Below Belief

Google amazes me everyday. Below Belief is nothing more than a tiny backwater on our planet-wide internet of tens of billions of pages and yet, Google came by yesterday, reliable as ever, cached my pages again and indexed my latest updates. It’ll probably come back in a few days and check again.
I build web technology for a living and I am still astounded every time I witness Google’s efficiency, scale and scope. How is there enough time in the day for even the most well organised of crawlers to reach just my pages regularly – once it’s done all the other more important sites on the internet. That it got this far down it’s list of sites to check is awe-inspiring. Do most people understand how this all works? How many people actually recognise the brilliance in what it has achieved?
Knowing the problems that IT can generate and suffer from sometimes, it is great to be inspired by people at Google who have designed a system so resilient to failure, so reliable, so efficient that all us consumers have to remember is that it just works.
“It just works” characterises a very special elite group of services and products which feel like they are shaping this new internet economy. They present such low “barriers to entry” that their take up by the mass market is virtually assured. They are generally free or very cheap to use, they are uncomplicated, quick to get started, easy to use, instinctive and have obvious and compelling benefits.
Google is long in the tooth now, but other products which give me the same feeling right now are:
MovableType – which makes this blog so easy to manage and just does everything I want of it, immediately and without hassle. It can be made to do other stuff it was never designed to do, quickly and simply too.
Flickr – a well thought out and well executed photo depository and management tool
ProfiMail – a recent recommendation from Simon, it’s just this very day revolutionised my mobile emailing
Apple and their beautiful iPod – which has changed for good the way I listen to music and revived a tired music collection and my weariness of it
“It just works” is the philosophy and the rarest of attributes which we should strive to achieve in every service we build.

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 22nd, 2005 at 3:48 pm and is filed under Internet trends, Journal, Work. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.