This is amazing, especially how it was missed. Anybody has an explanation? Don't we have Investigative bloging like Investigative journalism? Are we so drowned in "the noise" that we don't have the time to compare, ask questions etc.? Just barely the time to copy and paste and maybe to run a speller and move to the next item with a lot of sleep deprivation? - Raanan Avidor

Raanan: I didn't hear about the price diffference. This is why I watch so many blogs and so many RSS feeds and subscribe to so many people on Twitter and FriendFeed. If I miss something IT WILL come back up! - Robert Scoble

Robert: not sure " IT WILL", try to figure out the noise/signal ratio... not that evident... - directeur

directeur: believe me, if something is important it keeps coming up again and again and again. Either way, I look for stuff like this and have enough inputs to pretty much guarantee I won't miss it. - Robert Scoble

The comparison is not completely fair. You should also compare GAE CPU versus Amazon EC2 instances' prices because you are not forced to use SimpleDB or S3 for external traffic. If done this way, both are quite similar, about $ 85-100 a month per instance/core. The difference is when you scale up to SimpleDB and/or S3 with high traffic. - Ricardo Galli

Robert: You sure are right, I'm just wondering how "important" is something in general... Because of its "intrinsic" value or because of the "hype" it generates? - directeur

And now everybody will talk about it :) "The noise" has wealth in it but it eats up our most precious asset - time. I love the noise, but it can swallow 10 hours from my day, I have to filter it to ~10%(?) - Raanan Avidor

I don't think this is really an apples to apples comparison... from what i understand, amazon ec2 is fully generic, virtualized hardware, that you can essentially run whatever you want on. google app engine is python hosting. 10:1 sounds about right, to me... - Chris Hollander

Important things get "Liked." They also get "Commented" on. They also get repeated. They also include my last name in them. :-) - Robert Scoble

Good point Robert :) Alas, talking about things getting "Liked", I noticied yesterday with @Shey how someone "Liked" everything that his Digg's mate submitted... Popularity IMHO isn't obligatory a synonym of "importance", I digg yours, you digg mines, Digg sub-networks, influence... I hate Digg for this reasons. But yes, having your last name is a good argument :) - directeur

It seems to me, you are comparing apples with pineapples - Varun Mahajan

Robert: We are going to have some very interesting news in this area as an addition to our FlexiScale service. I'm going to be in SF for Structure 08 next month and would like to catch up with you to tell you more, let me know. - Tony Lucas

Tony: unfortunately I'll be in Washington DC that week. Maybe on Friday afternoon? - Robert Scoble

Robert: I'm around until the 2nd of July, so the Friday would be fine - Tony Lucas

I actually commented on the competitiveness of the pricing in my coverage at Mashable. The main difference is that you have much less server side processing options (read: less language support) than on Amazon. - Mark "Rizzn" Hopkins

@Scobleizer, must you be in every news item? If the news is worthy, it will rise up about the noise. You don't create the news; you amplify it. But since you amplify so much other news so often (actually, Mashable and TechCrunch are a lot worst), you drown out the occasional nugget. - Lawrence Liu from fftogo

Lawrence: I'm a news freak. So, yes, I want to know about all news about and for the tech industry. And, I will try to "like" and "comment" on every single important piece of news. - Robert Scoble

Robert: Ok, let's try this :) http://feedego.com is my latest app, I think it's worth people's attention... go ahead, put your lastname beside it :) - directeur

I'm checking out Feedego.com :-) - Robert Scoble

Thanks Robert :) - directeur

Yes, Robert, you're a valuable "Connector" and great "Amplifier" and sometimes "Generator" for tech news, but don't fool yourself into thinking that you'll be able to cover *all* of the interesting news. - Lawrence Liu from fftogo

I'll die trying. :-) - Robert Scoble

Google can afford to make GAE much cheaper because it is a much more constrained environment (which incidentally bears a lot of resemblance to much of Google's internal infrastructure in many important ways). Constraints can be very good for making things both reliable and affordable. - Jason Wehmhoener

Robert, that comparison isn't fair. In Amazon, you don't pay for traffic to/from other AWS services (EC2 and S3, most importantly), and Amazon has proven to be very reliable, while GAE hasn't the same level of reliability. Also, with GAE you're limited to Python, on AWS you can install and use whatever you want, including the supercool OpenSolaris with ZFS. I don't believe GAE and AWS are the same BallPark, and one Google representative himself said it few days ago. - simone brunozzi

It's ironic that highscalability.com gives me a "Service Temporarily Unavailable" message. - Ole Begemann