly scalable architecture and features such as task queues, built for creating loosely coupled apps, and memcache, AppEngine makes an excellent companion platform for MicroApps in which the apps can run anywhere in the cloud. The examples presented here range from new ways to find content which others are finding exciting or interesting, to live responses to the TV debates to ways to bring together all of the tweets of our journalists on specific subjects. <<Read the Full Article>>

I would put iFixit right up there with Fancy Hands (see prior post) as a platform for showing off the possibilities of crowd-sourcing. It demonstrates what people can do when the Web creates a frictionless environment for cooperation: namely, prices drop, costs trend towards zero, and the resulting burst of activity creates an entirely new horizon. Simply awesome.

You’re probably familiar with iFixit. We link to their teardowns and home fixing guides all the time on CrunchGear; they mostly focus on Apple, and their light and informative tone is a welcome addition to such a dry topic as hardware disassembly. Well, they’ve decided that merely providing help for Apple users isn’t enough, and are today launching a “global repair community” with the aim being user-level repairs of any device.

Such a project is well-timed; the relationship between user and manufacturer is becoming more one-sided. It doesn’t trouble you that the devices we use every day are so poorly documented, or constructed in such obscure ways, that one has to be an Apple-qualified technician or Dell customer service person to fix a simple problem? I’ve actually had a long post gestating on this very topic, and now iFixit has gone and eaten my lunch.

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