Measuring EC2 vs. App Engine in the blogosphere posted by Daniel Schneider at Tuesday, March 17, 2009

Over the last couple of months, I’ve dived headfirst into the innovative world of social media metrics. A tool that’s quite interesting is Radian6’s “conversation cloud,” which transforms statistics into a graphic. It aggregates the most common words associated with your search term and displays the results in the form of a word cloud. The larger the word, the more often it appears in search results on the term you wanted to measure. Simple.

Working all the time with developers for many of our clients, I figured it would be cool to see how Amazon EC2 and Google App Engine stack up in the blogosphere – what key terms are people associating with them and what similarities or differences are there. A little compare and contrast exercise. I set parameters for the last month. This is what EC2 looks like:













Not a surprise that most terms are developer focused. What about App Engine, where does it stand?

Clearly, there’s considerable overlap. This is to be expected since they offer similar services.

What’s more revealing are the differences. First, “cloud” is much more prominently associated with EC2 than App Engine. The “cloud” in EC2 dwarfs the “cloud” in App Engine. Second, EC2’s cloud reflects a larger enterprise base. “Business,” “company,” and “customers,” to name a few key terms, are all highlighted in the EC2 cloud, while similar terms are either not present or tiny and irrelevant in the App Engine cloud. Amazon EC2 and Google App Engine are closely related, arguably competitive platforms, with key differences that stand out.

This analysis only covers 30 days and is a crude instrument. But it paints an interesting ‘word’ picture. In the blogosphere, people are much more likely to associate Amazon's EC2 with business and Google's App Engine with developers.

A picture is worth a thousand words, right?