Blog

"Don't be evil" to your 3rd party app?

02/08/2009

Being a 3rd party application developer can be a tough job: you get squeezed between your royal customers and mighty big name software giants, and you need to constantly come up with work around to patch problems that the big name consider too minor to fix. Though Google's informal motto is "Don't be evil", will they be kind enough to small 3rd party application shop?

A recent incident reveals how good things can be run at Internet speed. On Friday, Jan 30, a massive service disruption was reported by customers of Gbridge (a 3rd party application that use Google's libjingle and utilize Gtalk IM service as the back-end to form personalized VPN and provides remote control and private file sharing features. Over the following weekend, the root cause was quickly identified to be likely related to an update of Gtalk server. Gtalk team was notified on Monday Morning, Feb 2. Please note that this glitch doesn't affect any vanilla Gtalk client's functionality, it affects Gbridge only because Gbridge is using some XMPP features that nomal IM clients don't use. Nevertheless, Gtalk team acknowleged this issue and started to work on it immediately. The bug fix is rolled out on Monday afternoon, which immediately solved the problem without any software upgrade from Gbridge.

This prompt manner is unheard of for traditional software development: usually 3rd party application would need to create a temporary work-around and beg the big name to put in a fix and roll out in the "next" scheduled release which could be months away. This incident greatly boosts confidence of 3rd party developer and shows the new dynamic of Internet age collaboration. Gbridge teams' decision of betting on the openness of Google and the Gtalk infrastucture really pays off.