Google OpenSocial: What About the Users?

So the tech press is on fire today with the announcement of Google’s new “Facebook Killer“, OpenSocial.

There’s a clear benefit for Google: more eyeballs, more advertising revenue, and more industry entrenchment. There’s also one for established brands and thought leaders with big audiences. They can further aggregate (and presumably monetize) their traffic.

What I don’t see as clearly is how all this benefits your average end-user. What does OpenSocial do for me?

A New Side Project: My Food Blog

I’ve done occasional posts on food and cooking here, but recently, as I was reading Bill Buford’s Heat, I was struck by a phrase and though, “wow, that would make a great domain name.”

Being a geek, I registered it. And since my new web host allows me to run multiple domains off the same account, I set up a small food & recipe blog to go with the name. I’ve set it up the way I want it, and gotten a couple of posts up. It’s ready for the world now.

Benvenuto, Profumo Profondo.

A couple of friends have expressed some interest in occasionally contributing recipes, but I expect it will be mostly me, and be relatively low traffic. We’ll see how it goes.

How I Did It

…picked a new web host, that is.

In recent comments, I got asked how I decided which web host to switch to once I gave up on Powweb. Truth is, it was not easy, and I very nearly re-upped with Powweb again, on the theory “better the devil you know than the devil you don’t.” But over the last 4 years, Powweb has gone from being a great company to one that I barely tolerated. I couldn’t bring myself to give them the $$ for another year. So I switched.

Finding a new host was definitely not a one-time project. I collected information on and off over the course of many months, from a number of sources. Those include word-of-mouth reports from other web folks on 2 mailing lists (WWWAC and SF-WOW) and reports from friends (like Glen). That gave me some anecdotal evidence to start with. Another site that was helpful for giving feedback and potential hosting company names was the WebHosting Talk forums.

I tended to avoid the various websites that list or rate web hosts, since many of them gave the impression of being basically advertising vehicles for the hosting companies. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, of course, but I wanted user feedback more than anything else. Basic web hosting is so much of a commodity these days that I was more concerned with customer satisfaction within the price point I’d chosen (under $100 a year) than the nitty-gritty of exactly how many MBs of disk space or how many e-mail accounts I’d get with my service. I also gave bonus points to companies that had an actual customer forum, not just a one-way support desk.

I looked at Dreamhost, Laughing Squid, Media Temple, Lunarpages, 1 and 1, iPowerWeb, and a few others before deciding that A2 looked good. I did some more digging into A2, looking for reports of dissatisfied customers, outages, etc. Nothing bad jumped out at me. So I filed the information away.

As I said, this happened over the course of several months. Periodically I’d re-check, to see if opinion about a company was trending one way or another (increased outages, reports of slowness / overselling, etc). A2 still looked good.

Eventually, my old contract was about to run out, and it was time to push the button, one way or the other. So I took a deep breath and signed up with A2. And here I am.

That’s a little longwinded, but it’s the story of how I chose a new web host. I hope it helps someone.

Well, That Went Well

I’m settled in at the new web host now — who by the way, is A2 Hosting, and no, there’s no referral link on that URL.

So far it’s been great. The blog and the assorted other web files are all in place. I’ve cleaned out some old stuff I don’t need to keep on the server anymore. I’ve updated my robots.txt to reflect the new site layout. I have IMAP set up on my desktop and my laptop. Everything is running smoothly, DNS seems to have transitioned, and all is right with the world.

I’m even taking advantage of the fact that my new account has more bells & whistles to set up a side blog for recipies. It’s not quite done yet but when it is I’ll post a link.

What’s amazing is how much easier all this has been. When I first set up a website in 1996, this was very much a manual process, and you needed to either have direct access to the server and/or be very comfortable with a command line do stuff like set up a domain name, create a new web hosting account, or customize a website. Today, it’s nearly all web-based and so very painless. I love it. YAY for progress!