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OpenLike: All-Star Team to Challenge Facebook’s Expansion

cgseo — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 01:17:13 +0000

Facebook announced yesterday that it is taking a number of dramatic steps that would all add up to serving 1 billion "like" clicks from visitors to sites around the web, within 24 hours. Many people are concerned about Facebook's growing dominance around the web . One group of high-profile New Yorkers has launched OpenLike , a "very alpha alternative to Facebook Like." Working on the project so far is much-watched blogging investor and startup guy Chris Dixon , Huffington Post co-founder and MIT Media Lab guy Jonah Peretti , Jonathan Glick of Dixon, Conway , Ehrenberg and other VC-blessed TLists , Tom Pinckney who with Dixon both sold SiteAdvisor and founded Hunch.com and MIT grad and Hunch engineer Peter Coles . Dixon said this afternoon that the project is "looking for an authoritative open source person to govern it." Sponsor So the establishment is in Palo Alto and the rock-star insurgents are from the East Coast? Let no one say the Internet is boring. The lightweight technology at OpenLike is right now just a way for site owners to provide buttons for sharing content on a wide variety of social networks. One line of javascript adds a series of sharing buttons to a site, which the site owner can edit. Given that there are any number of ways to do more or less this same thing, and that these are very smart people working on this, we're sure there's a lot more in the works. The project describes itself on its site as "an open protocol to allow sharing the things people like in a simple and standard method between web applications." We'll share more details if and when this project develops. Related: See also developer Jesse Stay's blog post How Do You Compete With This Beast: Here's How , about long-time open standards community member Phil Windley's new product Kynext . The battle over control or absence of control over the internet is far, far from over. There are lots of people getting ready to step up and challenge Facebook's powerful, seductive, expanding control. Discuss

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Facebook May Launch Recommendation Service For Other Websites

cgseo — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 03:34:52 +0000

Facebook appears to be preparing to launch a recommendation service that will be used on sites around the web. On the day before the F8 developers' conference, independent developer Jesse Stay has posted code found on Facebook's GitHub open source code repository account. Facebook is already very practiced at offering recommendations on-site: its News Feed technology pulls the items out of its Live Feed based on who and what you've shown is most important to you among all your friends and their activities. Facebook knows more about you than probably any other consumer service online, probably more even than Google. Recommendation could in fact become bigger than search, and so this feature could become one of Facebook's biggest moves. Sponsor Stay believes the feature will function like Google SideWiki , the sidebar of running commentary about a page that website owners have no control over but that hasn't really caught on with users, either. Two things you can be sure of: Facebook recommendations will make use of a website visitor's Facebook friend connections and the feature will almost definitely make publishers happier than the uncontrollable Google SideWiki did. recommendations site="abc.com" height="300" width="400" /> should be replaced by an iframe showing recommendations for the abc website (pending checkin on the server side). Recommendation would be huge for Facebook. Beyond just being cool for users, recommendation is compelling for site publishers because it's like pre-emptive search. The language in that code implies to me that the feature will display content recommended to a user because of interest by friends in certain content on the site. Presumably if any of your friends have shared links to the site you're visiting, you'll be encouraged to visit those pages in particular. Perhaps recommendation will go further than that. It's really hard to know, but we'll probably find out tomorrow. That's the question: is this a way for you to recommend content or to have content recommended to you? If it's primarily one, I'm guessing it's the latter. Make no mistake: recommendation could be a huge addition to Facebook's arsenal. Recommendation technologies are something we've covered for years here at ReadWriteWeb . We asked a year ago if Facebook was secretly working on a recommendation technology , though the feature we saw then turned out to be something else. Beyond just being cool for users, recommendation is compelling for site publishers because it's like pre-emptive search. Everyone wants to give their site owners an opportunity to search for the content they want to find, but even better is prompting them with what's effectively personalized search results as soon as they land on a page. Opt-out/opt-in? This essential question of privacy will be put to the test in many ways, as Facebook continues to extend its system of identity across the web. Facebook knows enough about you, your interests, your friends, their interests, their friends and their interests too that it should be able to nail recommendations fairly well. Discuss

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Facebook May Launch Recommendation Service For Other Websites

Where Does Android Register on Google’s "Evil" Meter?

cgseo — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 18:04:18 +0000

As we mentioned briefly last night , Google is going to attempt to reintegrate Android into the main Linux kernel - the code had been booted in December because it was "no longer being cared for," according to Greg Kroah-Hartman, the Novell developer who maintains the staging, USB and driver core for Linux. The reintroduction process will take years , says Google open source programs manager Chris DiBona. On the one hand, it's good to see Google trying to do the right thing by the open source community, but on the other hand, the argument could be made that Google appropriated Linux for its own for-profit ends without giving back. This move has been dubbed by some as "evil," (in reference to Google's infamous company motto, "Do No Evil"). The issue: Google forked Android's development into private branches, implemented a closed code review process and and then trademarked the "Android" name all while providing an incomplete public software developers kit which is missing several key items needed to build a Android-based handset. Open? No. But is that evil? Sponsor The Arguments as to Android "Openness"...or Lack Thereof Vision Mobile's research director Andreas Constantinou makes these same points and more over on the blog run by the market analysis and strategy firm. The post, entitled " Is Android Evil? " is worth reading in its entirety. But we'll summarize some of the main points here by snipping out a handful of his top arguments as to why Android isn't really open source software: Private branches: As noted above, select partners (OEMs mostly) have access to private codelines that are estimated to be 6+ months ahead of the public SDK. This allows them to stay competitive. Close review process: All code reviewers work for Google. Few outside contributions get in with no explanation as to why. Speed of evolution: Google innovates on Android so quickly that OEMs have no choice but to remain close to the company in order to get in on the new features and bug fixes. Incomplete software: The public SDK lacks radio integration, international language packs and operator packs. Android is a trademarked name. Private roadmap: The published roadmap is a year out of date . You have to contact Google to see the private one. Constantinou makes a few other arguments, too, like how the Android Marketplace is controlled by Google for example, but that's not really as important to this issue - especially since there's no Apple-like review process when it comes to accepting new applications. Another argument to Android's not-so-open nature is that Google chose the Apache license so the derivative code doesn't have to be contributed back. Google's DiBona dismissed this, claiming differentiation is good and enables commercial vendors to succeed, according to the ZDNet report . Profit Isn't Evil Commercial success with Linux isn't a new (or "evil") idea, though. Distributions like Redhat, SuSE, Oracle Unbreakable Linux - heck, even Tivo - among many others have turned a profit thanks to Linux. That's not evil, that's just good business. But the issue here is that Google is succeeding commercially on top of Linux while making changes to Android that are not shared with the community. Meanwhile, they get to promote "Android" as "open," when, in reality, that doesn't appear to be the case. The question we ask now is this: does this make the Android business "evil?" Or does Google get a pass since Android is far more open, comparatively speaking, than most other mobile operating systems today? Where does Android fall on Google's "evil meter? in your eyes? Discuss

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Where Does Android Register on Google's "Evil" Meter?

Android and Linux Discuss Code Reunion

cgseo — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 04:00:00 +0000

The guardians of the Linux Kernel Archive , repository for the source code for the Linux open source operating system, turned the code for Google's Android phone out the door last year. The guardians felt they were getting too little cooperation from Google and too few patches from its engineers. However, at the Linux Collaboration Summit, taking place today and tomorrow in San Francisco, Google has apparently broached the topic of bringing it all back home. Sponsor Both Jim Zemlin, Executive Director of the Linux Foundation, and Chris DiBona, open source and public sector engineering manager for Google, reportedly believe it will be done. DiBona, however, told a reporter that he believed the restoration would be a "multi-year process." DiBona even told ZDNet's Paula Rooney that Google was hiring two engineers just to work on the kernel. He dismissed worries over forking and fragmentation, "noting that smart phone operating system code is not all appropriate for the operating system kernel." In fact, that seems to lie at the kernel of the fuss over the kernel, the fact that Google, he says, is shipping millions of Androids per day. The exigencies of the profit-driven corporation and the clean code values of the guardians don't seem like they will ever fit together seamlessly. Top photo by Paolo Massi Bottom photo by Seth Rasmussen Discuss

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Android and Linux Discuss Code Reunion

Skobbler Heads for the New World

cgseo — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 00:20:39 +0000

German navigation company Skobbler is bringing their turn-by-turn, OSM iPhone streetmap application to the United States. Skobbler describes itself as "an Internet community with a free mobile phone navigation system." Skobbler has been testing the application in several states in the last few weeks and has reportedly found the OpenStreetMap data quite good. OSM is a collaborative, crowdsourced project to map the world from the ground up, using volunteers and an emphasis on open-source presentation and rendering. Sponsor Skobbler is comparable in its leverage of community and focus on open source to the more established Waze . Skobbler had jettisoned NAVTEQ data and debuted with OSM in Germany in March. After a rocky start it has found its way into the top ten downloads in the German iTunes store. "Skobbler is using consumer feedbacks (reporting is integrated into the application) and the GPS tracks generated by users to improve the map data in co-operation with OSM volunteers," according to GPS Business News 's Ludovic Privat. Discuss

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Skobbler Heads for the New World

Rulers of the Cloud: A Multi-Tenant Semantic Cloud is Forming & EMC Knows that Data Matters

cgseo — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 10:21:00 +0000

EMC is a large company focused on high performance storage for enterprises. It's offerings are closely aligned with the idea of extending infrastructure from virtualization to private cloud infrastructure. The company wants to help IT data provisioning services are as easy as Amazon and as secure as Fort Knox. To get a handle of where enterprise data storage meets the web, we looked for inspiration from architects of the web and Internet, including web pioneer Sir Tim Berner-Lee and Vint Cerf . We take a look at EMC as positioned as the closet, physically, to the core assets of the enterprise. Sponsor In this report, we also spoke with Ted Newman, CTO of the Cloud Infrastructure Group of EMC Consulting, which is part of EMC Global Services to find out what is really happening in the enterprise sales and delivery engines. We mashed his thoughts up with some big-thinkers in the core of computing to get perspective on the company's future as a map to enterprise information assets. Where Does Data Live? EMC's byline is " Where Information Lives ", and by being a leading provider of storage solutions, this claim is literal indeed. Here, we see that data does have a home. In this case, in an enclosure, in a data center. This YouTube video shares a 2009 demonstration of EMC's Symmetrix V-Max. This unit, built in partnership with Intel, can be configured with up to two petabytes of storage and one terrabyte of cache. Based on our interview Newman from the company and its focus on creating and extending private clouds, we think the EMC is recognizing the vast power of extending the enterprise out and providing services that compete with with the ease and speed of Amazon Web Services, but also provide enterprise class controls and performance. Where Does Data Dance? Tim Berners Lee sheds some light in this interview about the future of the web and its data. Question : "Is your vision of the Semantic Web one in which data is freely available, or are there access rights attached to it?" Answer : "A lot of information is already public, so one of the simple things to do in building the new Web of data is to start with that information. And recently, I've been working with both the U.K. government and the U.S. government in trying not only to get more information on the Web, but also to make it linked data. But it's also very important that systems are aware of the social aspects of data. And it's not just access control, because an authorized user can still use the right data for the wrong purpose. So we need to focus on what are the purposes for accessing different kinds of data, and for that we've been looking at accountable systems. Accountable systems are aware of the appropriate use of data, and they allow you to make sure that certain kinds of information that you are comfortable sharing with people in a social context, for example, are not able to be accessed and considered by people looking to hire you. For example, I have a GPS trail that I took on vacation. Certainly, I want to give it to my friends and my family, but I don't necessarily wish to license people I don't know who are curious about me and my work and let them see where I've been. Companies may want to do the same thing. They might say, "We're going to give you access to certain product information because you're part of our supply chain and you can use it to fine-tune your manufacturing schedule to meet our demand. However, we do not license you to use it to give to our competition to modify their pricing." This vision is where there is opportunity, accountable means controls. Shared, means cloud. Perhaps a new term in the making: Accountable clouds. Does Your Cloud Compile? Vint Cerf, Chief Internet Evangelist posted to the Google Research blog, Cloud Computing and the Internet that further expands on vocabulary management and cloud computing. We see a definition of cloud computing emerging here that ties it to data portability and capability, a defining moment in the definition of semantic web. "Interestingly, my colleague, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, has been pursuing ideas that may inform the so-called "inter-cloud" problem. His idea of data linking may prove to be a part of the vocabulary needed to interconnect computing clouds. The semantics of data and of the actions one can take on the data, and the vocabulary in which these actions are expressed appear to me to constitute the beginning of an inter-cloud computing language. This seems to me to be an extremely open field in which creative minds everywhere can be free to contribute ideas and to experiment with new concepts. It is a new layer in the Internet architecture and, like the many layers that have been invented before, it is an open opportunity to add functionality to an increasingly global network." All of the sudden, the semantic web seems required to realize the vision of the cloud. And, the great thing about it is that the cloud layer being a first example of the semantic web shows us we can start it in information technology's own backyard. EMC's Opportunity The enterprise of the future needs to share nicely, store petabytes at-will, and be available on demand. Also, to the degree that organizations run sensitive or personalized enterprise software, the platforms it runs on and interacts with will need to demonstrate the controls and permissions similar to those today inside the enterprise. This will be a key factor in whether the enterprise systems can gracefully consume cloud computing - or what they can adopt it for. This is the space open for EMC to provide hardware solutions coupled with software to manage the resources of the cloud, including storage, computing, and network. This is also the area of much focus - from monitoring to provisioning. And a winner is not going to be determined overnight. A roundup of open questions for the company and the enterprise information industry: VMware and Not - Can EMC win soley with ties to VMware, if open source hypervisors take significant market share, can and will the company be well positioned in these architectures? Oracle with Sun - Will Oracle's move into hardware, cloud, and storage have an impact on the companies positioning? S3 Servers in the Enterprise - We may have made this up. It seems clear that S3 and other Amazon Web Services will become the core fabric for IT adopting the cloud. It only makes sense to do the same with abstracting storage in the enterprise. We believe in the power of the cloud to creep in, and we want to see how big storage providers react to this new logical competitor. A key here for EMC and the rest of the IT industry is that Amazon sells storage with no consulting involved, or waiting period. At EMC, global services was responsible for 37% of EMC's total revenue in 2009 and is a important part of servicing customers. We wonder, should EMC offer an "S3" for the enterprise that plugs into Ionix and other EMC offerings? Open Protocols Inside, APIs Outside? - We asked recently in a discussion with Hitachi Data Systems whether open protocols instead of APIs would be the driver for this industry interoperability. Amazon, is clearly an API, where things more in the core of storage tier are protocols, worked on in tandem by many and influenced by those who matter. Helping IT Respond to Now - In a way, EMC and cloud computing meet in the IT budgeting process. We think that providing "always available" and "highly available" will meet, "low latency" and "DR" in a real way in future Amazon vs. internal discussions. What we mean, is that Amazon providing "scale as you go" is perfect disruption for the IT department. Iinfrastructure scales, IT budgets don't. This can be a big headache for IT trying to predict the future and is an opportunity for EMC to provide a better solution for enterprise capacity management. Yes, that means paying with a credit card - at least sometimes. Intel / Cisco as partners - New types of network management and cloud services are evolving in the chipset and network layer. We see the companies maturity in how it has global partnerships with these companies to help the the channel and drive solutions. At the same time, this centuries IT industry is more of a mosh-pit than a sing-a-long, and it seems like it is going to get very cozy in the future in the area of network and cloud management. This EMC rant on YouTube is a funny take on where the company is positioned. If EMC plays it's cards right, enterprises will choose its tools to "control the shape" of the data and systems in the data center. And, if it evolves quickly enough, the same IT manages will have solutions that keep all of the companies assets, including public cloud offerings, under one umbrella. Is your enterprise moving your data out into the cloud? Or is the cloud moving into your company's data? Photo credit: paul_clarke Discuss

Boom! Tweets & Maps Swarm to Pinpoint a Mysterious Explosion

cgseo — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 03:24:08 +0000

What would you do if you heard a giant boom and you didn't know where it came from? If you're like thousands of people in Portland, Oregon, you might hit Twitter and Google Maps to participate in the city-wide exploration of a slightly frightening mystery. Last night at about 8 p.m., people in a big part of the city felt their windows shake and no one could tell them what caused it. Was it a sonic boom? An angry deity? Even the mayor himself tweeted this morning that he was looking into the sound. In the meantime, thousands of people were using the hashtag #pdxboom and adding themselves to a hastily configured Google Map showing where they lived and how loud the boom had been there. In just a few hours, a pattern emerged, with reports clustering around one city park. This morning the police found a detonated pipe bomb there and cited the Google Map in their announcement. Sponsor Pausing the Stream Reid Beels is a designer, geo-developer and one of the community organizers of Portland's forthcoming conference Open Source Bridge ("The conference for open source citizens"). Beels says he was sitting in a restaurant in southeast Portland when he heard the boom, and saw tweets streaming in about it within minutes. He searched Twitter for "boom" and "explosion," limiting the results by location. Within five minutes, he says, a hashtag had emerged: #pdxboom. What was the #pdxboom, people wanted to know? Some people said it sounded like thunder. Lots of people said it sounded like an empty trash Dumpster crashing on the ground. They mentioned their locations in their Tweets and Beels quickly grew frustrated that all this data was just streaming into the ether, lost from analysis. So he threw up a Google Map with instructions to put a pin in your location and describe how the boom sounded to you. Within an hour 100 people had placed pins on the map. Beels and developer Audrey Eschright came up with a color coded system to describe the intensity of the sound, and began retroactively coloring in pins based on any comments people left. Then they found out that Google Maps will only display the 200 most recent pins placed in a public map. Beels' friend Aaron Parecki wrote a script to download the map's data every fifteen minutes. That came in handy when a few hours later someone vandalized the map by dragging a large number of markers outside the town. It was trivial to roll back to the last valid data. The local TV news and the newspaper ran stories about the boom, and pointed their audiences to the Google Map. Thousands of people visited it, and just under 1,000 added a pin marking where they where and how loud the boom had sounded to them. It became clear that the boom originated near the Sellwood Bridge; a big cluster of red markers surrounded the area, especially to the east. Thousands of people are still streaming in to look at the map; at the end of the day it's now approaching 70,000 views, even if the mystery, if not the crime, is solved. Some people thought it was a precursor Earthquake Boom . (I woke up convinced my house was in an earthquake.) But the Portland police went to a park in the area most filled with red flags on the map and found a large detonated pipe bomb. A Portland police spokesperson said the maps and tweets were very helpful. A topographic view of the map made some inclined to believe that cliffs across the river and low-hanging clouds combined to make the sound travel as far across the city and in the direction that it did. That Was a Practice Run Beels says two big lessons came out of the experience for him. First, the tools they used were easy and fast, but they were also quite limited. Google Maps in particular was capable of multi-user collaboration but did poorly when it came to displaying a large amount of data. As Eschright wrote after the action, "It's not the best platform for a couple hundred people, many without prior experience editing maps, to be using all at once." Inspired by campaigns like CrisisCampPDX and the CrisisWiki , Beels says the community is interested in setting up an installation of open-source, crisis support software Ushahidi on standby in case a real crisis has to be dealt with. Beels says he's inspired not just by what was done in this situation, but by what it revealed about the future. "The community of people who will search for things online and go out of their way to try to figure out what's going on," he says, "is larger than you might think." Marshall Kirkpatrick is leading a webinar for Poynter's News University on Thursday about how location services are changing the news . It would be great if you joined us. Discuss

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Boom! Tweets & Maps Swarm to Pinpoint a Mysterious Explosion

Cracking Facebook’s Dominance: New Cross-Network Commenting Protocol Could Be a Game Changer

cgseo — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 18:50:31 +0000

Two companies outside Silicon Valley say they are the first implementors of a new open source protocol called Salmon , which allows comments to be sent over the walls of one social network to communicate with users of another. Imagine being able to post a message on Facebook to "@janedoe@twitter" and then seeing Jane receive the message in real time on Twitter. It's a vision comparable to being able to call any telephone number, whether it's part of your phone provider's network or not. Facebook isn't implementing Salmon, but that's what Canadian open source business microblogging service Status.net and Florida-based stream service Cliqset announced they have implemented between their networks this morning. Think of this as a technical foil for monopoly beginning to unfold. Sponsor Because Salmon is an open standard, any service can implement it without formal business relationships, and Google Buzz is expected to enter the Salmon ecosystem next. If a substantial portion of the technical community implements Salmon, Facebook could be under a lot of pressure to do so as well. (As it was with OpenID, for example.) If you could still message your friends inside and outside Facebook, it would be a lot easier for innovative new alternative networks to lure you away from the one big site that 400 million people use today. The Players Evan Prodromou of Status.net says his service has 1.2 million users, hosts 12,000 sites on its cloud and is adding 800 sites per week. It's a hot little startup that's fast implementing new technical protocols and making high profile hires. Status.net began rolling out Salmon support earlier this month but today announced that it was working with Cliqset on displaying the cross-network communication. "We've got disparate implementations communicating well using this open standard for cross-network conversations," Prodromou said today, "It's the first time!" Cliqset is better at trailblazing innovation than user acquisition but is a very respected member of the technical community working to create social network interoperability. Google Buzz appears to have seen a lukewarm public reaction to its launch but is most disruptive because of its support for open data standards . Salmon is still listed in the "coming soon" stage of the Buzz roadmap . Today's news isn't just about those players, it's about the Salmon protocol that would allow any social network to participate. Salmon was developed primarily by Google employee John Panzer. If you've seen the way that the Echo commenting system displays Tweets, trackbacks and other social media mentions below blog posts, that's the kind of model that Salmon aims to make open source. Interoperability as Foundation for Choice, Innovation, User Control Facebook's near monopoly on mainstream social networking means that users have limited options in how they experience social networking and they have to play by Facebook's rules. Not everyone likes how Facebook changes its rules, especially its privacy policy. Likewise, though Facebook is incredibly quick to innovate, it's generally assumed that a market with more than one competitor gives all companies in question more incentive to try to win the hearts of users. Simply put, if you could leave Facebook and still communicate with people using Facebook (you can't today) then leaving Facebook would be a lot easier and more social networks would have reason to invest in building a compelling service for you to use. If there was more than one meaningful option, those services would compete to build the best social network they possibly could. And Facebook would have more reason to be careful when considering dramatic changes in things like its Privacy Policy. Today, where else are you going to go without losing touch with all your friends? That's why interoperability is important and that's why it's a big deal that two small social networks used by early adopters have pushed Salmon-based interoperability out into the wild. Discuss

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Cracking Facebook's Dominance: New Cross-Network Commenting Protocol Could Be a Game Changer

Rulers of the Cloud: Google Becomes the Cloud, Search is a Feature

cgseo — Sat, 20 Mar 2010 01:30:00 +0000

The shortest way to describe this is that Google is no longer a verb. It's becoming a noun. Not just the few clicks to find information, but the information itself and the experience surrounding it. Today, we get to add Google's chapter to " Will One Company Dominate the Cloud " introspective series and take a glimpse of the silent revolution from "index" to "be" that is transforming the company and it's products to the default way to engage the Internet. As fate has it, Google done us a big favor in preparing for this piece. The company has launched an assault on the enterprise with its movement in the Google App Engine, having a stand-off with China , and negotiating with the EU . And that was just a bit of Google news from this week. Sponsor Whereas it's a bit more clear where Amazon and Cisco win (our recent analysis) as they head towards the cloud, with Google it takes a bit more expansive view. We have to take the focus out a bit, to be able to dial in on the details. Acknowledgment: Developers are the Products they Build We recently had the opportunity to sit down with Tim Bray . He has been a key contributor and thought leader in key areas of interoperability and information design, including his leadership in bringing XML to the world. He recently announced that he's joining Google and focusing on Android in a transition from Sun. Several things struck us about our dialog that we think are key for Google. First, when Bray described his new job at Google, he talked about what he wanted to do and what he saw that needed to be done. Within three days of being there, he has a sense of ownership of the companies products and mission. In some organizations, you may never get such a luxury. Second, Bray described his opportunity to "roll up his sleeves" and get back in the groove as a developer on a project he feels passion for. He mentioned his desire to take the open APIs of Android and expose some of the information in a more portable way, for example to transfer a call log from one phone to another. A very interesting project, with tangible results. This type of innovation lives on top of all the work the company has done to make the API exist, and to attract individuals who are willing to rethink how it should really work. We think that this is the most interesting thing about where Google is right now. It's "open" mantra gives the company the ability to see a whole generation into the future of information channel disruption. And, by bringing in "no holds barred" developers like Bray and a legion of others, the company is patiently solving problems that many of us don't even know exist. Lastly, Bray said something that caused us some deep thought. His comment, "when the Drizzle team was moved into Google, they just kept working on the their open source project and things stayed nearly the same." What caused us to pause was that open source development, whether Linux or XML, gives the developer, as a person, a way to contribute to the world. And it's documented. If the Internet was the Bible, leading a key open source initiative, is like getting your own chapter in the book, where time will be the judge of your actions. Much better than your manager alone. To know that hard work, intellectual capital, libraries are available to the world after the contract is complete. This really speaks to the artist in us, in a way, the paid open source developer is using Google as a canvas. If working at Google offers this emotional spark to employees, it will gain entirely new efficiencies in solving the big problems, in the context of individual efforts. Maybe this open source spirit is embedded into Twitter, and is why it works. We like to contribute to our version of the greater good...and want fans to cheer us on. What we learned; acknowledgment matters, and connections to the whole population of people is an amazing vehicle. Google: become an indie rock star - with the strength of grep. All of the Information on Earth Google's destiny to become the hub of the worlds information is intertwined with history. And this comes with artifacts of policy and posturing. To start with, not everyone agrees that Google should achieve a dominant cloud position. As we're noticing, stopping it is another matter. We'd like to suggest that in 2010, the company is not shy about stepping towards its future and will use its power, technology, and cash to stir it up. Here is our list of organizations in the world that Google has, is, or will be, continually bumping into in its quest for cloud information dominance. China (counties own the filters for the people) ATT (service providers own consumer on the network) Penguin (book publishers own the words in the texts) Visa (financial institutions own the digits in the transactions) Facebook (social networks know the details) Amazon (commerce sites own the decision point) Twitter (owns "what's happening") Microsoft (owns the computer applications and files) Open can be a Key to Unlock Doors We see both practical and strategic reasons that Google has a deep connection with the open source movement. Strategically, being the new optimized layer, removing all historic barriers to information give the company more leverage. Practically, solutions can be built where information is free. Reviewing a few examples, such as Google Earth, Android, and even GMail and we see that where there are open protocols and information disruptive products can be built. Once they are built, the Google wields a significant economic advantage in binding the worlds information assets and converting them to eyeballs. Here, we take a quick look at the information assets that Google is investing the global cloud. Results : Google has moved away from Page Rank to "Closest Object" in it's default results. What this means is that many businesses today show up as widget in the results in google with embedded links, maps, and other efficiencies. Ads : This is perhaps the best known and most valuable insight and unique asset, who wants to pay for what customer Realtime index : Google has worked to keep up with Twitter's realtime firehose Semantic index : The company continues to add more and more microsyntax parsers into its index, giving more controlled tools for publishers GMail : It had to be done. And it is monetized. Documents and files : Google Docs and the Apps Marketplace create a whole new stream of information about an individual. Private, personal, and shared. Mobile transactions : This is an interesting sample of where Google's strategy to build the Android OS pays off in the cloud. Not only does Google get to connect mobile to the rest of the offerings, but also to be able to dial in on movements, calls, and other critical tasks in our real-time lives. Books : Indexing all of them, first is an interesting piece of the strategy to break apart historic containers of knowledge. Is the book copyrighted? How about the quote? Browsers : The browser knows a lot. Google's Chrome moves it from being default search, to being default experience. This was a great example of where access to information "Faster pages" is the simple value proposition for consumers to switch. Filters : Protecting companies, trademarks, and interpreting the legality of free speech. Someone has to do it, if we're all one people. Health transactions : Google has even taken on one of the most sensitive challenges, private health information. And, it's connections to legacy systems that prefer EDI to JSON. It's clear that Google is making progress. What we've also learned in this review is that the companies biggest asset - people - may scale to solve problems in lightweight ways that entire teams and companies haven't been able to in the past. Perhaps being open, or transparent, gives the company a unique advantage in being prepared for a cloud future. Is the cloud where the action is? What verb would you be if you were hired at Google? Discuss

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Rulers of the Cloud: Google Becomes the Cloud, Search is a Feature

While Facebook & Twitter Sit on Sidelines, MySpace Jumps Into Bulk User Data Sales

cgseo — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 18:30:06 +0000

MySpace has taken a bold step and allowed a large quantity of bulk user data to be put up for sale on startup data marketplace InfoChimps . Data offered includes user playlists, mood updates, mobile updates, photos, vents, reviews, blog posts, names and zipcodes . Friend lists are not included. Remember, Facebook and Twitter may be the name of the game these days in tech circles, but MySpace still sees 1 billion user status updates posted every month . Those updates will now be available for bulk analysis. This user data is intended for crunching by everyone from academic researchers to music industry information scientists. Will people buy the data and make interesting use of it? Will MySpace users be ok with that? Is this something Facebook and Twitter ought to do? The MySpace announcement raises a number of interesting questions. Sponsor The 22 sets of data being made available are cheap. Prices range from $10 for raw dumps from the MySpace API to $300 for everything broken out by latitude and longitude. Subsequently derived data sets can be put on sale by InfoChimps users as well, with a revenue split. Analysis coming from the data could include things like music trends per zipcode, popular URLs being shared, etc. MySpace is generally thought of as a social network on the decline, but if it is able to position itself as the place to do music still then its hundreds of millions of users could remain engaged. Will data scientists want this data, though? Time will tell, but MySpace has long done cooler things with data than competitors Facebook and Twitter and people haven't gotten terribly excited about it yet. Related: See today's coverage of the cancelation of the Netflix Challenge due to privacy concerns. Bulk user data has tremendous analytical potential and both Facebook and Twitter have thrown the breaks on 3rd parties offering up their user data more than once. We covered InfoChimps' offering of bulk Twitter data in depth this Fall , but the marketplace quietly removed that data after Twitter asked them to "wait" for a second time. In February we profiled Pete Warden ( The Man Who Looked Into Facebook's Soul ), a developer who planned on putting a huge pile of Facebook user data online for academic analysis. As we wrote in that article: If what people call Web 2.0 was all about creating new technologies that made it easy for everyday people to publish their thoughts, social connections and activities, then the next stage of innovation online may be services like recommendations, self and group awareness, and other features made possible by software developers building on top of the huge mass of data that Web 2.0 made public. Days later Facebook contacted Warden days later and asked him to hold off on release of that data as well. Last week Warden posted open source code for harvesting the same type of bulk user data from Google Profiles , so the game's not up yet, not by a long shot. Why is this kind of big data interesting? This rational may be less applicable in the case of MySpace given its focus on music, or it may be more applicable given the allegedly poorer user demographics on the site compared to Facebook, but here's how I explained my interest in big social network data analysis in general, as part of a discussion about an excellent special report on big data in the Economist this month . I think in big data there lies a lot of hidden patterns that represent both opportunities for action and for reflection. At RWW we're working on trying to find ways to mine data to find news first (we've got some interesting methods employed already) and personally, I think the world is an awfully unfair mess and I'm hoping that data analysis will help illuminate some of the hows and the whys. Like the way that real-estate redlining was exposed back in the day by cross referencing census data around racial demographics and housing loan data. That illuminated systematic discrimination against black families in applying for home loans in certain parts of town. So too I think we'll find a lot of undeniable proof of injustices and clues for how we might deal with them in big data today. What will we see come out of MySpace's bulk data? What could we see come from Facebook and Twitter data if only they would let people get their hands on it? Time will tell. Discuss

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While Facebook & Twitter Sit on Sidelines, MySpace Jumps Into Bulk User Data Sales