UnSpun is a new service from Amazon that puts workers from the Mechanical Turk and the UnSpun community at work finding the top, best, favorite things in any category. It’s also a Ruby on Rails application sitting on the Amazon.com domain.
To be afforded that privilege at Amazon, you have to run the gauntlet of Amazon security and scalability requirements. Certainly not a trivial thing to do, but the Amazon Web Services team did it and now their Rails application is live.
How’s that for fueling the rumor engine.
Tim
on 29 Nov 06Did 37signals have any direct involvement in this, other than of course the Amazon Web Services team using the Ruby on Rails framework?
Does 37signals = the new Amazon Web Services team :)
JF
on 29 Nov 06Tim, 37signals had nothing to do with this other than evangelizing Rails. There was no direct connection.
osmif
on 29 Nov 06Don’t seem to be working too well, do it?
Cameron Barrett
on 29 Nov 06This is very intriguing indeed….
Rob
on 29 Nov 06They aren’t even using resources. Ugly URL rendering. F- from Amazon.
Chris H
on 29 Nov 06“Application error (Rails)”
Hmmm. Probably spoke too soon, eh?
The Hoff
on 29 Nov 06I get “Application error (Rails)” right now. :-)
Doh!
Lorenzo
on 29 Nov 06Does it’s job very well at crashing
Fitz
on 29 Nov 06Eh…rails error? Wow, at least that makes me feel like I’m not the only one.
Jay
on 29 Nov 06Guess they didn’t get those scalability requirements set yet…what with that big fat nasty error and all.
Tim
on 29 Nov 06Maybe an Amazon EC2 could have been used to avoid the Rails application error.
Nick
on 29 Nov 06That’s because Jeff Bezos is your kind of guy.
Tim
on 29 Nov 06Talking about Bezos, I’m curious to know why he isn’t listed on the sidebar under the “Who are 37signals?”.
Nonetheless, you gotta love both Bezos and 37signals.
Scott Meade
on 29 Nov 06If the Almost Effortless scenario is correct, what happens with TextDrive? Or is that rumor/idea completely off base?
Farort
on 29 Nov 06Sheesh . . . yuk. Usability and design bite.
Scott Meade
on 29 Nov 06Congrats to the Rails team. While I do not think that making Rails corporate-gauntlet friendly should be a primary goal of the Rails core team, it is great to see that people in large companies can move it through the “enterprise” approval process. Good job 37s and Amazon (and Bezos)! [Now if only I could get my hands on some EC2, I’d be an even bigger fan]
DHH
on 29 Nov 06Scott, I should have layered it on a bit thicker. Yes, it’s completely off base :).
tom
on 30 Nov 06Sorry guys, just not enjoying the Kool-Aid as much nowadays. Why does Rails need a full stack (lighttp, memcached, etc.) just to be useful on the web? And it seems pretty finicky. Amazon can’t get it to run all the time? The RoR wiki was down for like a month a while back, with a Rails Error. I mean, for people just learning it, sure, that’s reasonable, but does php.net or java.sun.com crash and burn with an incomprehensible error message, ever?
DHH
on 30 Nov 06If you haven’t seen any big sites give funny errors before, then you’re not looking close enough (I got one on Google just the other day). And you don’t have to apologize for not enjoying the kool-aid. No one is trying to hard sell you. If you think Java or PHP would work better for you, slurp away!
Edward
on 30 Nov 06Launch days always have problems. As long as Unspun’s not regularly down, it seems like a pretty good example of the mainstreaming of Rails.
John Topley
on 30 Nov 06Someone should have told them that you’re allowed to create Rails applications that don’t have a graduated blue-to-white fade at the top! ;-)
Garth
on 30 Nov 06Why do people think that TextDrive are the official Ruby on Rails host? Our company pays for their business hosting and they never reply to our support emails. Their attitude of killing FCGI processes without warning or notification is unacceptable when running a production site. I only wish the Amazon rumours were true, meanwhile we’re looking for a more Rails ‘sympathetic’ host. It would be interesting to know what stack UnSpun are using.
AndyToo
on 30 Nov 06Still seems to be screwed.
“We’re Sorry! UnSpun is temporarily unavailable. Thanks for your patience.”
Nice comment spam, btw.
Rob Sanheim
on 30 Nov 06garth: Not sure if by “textdrive” you mean “shared hosting at textdrive” but anyone who is running a real production site on shared hosting is going to have problems, whether its textdrive or anyone else. If you have a site with real clients that, go with a vps or dedicated.
Rob Sanheim
on 30 Nov 06And their biz plans must be some sort of “shared less” plan -> http://textdrive.com/faqs/17
btw – Rimuhosting (rimuhosting.com) has been great for me – top notch xen virtualization, and support is very good.
Garth
on 30 Nov 06Thanks Rob, we’ve just gone with Rimuhosting. They should be able to grow with our Rails hosting requirements.
nic
on 30 Nov 06Just thinking… It may be in Jeff Bezos’ best interests to give 37s a little limelight?
Andrew
on 30 Nov 06For the record, the problem yesterday was not caused by rails, but rather a faulty deployment of only part of our code which explains why the default framework message came up instead of our custom page.
The second “temporary” outage early this morning was a planned outage that lasted 20 minutes.
Anonymous Coward
on 30 Nov 06Probably because on the Ruby website it says, “If you need hosting, TextDrive is the official Ruby on Rails host.” :)
Trevor Turk
on 30 Nov 06C’est la vie!
David Smit
on 30 Nov 0637 Signals had to be involved. UnSpun is such a creative, clean simple product. I can’t see how they where not involved. 37 Signals UnSpun
JF
on 30 Nov 06David, 37signals had zero involvement in UnSpun. Zip, zilch, nothing.
Nismoto
on 30 Nov 06Try harder…
David Smit
on 30 Nov 06“37 Signals had to be involved…they “stumbled” across this while working on Amazon Mechanical Turk.”
Came out different than I wanted to. I changed it to “I find it interesting how the Amazon Team “stumbled” across this new idea while working on a Amazon Mechanical Turk project. ”
I am still making the point that UnSpun is so clean and creative that it might as well have come from 37 Signals.
Michael
on 01 Dec 06Lets vote for RoR and make it no.1 open source project here: http://www.grupthink.com/topic/821
Gavin
on 03 Dec 06First, long time reader, first time commentator. Huge fan of 37 Signals. As always, keep on inspiring people.
I have to say Unspun has freaked me out a bit.
Not because it’s a fascinating site and an amazing use of Mechanical Turk, but for the simple fact that it’s so close in idea/execution to my site that I soft launched just last Friday, tenspotting.com which collects and aggregates social top ten lists and allows users to share both their individual list and the communities.
Both sites collect info from users. Both sites allow users to create lists of whatever they might like. However, I do not have thousands of people working for me via Amazon’s MT. It’s kind of hard for a bootstrapper to compete against that.
However, I do believe that making lists on my site might be more fun. And I guess that’s probably how I’ll have to differentiate it over time.
Either way, it’s an amazing experience for me to have launched the site and to see it up and running as a first time web entrepreneur.
If anyone in this thread is interested in checking it out, I’d love to hear what you think. It’s early and kinda ugly but it works at a very base level. Launch early and often right?
Yours,
Gavin Purcell www.tenspotting.com
Jamie Wilkinson
on 03 Dec 06“Loading your main page.” As of 12/3 12:23am EST.
An easy answer to that “ultimate ROR host” question I guess.
whetstone
on 05 Dec 06Pretty sweet. Stuff I’d like to see in it:
1) the ability to embed, say, the top 10 from a category in a web page 2) browse page with categories 3) more transparent explanation of the numbers and voting rules
This discussion is closed.