Posted by Brian Fending on May 17th, 2008 — Posted in News, Social Media, Technology
In an interesting post by Dan Farber yesterday, he drew the comparison of the battles between companies firmly entrenched in the development of social media (”the social Web”) such Google, Facebook, and MySpace, to early American colonial efforts. Sure, they have the same goal - but what can they agree upon? Okay, not a perfect analogy, but:
Taking a historical perspective, the social-networking community hasn’t formed its Continental Congress to unite the colonies with a common vision and approach for openness. It’s a political and economic, not a technical, issue. The technical building blocks, such as OpenID, oAuth, and OpenSocial APIs, for an open social Web are taking shape.
So what DO they agree upon? I’m not sure that the organizations mentioned above, and to which the Big Players have committed PR time and in some case resources, are the stellar examples of a true Congress that they could be. Nobody but nobody is really opening up their APIs for integration with these “open” APIs in the way that would draw everyone to giving up individual rights in interest of the greater good. Google’s own “do no evil” mantra was even called into question (read the article). Additionally,
The Data Portability Project is developing guidelines and has the endorsement of the big social-networking players. But endorsement doesn’t mean they are gathered together to create a common social layer for the Web. It’s time for the social networks, like the 13 colonies in 1774 banding together to be free of British authority, to unite and manifest that the Web is by and for the users.
Right. The colonies took a really, really long time to do that. And so we wait. How do we move it forward when the really big issue is openness? The only answer I come to is a lot of the work from the entire community that I suspect engineers from all camps are already engaged in: matching the OpenSocial APIs with the Google Apps and Facebook Apps APIs, and uncovering a Killer App for social media connectivity in the process, probably igniting lawyer letters about violations of terms of use/service the same day.
But, at the end of the day, do we all get the right to own virtual guns? I say we need to start collecting them to find out. And by THAT, I mean we need to start building our own Killer Apps.
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Posted by Brian Fending on May 15th, 2008 — Posted in Technology
Let me be the first to correct my misspelling of nunchaku and point out the absurdity of the Napoleon Dynamite reference. Now, Nunchuck Skills is the title of a series of meetings I hold for a small rotating audience at work. Yes, I’m an oddball and Yes, there is at least one person in my department not completely enamored with my idea of braindump sessions on fringe topics that have some relevance. Since that person’s not my boss, I’m okay with that. The idea is to widen the audience for future sessions, and reprise some of my topics for additional presentations if they come up in the context of daily business. Pretty cool, pretty useful. The sessions run the risk of being one-way, but they’re small enough right now to spur shouting matches of epic proportion. It’s awesome.
Anyway (Historian: please count the number of times I begin paragraphs with this word. Thanks.), the first of these was on Social Media, big buzz word that it is these days.
“How many people here blog?” <crickets>
“Twitter?” <crickets>
“Subscribe to RSS feeds?” <the crickets’ parents usher them to bed>
So here we are, talking about the importance of social media, and I’m the only one with so much as a GoodReads account. This was going to be fun.
I used a few slides from my Flickr account (using PicLens, of course!), and my basic points were (a) if you plan to talk the talk, etc, etc, DO some social media and (b) more content is coming directly from your users to other users - if you’re not involved, it’s all soon to be beyond your control. A lot of gray areas there, but I was pleased with the session overall.
Some interesting counterpoint(s) on “but where do we start?”-type questions, but the general vibe was “Yes, we need to think about microbloggers & RSS consumption and not just company-hosted blogs, comments and personalization.” So it ended a little flat. But there’s promise, and at least a level of awareness.
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Posted by Brian Fending on May 13th, 2008 — Posted in BI, News, Technology
DaaS (DBMS as a Service) is yet another acronym that I pray will not catch on, mostly because it doesn’t add any value for anybody but the first-adopter vendors. This recent article in InfoWorld tells how database vendor Vertica is collaborating with Amazon on a move to offer its database management system (DBMS) as a hosted service on Amazon’s Elastic Cloud Computing Infrastructure (EC2), a take on Software as a Service (SaaS), etc, etc. The net here is that what costs ~$150K/month to host a 500GB 1TB [edit] data warehouse inside an end-user company gets slashed to $2K/month for a 500GB store [edit]. Of course, these numbers come from the vendor and who KNOWS what creative licensing math went into the ROI calculation [see comment]. But it’s compelling. [edit: a Vertica employee corrected a few details, but the story remains compelling. I encourage you to read the InfoWorld article (link above) and his comment.]
Here’s the Donald Feinberg (Gartner Group) analysis:
Cloud-hosted database management systems (DMBS) hold little value to the end-user type IT and department-level organizations. [...] Another, although related to the software vendor, is when a BI app vendor puts their app on top of Vertica and sells to their clients as a package. [...] They could now sell just to the end-user (bypassing IT and red tape) and install it fast with the correct resources for the end-users on EC2, assist the end-user loading data and the users are off and running.
That’s interesting - take IT out of the BI mix and you have end-users getting to their “one version of the truth” using a packaged software. So long as the tools / data can support reporting without an inherent “slice & dice your way to fun and profit!” capability, I think this is good. But the IT Analysts will remain involved in the setup of such instances until there exist Business Analysts not influenced by sales & marketing execs. Call me paranoid.
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Posted by Brian Fending on May 1st, 2008 — Posted in Technology
So I heard a humorous suggestion yesterday: “We should have one server per user.”
Hm. It doesn’t jive with the whole direction of increasingly distributed (”cloud”) computing, providing whatever computing resources are needed by a person/application/whatever on demand, even on a tremendously large scale. Of course, this person was referring to a server per user for *one application*, but it’s way more fun thinking in the scope of a general one-to-one person-to-machine pairing.
Here’s what cloud computing is actually supposed to look like. Note that it begins at the User Interaction Interface and does more than a simple back & forth with a single server (plus mystery resources to the right of it) to handle requests…
There was in InfoWorld article published citing a great example of this scalability over conventional server infrastructure approaches:
Analyst Alistair Croll of BitCurrent said there are specific applications for which grid/cloud computing is perfect. For example, The New York Times recently rented Amazon’s grid to create searchable PDFs of newspaper articles going back decades. The Times estimated that the project would have taken 14 years if the Times had used its own server. Amazon did the entire project in one day, for $240.
Seriously. A day. $240. That’s insane.
So what of that Matrix-like notion of a dedicated panoply of machines ready to act out orders from any and one? A *virtual* server, a “machine” that starts on command and goes out into a virtual world to return everything we need. This is the space where EVERYBODY wants to play God, from Google to Amazon to Microsoft, and make you feel safe next to your imaginary black box. Computing with a single interface per person - on whatever computer (who cares about the device you use??) - where everything is brokered past that single point of entry… Your Virtual Server. It’s the dragon that Killer App folks have been chasing for quite some time now. “Come home to us,” they say, while competition has the lot of them reinventing the wheel and drawing you to THEIR single interface.
Once the privacy/security/infrastructure/interoperability concerns (you know, the little stuff…) are worked out - and probably after the monetization is worked out behind closed doors - there is tremendous potential for a single window unto the world that will supplant the browser-based, keyword-search-based Internet we’ve come to love and waste time on. I wonder, how close are we to that reality?? It really makes me wonder if I should do a Facebook programming challenge in May just because it’ll be interesting or instead contribute something to OpenID, develop an S3-based app, work with the Google APIs, or develop a Facebook app.
Or just develop one of those cloud computing infrastructures - I hear it’s an easy $240 a day.
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