Firebase Predictions Beta
firebase.google.com
firebase.google.com
It's nothing new, but I still find it amusing how much the IAP model has borrowed from the marketing handbook of narcotics dealers.
Also Firebase has a free tier but it does cost money https://firebase.google.com/pricing/
(acquisition still running, top of my head: Google Docs, Android, YouTube, DoubleClick)
The problem is the google isn't forthright about it's plans. They just let some products languish forever without any communication. If you're lucky (like a firebase user) you will get a giant code dump of new features after 18 months of radio silence. If you're unlucky (like a google app engine standard user) then maybe they will announce a shutdown. It could go either way - you will never know what's coming. Yes you will get time to migrate away, but you're not really treated like a partner.
At some point they said google code wasn't getting new features because they couldn't find anyone who wanted to work on it. WTF? That's what employees are for right? I cannot understand this company. Why waste peoples time with projects that are just rounding errors next to adwords.
Im not disputing that Google does this, but ever since Google Reader was stopped this has become a stock comment on basically every HN discussion on Google products (other than search & ads) and has long ceased to have any value at all, and seems to be just accepted as some gospel without any evidence that this is a bigger problem with Google than the other tech giants.
I don't think hk__2 is promoting another big corporation.
Perhaps it's HN apophenia but Google's record of discontinuance does not seem insignificant - it is valid for anyone to be skeptical of their ability to maintain any newer product in the medium term.
That said, I think anyone who's followed Firebase closely since the acquisition should have reasons to have more confidence in their commitment in this one particular case.
I like it so much that I even found a old copy to install on windows 10. 6 years after it is discontinue and still much more useful and much faster than windows 10's search bar.
It fits in well to the overall Google Cloud Computing offering and has few real competitors in AWS/Azure.
I say this as someone using AWS daily but Firebase for side projects.
Disclaimer - I'm the founder :) Would love your feedback !
Graph.cool just released their development framework so I may investigate.
I realise Firebase and GraphQL are very different beasts but I think they serve the same market. It would be good to see Firebase at some point offer a GraphQL interface but the data structures are very different.
Graph.cool is rad. We used it while migrating to Google Cloud, just so we could be off of Scaphold.
My company, Gyroscope Software (getgyroscope.com) does prediction, cohorting and timing of callbacks into mobile games and apps, with plugins for iOS and Unity. We've built a real-time prediction engine to make this happen; we also use some neat tech to get us enough data from the clients to do fast machine learning without the developer having to do any instrumentation, data collection, or other data wrangling - we do this automatically. Happy to answer any questions anyone has.
Given that, I guess I'll be giving it a shot (although I think Firebase in general is super over priced)
- Build collaborative applications with real time updates and fine-grained permissions.
- Our JavaScript client for browsers leverages IndexedDB to work completely offline and synchronise data when online.
- It’s even possible for data to be encrypted on the client to keep user data safe on the server.
- Permissions can be set on the stored objects, making it possible to share data between users.
- Kinto is an HTTP API in front of a database. Interactions with the server are simple HTTP requests rather than complex SQL or map-reduce queries. It is meant to be minimalist and simple.
This would be a self-hosted solution. They have a pre-built docker image to spin it up.
Previous HN links:
- 641 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10994736
- 687 days ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10733164
Disclaimer - I'm the founder :)
Fear based question: are there applications (hopefully mine) that would scale in an economic way? And there are other use-cases that wouldn't scale?
I'm currently researching open source solutions such as Parse.
Any plans to have this work for web apps?
Creating/buying an app, making it popular and drawing every last penny out of it while pissing off the core users who helped to make it popular and then letting it die. Rinse and repeat.
It helps you piss off the core/current users a little less to draw out the process as much as possible and make more profits, but the result is the same.
Using optimization strategies and software like Firebase disconnects you from the user base as you turn your users into the product. Of course this would come from Google who are experts at it. They get away with it though, because their software is great and there are few alternatives, but that's not the case in the app market.
/rant