Cloud computing makes it easy to build applications that run reliably, even under heavy loads. However as a developer you need to know if and when the cloud, and hence your application, is having problems. 

Cloud Status, the first iPhone application from Babilim Light Industries, allows you to monitor the status of Google App Engine, Amazon Web Services and Twitter in real time. 

How does it work? Each service has a separate page, status for the various services is indicated by the icon next to the service. Clicking on each service component will provide further information as to the current status of that component, and any problems that it might be experiencing.

Babilim Light Industries is a small technology consulting company based in the South West of England run by Alasdair Allan.

Dot Net Solutions released a new version of its Wikipedia Explorer built on top of Windows Azure. Of course this is built in partnership with Microsoft developer and platform evangelism team, so I’m not sure if is just a prof of concept or an actual product that will evolve later. Nonetheless, the project is interesting and is one of the few applications out there using windows azure.

The project is about visualizing relationships between documents within Wikipedia - creating a new browsing experience in Windows Presentation Foundation.

In the original version all the data was downloaded from Wikipedia on the fly. This was very simple, but also very slow and meant different visualisations would be produced each time based on which links were downloaded first. Continue reading…

From Dare Obasanjo, a Microsoft employee working for the Windows Live team, here comes a Twitter search engine built on Windows Azure. It is not by any means a commercial product but a good proof of concept.

The search functionality with no options checked is exactly the same as search.twitter.com.

Checking Search Near Me finds all tweets posted by people who are within 30 miles of your geographical location (requires JavaScript). Your geographical location is determined from your IP address while the geographical location of the tweets is determined from the location fields of the Twitter profiles of the authors. Nice way to find out what people in your area are thinking about local news.

Checking Sort By Follower Count is an attempt to jump on the authority based Twitter search bandwagon. Follower counts are obtained via the Google Social Graph API.

Checking Limit to People I Follow requires you to also specify your user name and then all search results are filtered to only return results from people you follow (requires JavaScript). This feature only works for a small subset of Twitter users that have been encountered by a crawler the author wrote. The application is crawling Twitter friend lists as you read this and anyone the author follows should already have their friend list crawled. If it doesn’t work for you, check back in a few days. It’s been slow going since Twitter puts a 100 request per hour cap on crawlers.

Dare also mentions in his blog the likes and dislikes of developing on windows azure.

Panda is an open source solution for video uploading, encoding and streaming, running completely within Amazon’s Web Services using customized EC2 instances, S3 and SimpleDB. It has support for the encoding profiles which FFmpeg supports. They include FLV for flash and H264 for iPhone.

The service is easy to integrate with your application. The EC2 instance will provide a simple REST (both YAML and XML formats support) API for listing, creating, editing and deleting videos. When a new video is created on your site the actual file upload takes place in a popup or iframe. Doing so means that the large video file is uploaded directly to your Panda EC2 instance so you don’t have to handle it within your application. The server also is configured to support an upload progress bar so user’s can see the video upload in progress. It cannot get any easier than this.

The range of encoding support does not depend on Panda, but rather depends on ffmpeg and Libavcodec(open source encoder/decoder tools and libraries Panda use underneath) encoding capability. Wikipedia page has a list of implemented video codecs. For Panda AMI setup, see this and this google group thread. Continue reading…

PageGlimpse is a service providing developers with programatic access to thumbnails of any web page. The thumbnails can be virtually used in any kind of applications that require the display of website screenshots: web sites, windows/linux/mac applications, iPhone/mobile utilities, browser plugins, etc. 

The service is using Amazon web services EC2, S3 and SQS. The entire architecture is described in their blog here: http://blog.pageglimpse.com/2008/10/02/pageglimpse-platform-overview/.

PageGlimpse web service is a REST service, meaning that you can easily construct request URLs that will work in your code, in your browser or at the command line. The REST access to the PageGlimpse service is simply an HTTP GET or POST request (RFC2616). The service parameters are passed as simple HTTP parameters.

The quality of the thumbnails is really good and the service provides big size thumbnails (430×310) which none of their competitors offer.

The service is still in BETA, with promises of a full release early next year and there’s no charge for using the service. To use the service, simply create an account here. A developer key will be issued to you and you’re ready to go! The service cannot be accessed without a valid developer key. 

A Wordpress plugin is provided for displaying a “thumbnail bubble” in your blog.

PageGlimpse service is used by Adjix, DotNetShoutout and many Wordpress websites. You can contact them by going to their website: http://www.pageglimpse.com.

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We’re starting a new weekly cloud application showcase. Every week, starting today, we’re going to showcase applications using the “cloud”. Even though this blog is named “azure” blog, we’re going to showcase applications using any of the “cloud” providers out there, including on-premises “clouds”.

You got the coolest software? Not too cool but you think is useful?:) You want hundreds of “cloud” enthusiasts to see your app? Here’s what you need to do:

1. Make sure your application is “demoable”. It doesn’t have to work, it doesn’t even have to run, but it must be demoable. Screenshots, slides, screencast, anything will do.

2. Send an email to contact@radsense.com including in the subject line “azurejournal showcase”

3. Include in the body of the message:

• a short description of your application and a full description 
• please attach to your email, or make available on the web if the size is too big, any additional screenshots, screencasts, etc.
• contact information: email, phone number, website. We will NOT make this information public.