I feel kind of fucked by Google. And that's totally not ok of me.

See, I was blessed by Google. I was one of ten people outside of the company given super-early access to their awesome new Channel API way back in October-ish. At the time, they gave access to my development server for android2cloud, to load-test the service and figure out how it works under load. They said they'd be expanding the test server numbers to check and see how more and more user load affected the server as time went on. That's totally reasonable, and I was lucky to get what they gave me. Because I'm a greedy little bastard, I asked that the production server be considered for the larger tests, and was given an assurance that it was "exactly the kind of environment [they'd] want" when the time came.

So I faithfully ported android2cloud, tried to work out the kinks in the system, tried to help out the other developers who were gifted with this early access. And we heard very little about the roadmap and schedule of the testing. So, we moved along. I had to stop working with the Channel API after a while, and pick up nodejs, to try and get a patch for my server issues out the door as soon as possible. And that's where I was, when I saw the TechCrunch post today.

After that, I saw the App Engine blog post.

The impression I get from both posts is that Channels are available in all App Engine apps now. Which leaves me a little hurt and upset, and I'm simultaneously hoping that it is true and not true. I want my server problems to go away, and this gives me a huge amount of breathing room. But I also wanted to get some load testing metrics, get some idea of how this would actually work with our system, have some forewarning so I could handle this gracefully and smoothly. Finding out through a third party, then hearing about it on the official blog, and not even getting a similar announcement in the mailing list is kind of a slap, after everything. And I posted links to both posts on the mailing list, and asked if this meant the Channel API was available to everyone now. Nobody has clarified yet.

And then I think about everything that's happened, and this saga as a whole. And I feel like an ungrateful little shit, because the company that did so much for me and made such exceptions for me didn't remember to give me forewarning before launching the feature I had been testing for them, as a favour to me. If they even launched the service, which I'm still unclear on.