Google expanding in Kirkland

As mentioned today in the Seattle Times, Google has signed a lease to occupy a new three-building office campus in Kirkland just down the street from our current offices. At 180,000 square feet, this will provide a lot of much-needed space as we grow our staff from the current 400+ employees to the goal of "several thousand". No word yet on whether the Kirkland campus will feature a Tyrannosaurus skeleton.

Update: Another story, with pictures, in the Seattle P-I.


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Lessons Learned: Google Tech Talk on Building Scalable Systems

Reza Behforooz, tech lead for the Google Talk service, recently gave a presentation at a Google-sponsored scalability conference in Seattle. In his talk, Reza discussed many of the challenges involved with running a large-scale service, and how Google Talk has addressed these problems. While it doesn't give away all the secrets, the presentation does provide valuable insight into the Google Talk service architecture.

It's also interesting to note that many of the methods used to scale the Google Talk service to millions of online users were the same ones used at AOL to scale up the AIM service. There are a number of minor architectural differences between the two systems (XML vs binary protocol, gatewayed connection to presence server vs direct, for starters), but the essentials are very similar.

You can watch the full talk with Q&A below, or if you'd rather just read the highlights, check out Dare Obasanjo's notes from the conference.

Random IM of the Week

In my work on AIM and Google Talk, I get a lot of random people sending me messages. Some of the IMs are funny, some are bizarre, and more than a few are social engineering attempts. But one conversation I had last week was sufficiently random to be worth sharing.

sender: sir sender: please cancel your hamburger sender: ive asked you twice sir me: cancel sender: sir sender: dont play games with me sender: have you cancelled your hamburger? me: it was a cheeseburger sender: sir that will not do sender: cancel your hamburger now me: can it be a double hamburger? sender: yes sir the more the merrier sender: sir cancel it me: ok cancel my double hamburger then. sender: ASAP sender: sir i cannot cancel it for you sender: it is YOUR hamburger sender: you must do it me: ok. cancelled. sender: sir you and i both know much more effort is required a double hamburger sender: please refrain from playing games sender: sir me: right. my mistake. cancelled cancelled. sender: sir sender: please refrain sender: control yourself sender: no need to yell sender: calm down sender: im willing to negotiate sender: sir? sender: sir if you do not respond your are terminated i hope you realize sender: terminated sir me: my hamburger will be terminated? sender: no you sir will be terminated sender: sir sender: you are terminated due to lack of balls sender has signed off. me: but what about the hamburger?