Almost exactly 15 years after we started KnowNow. Wow. That feels like a lifetime ago.

And almost 30 years after Tibco. Two lifetimes for me!

Yes. I wonder if it will take another 15 years for the service to become ubiquitous. 

Gregory Alan Bolcer added: "@Srini only two?"  http://xent.com/FoRK-archive/nov99/0617.html

VentureBeat fails to say who this service competes with. Amazon Web Services pub sub?

For now, while the service is in beta, it is free, according to a blog post today from product manager Rohit Khare.

Once it’s generally available to all to use, the service will cost 40 cents per million operations of the Cloud Pub/Sub application programming interface (API) operations for the first 100 million operations. After that point, the price drops to 25 cents per million for the next 2.4 billion operations. And after that, the price goes even lower, to 5 cents per million.

Of course, data storage and movement of data from one Google data center to another will cost money, as always.

The beta availability of the tool makes Google more friendly to developers looking to easily build complex, data-rich applications. And that’s important as Amazon Web Services continues to lead the public cloud market, with Microsoft also playing a key role alongside Google.

Open-source publish-subscribe messaging tools do exist. Apache Kafka is probably the most prominent one. But it takes time to implement Kafka yourself. So this tool could come in handy for certain programmers.

Cloud Pub/Sub does have quotas. For instance, requests for publishing data — and individual messages — are capped at 10MB. See the full list of quotas for more detail.

15 years ago we dreamed of this kind of scale:

That’s why we’re making the beta release of Google Cloud Pub/Sub available today, as a way to connect applications and services, whether they're hosted on Google Cloud Platform or on-premises. The Google Cloud Pub/Sub API provides:

• Scale: offering all customers, by default, up to 10,000 topics and 10,000 messages per second

• Global deployment: dedicated resources in every Google Cloud Platform region enhance availability without increasing latency

• Performance: sub-second notification even when tested at over 1 million messages per second

It's even more relevant now! I'm extremely curious about this part here:

Robust data collection from smart devices – for example, mobile device endpoints: providing developers with the ability to integrate sensor data from the endpoints with real-time data analysis pipelines, automatically routing the data streams to an application.

What about that makes you curious? That was always the dream, even in 2000!

Not the theory, I'm curious what exactly they support.  Radio signal?  App launches?  What?

Yeah, I agree that that is unclear. Not sure. 

@Srini only two?  http://xent.com/FoRK-archive/nov99/0617.html

I wonder what happened to FAST.

Wikipedia says bought by Microsoft in 2008: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_Search_%26_Transfer

20 years after BuddyList.

Whoa, when did BuddyList begin? 1995??