Since I wrote the first version of 2cloud, I’ve always had a favourite moment. It’s the moment where things first start working, where I pick up a random device and use it to tell another random device to open a link. And it does so. Instantly.
That’s magical.
I just finished my third pass at writing a system (the first used a particularly naive polling algorithm that made servers cry, the second used Google’s Channel API, now I’m using WebSockets). I know how the sausage is made for each of those: for the first, it’s an insane amount of HTTP requests to a specific URL. For the second, it’s a combination of an insane amount of HTTP requests and some black magic with keeping the connection alive, among other things (XMPP gets worked in there, too). For the third, it’s a protocol that explicitly allows what I’m doing, that was built for what I’m doing, that both my webserver and my browser support. Nothing in these three solutions is more magical than the Internet itself.
And yet, every time I get the first google.com link to pop open on some device across the room, it’s a huge rush and I inevitably end up showing anyone who will watch, bemused at my excitement.
A lot of people have asked why we don’t just offer a free version that doesn’t pop links open automatically, which would drastically reduce our costs and allow us to keep a majority of our userbase. I’m not ruling that out, but this is my big objection. The magic is a large part of what I love about working on this; if users don’t get a chance to see that, I’ve denied them something wonderful.
