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The U.S. Library of Congress announced this morning via its official Twitter account that it will be acquiring the entire archive of Twitter messages back through March 2006. In addition to a massive printed collection, the Library already has an extensive collection of other digital assets. The Library of Congress is the biggest library in the world. The Library does extensive work with data format standards , the semantic Web and other platforms for outside analysis. The addition of Twitter into the organization's offerings could foster an enormous amount of academic research. From a new kind of historical record to an unprecedented opportunity for discovering patterns of social interaction, this is big. Sponsor When the Library of Congress was founded in the year 1800, publishing was very expensive and relatively few people did it. Today, thanks to blogs, YouTube, Facebook and certainly Twitter it's a new world. Publishing is far faster, easier and more accessible today than at any point in human history. That might seem obvious, but on a day like today it's worth thinking about some more. For now there are more questions than answers with regards to this Library of Congress Twitter news. Will the archive include friend/follower connection data? Will it be usable for commercial purposes? Will there be a Web interface for searching it, and will that change the face of Twitter search for good? Is there any way that the much larger archive of Facebook data could be submitted to the same body for analysis of the same kind? These kinds of large data sets are poised to become one of the most important resources the Internet creates. As Kenneth Cukier wrote in The Economist's recent Special Report on Big Data , "Data are becoming the new raw material of business: an economic input almost on a par with capital and labour." The Library's blogger Matt Raymond put it like this in the blog post about the announcement : Expect to see an emphasis on the scholarly and research implications of the acquisition. I'm no Ph.D., but it boggles my mind to think what we might be able to learn about ourselves and the world around us from this wealth of data. And I'm certain we'll learn things that none of us now can even possibly conceive. Nate Anderson at ArsTechnica offers this context: There's been a turn toward historicism in academic circles over the last few decades, a turn that emphasizes not just official histories and novels but the diaries of women who never wrote for publication, or the oral histories of soldiers from the Civil War, or the letters written by a sawmill owner. The idea is to better understand the context of a time and place, to understand the way that all kinds of people thought and lived, and to get away from an older scholarship that privileged the productions of (usually) elite males. Twitter co-founder Biz Stone said today that there are 105 million registered users on the service. How will those users feel about their tweets being archived for posterity? Will non-U.S. users be included (it is a U.S. based company) and object? Lots of questions remain. There's no word from Twitter itself about this news but we expect details to become public during the Chirp developers conference starting in just a few minutes. Update: Twitter HQ just told us that a blog post about this news is forthcoming. It's hard to imagine a more significant milepost in social media's early march toward becoming an essential component of our social experience. Discuss
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Twitter's Entire Archive Headed to the Library of Congress
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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
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Rulers of the Cloud: A Multi-Tenant Semantic Cloud is Forming & EMC Knows that Data Matters
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Hey, RWW friends and fans! As some of you may have noticed, we've been tinkering around with our new team Buzz account today. We've decided to do something a little bit different with this network, and we really hope you'll like it. We know that a lot of you follow us on Twitter or are our Facebook fans , and sometimes the constant streams of blog posts and observations can be as impersonal as they are informative or interesting. Occasionally, you might also catch a duplicate update. We've decided that the last thing we need to do with Buzz is use it to promote the same stream of blog content - we're not that desperate, and we know you get that news elsewhere. Here's how we're using Google Buzz instead. Sponsor Follow Team RWW on Buzz For conversations! Actual, honest-to-god, open discussions between the RWW team and you, our wonderful readers. We'll ask questions or give opinions there from time to time each day, and we do hope you'll join us for some friendly debate and fresh perspectives in a real-time setting. We've certainly had fun with it, ourselves, already. You can also choose to add our blog posts to your Google Buzz stream by choosing Buzz from the Add This widget at the bottom of each post. It looks like this: But we won't be cluttering up our own Buzz stream with bot-like aggregations and self-promotion. As we've said, if you want to get RWW news, there are many other platforms well-suited to that. Join the ReadWriteWeb team on Buzz for real-time conversations about web technology and social media. So, if you'd like to chat with us about any topic under the sun, just follow our new Buzz account and leave us a comment. We welcome all kinds of feedback, and you never know who will reply! We're really looking forward to getting to you know as individuals in a more casual online environment. Let us know what you think in the comments, or just pop over to the Buzz account and tell us all about it. Discuss
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How We've Decided to Use Buzz
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Millions of people click click click their way mindlessly through repetitive casual games like FarmVille every day. Such games spread like a virus, infecting Facebook news feeds and eating up big chunks of the precious little time on earth that players were blessed with before they face their inevitable, if temporarily forgotten, mortality. Josh Williams used to develop software like that. A graphic designer by training, his website for sharing iconography grew popular enough that he turned it into a game called PackRat. Half a million people spent far too much time on the site, but bigger companies grew faster and quickly swallowed up the "zombification" category of casual games. (My categorization, not his.) Now Williams is building something different, perhaps the opposite of FarmVille. Sponsor Williams is the CEO of Gowalla , one of the newest and smallest of the several entrants into a market referred to as "location based social networking." Gowalla encourages people to go outside. It's a mobile game where players are rewarded for visiting new locations in the real world and for adding new spots to the Gowalla database. Users can find out who goes to particular places around town, where else those people like to go and what people think of those different spots. Gowalla vs. Foursquare vs. Facebook As of the end of last-year , Gowalla users had checked-in at 150,000 locations in more than 100 countries around the world. Your millage may vary. The coffee shop I'm in right now has been checked-in to by 30 people, only 2 of us in the last week. Competitor Foursquare shows 4 users checked-in and present right now . At least in this spot, Foursquare has seen 20X as many check-ins as Gowalla. True to the backgrounds of the company's founders, Gowalla is very focused on design. Its badges, like stamps on a passport displaying where a user has checked-in, are beautiful. Its user experience is simple but clear and enjoyable. Foursquare may be much bigger and have more commercial partnerships but Gowalla is much prettier and does certain things better, like importing friends from other social networks. What about Facebook? Williams says he's as sure as anyone that Facebook is working on location as a feature. Ted Morgan, CEO and founder of location data provider Skyhook Wireless, says his company has been talking to Facebook and Twitter about location for years. Twitter recently hired developer Ryan Sarver to run its developer platform after Sarver spent 4 years at Skyhook. Williams says that when Facebook launches location, he hopes that many people will want to use Gowalla as the interface to post to Facebook. They needn't wait, Facebook Connect integration is live today, but full-on entry into the location market by Facebook is going to be a very big deal. The Rise of Location Based Services Gowalla has raised more than $10 million from a variety of investors large and small, several of whom also invested in Foursquare. Morgan says these kinds of services are blowing up location in a bigger way than ever before. "Around the dot com era they thought location based services were going to take off," he told us today. "That was premature but the telecoms have been talking about user privacy and preparing for a time of location services for ten years." Morgan's company pocketed a part of Gowalla's war chest today when the social network announced that it was deploying Skyhook Wireless's location software in the Android version of Gowalla. Skyhook has driven around the country and cataloged the location of more than 80 million wifi hotspots. It then tells its customers where they are with precision, based on the MAC addresses of nearby wifi signals. Gowalla queries Skyhook for a device's location, to supplement the GPS data, Skyhook sends that data back and then Gowalla interprets it to suggest businesses and other venues that a user is probably at. Skyhook is now baked into the iPhone OS but Morgan is still selling the service to other platforms and application developers. He says that for the first 5 years of his now 7 year old company it was a hard sell. "I was waving my hands a lot," he says, "trying to convince people that good location is important." Now the company is serving up location data hundreds of millions of times each day, thanks entirely to the proliferation of mobile apps in general and the iPhone in particular. Hundreds of millions of location checks per day, millions of check-ins on applications like Gowalla. And what's the point? Williams the Gowalla CEO says that the company hasn't done a good enough job explaining the desirability of the service's badges. Some users get it and some don't, he says. "We'll be doing new things this year that make it more clear, but it's all about encouraging people to get out and experience new things." He tells stories about a user alerted that they were near Michael Jackson's birthplace and driving several miles out of their way to visit it. About a couple who have quit their jobs and now aim to check-in in every state in the US and every province in Canada. Gowalla users can get social credit for doing things like going out into the woods. "And then they're out in the woods," Williams says, "and we think that's great." Discuss
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Gowalla is the Anti-FarmVille
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