If you’re wondering about the reach of Twitter (clocking in at over 3 million users now) consider the tragedy that’s happening right now in Mumbai. Apparently the police (and perhaps the attackers) are not only aware of Twitter — it’s also part of the problem. The Indian government is asking that the #mumbai hashtag be shut down.
What’s more, with Twitter being an excellent medium for short messages but lacking the space for details, Internet users are now repurposing Wikipedia to maintain a frequently edited page.
The clouds just keep rolling in. Microsoft has thrown their hat in the ring with Azure which deserves notice because Ray Ozzie is behind it. Amazon just released a CDN service. With recent coverage in The Economist and every major newspaper, even my local news tonight, cloud computing appears to be here to stay, judging by the marketing feeding frenzy. There have been some recentwellpublicizedoutages that have generated someconcernedopinion. Something struck a related chord when I read an excellent interview by Stephen Strogatz about network effects in Seed magazine:
I have this general concern about entering this networked era, which we’re clearly already in. For example, the power grid used to not be a grid. It was just a lot of isolated power stations. When there was trouble people would just close down the power plants and repair whatever the problem was. But now that there’s a grid, when something bad happens at one point in the grid, and you use the defense strategy of just shutting down that plant, it can have propagating effects. It can put too much load on other plants, which may cause them to shut down. And this is exactly what we saw here in the northeast when we had the 2003 blackout. Or think about what is happening right now in the market, where there are all kinds of propagating, cascading failures in our market and financial systems. So, I’m just thinking that you may be opening a Pandora’s Box
Mark Dowds and I just finished the Beyond Technology event in Vancouver, BC. Lots of folks wanted the slides, so here they are.
My content focused on the outside community — how to find and join conversations that your market, customers, and partners are having. Mark’s presentation looked at the cultural changes within organizations, and how social networking can help capture learning and promote sharing of knowledge within companies.
It was a very interesting discussion, with lots of follow-up both online and off.
From the Register, by way of Broadsight, it seems that Google has patched an issue with Android that interpreted text you type as commands. So you can type “reboot” and reboot the phone.
Really? Really?
I mean, I’ve heard Android is supposed to be an open platform. But if the tale is true — and there isn’t some kind of double-backflip configuration knob you have to fiddle with to make this work — it’s a big deal.
Consumer electronics don’t like to be open. Openness breeds complexity. The iPhone is criticized for being closed, but it’s usable (despite this post to the contrary) in part because it’s locked down. The button-bar iPhone resembles nothing so much as the old Compuserve menu. It took us years to move from consumer adoption of buttons to comfort with the open web.
If you let humans play with the guts of things, they tend to break in new and creative ways. Social engineering is the new hacking; now that many operating systems are patched and scanned, hackers exploit human weaknesses to send drive-by malware links to Facebook users. (Good thing the bad guys are after Warcraft passwords, then.)
But back to Android. Apple locks it down; Google opens it up. One approach delivers a seamless experience, the other so much flexibility you can hurt yourself. Apple assumes people will use its devices on a busy New York subway, jostling for handholds and bouncing in purses. Google assumes people will hack together scripts and plug-ins, finding new ways to use tag clouds and APIs. Apple partners with monopoly-scale carriers; Google lobbies for free spectrum.
The two philosophies couldn’t be more different. It’ll be fascinating to see whether integration trumps flexibility, or vice-versa.
Today, I’m going to write about an equation. I’ll try to make it easy to follow, but it’s still stats and graphs. Stay tuned and I’m convinced it will be worth your while, because in my opinion, it’s the most important equation in cloud computing. It’s what drives your market, your customers, and your burn rate.
If you build a traditional data center platform for your application, you worry about three variables: The amount of traffic to your site, your capacity to handle that traffic, and the user experience they get, such as latency. The equation looks like this:
User experience = Traffic / Capacity
As traffic increases, user experience gets worse and delay goes up. This is because each visit to your site consumes resources on your infrastructure, and some users wind up waiting for the app to respond. Networks get full; databases encounter record locking; message queues back up; and so on. Ultimately, some of your visitors have a lousy experience.
On-demand computing platforms fundamentally change how you deal with this, because as far as you’re concerned, they have infinite capacity.
Google has been introducing a wide range of features lately. Their GMail labs are proposing all kinds of enhancements. But this one proves just how mainstream the web has become: Mail Goggles.
A pun on Beer Goggles, the plug-in asks you skill testing questions when you might be drunk.
There’s some controversy over Google’s product development approach. On the one hand, Google has taken new approaches — simple search engines, an entirely new approach to email (remember when labels were new?) But at the same time, the company has started sharecropping development, by letting people submit plug-ins, GMail enhancements, and so on.
That’s a tricky line to walk. On the one hand, you want to keep things simple. On the other hand, you want to reap the wisdom of the crowds and keep innovating. While new features keep the geeks happy, Street View confuses many of the Google Maps faithful.
So the real question is: Google Goggles might work, but if it’s too hard to set up, only the math nerds will use it. And they can do arithmetic unconscious. How about tracking my shaky mouse movements, or using my webcam to check for eye redness? Now that’s easy to use.
A few posts back, Alistair wrote about Human 2.0, focusing on sensory immersion, augmented reality. and bridging the gap between the human and the screen. These techniques are only half of the Human 2.0 equation - they modify the environment - the inputs - not the human body itself.
I’ve been interested in these fields for more than a decade, to the point that I have my own EEG at home so I can read my brain waves and learn to modify them at will. Some people have closets full of golf clubs they never use. Mine is full of soliton lasers, cerebro-electric stimulators, light/sound goggles, micro pulse generators, and FIR-LED neuron growth stimulators. I can’t wait to get my own Emotiv headset.
Smart drugs? Tried them all (and I won’t say if I take them now). I’m a board member of a non-profit called the Smart Life Forum that meets once a month in Palo Alto. (Third Thursday of the month - check it out; I’ll be there…) SmartLife’s advisors include leading anti-aging physicians and Steve Fowkes, author of “Smart Drugs II,” and head of the Cognitive Enhancement Research Institute. Hormone testing? Been there. SPECT scan? Done that. Ayahuasca? Check. You get the point. Ray Kurzweildefinitely gets the point.
My favorite thing on the Internets today (aside from Stallman’s tinfoil-hat rant about cloud computing being evil, which I’ll get to later) is this video of the Mythbusters crew researching sobering-up techniques.
When you’re done laughing, think about the first part of that. A member of the media (admittedly, a pretty irreverent one,) showed a roomful of people the illegal content on his hard drive. And they cracked up.
Jennifer Bell and the folks at Visible Government took the covers off their much-needed I Believe In Open project. If you’re a Canadian, you should go sign up. Simply put: any elected official who isn’t willing to be transparent and accountable to their electorate has something to hide, and we now have the technology to track their record.
Which makes me wonder what Bitcurrent’s record is. Once upon a time, many of the folks behind Bitcurrent were part of Networkshop, a consulting firm that became Coradiant, a web performance company that helped create the end user experience management space.
Back then, Networkshop talked a lot of trash. We blew the whistle on SSL performance issues, and wrote a huge (250+ page) study on load balancing. We also prognosticated a lot.
Amazon’s rolling out an extension to its S3 storage offering that will help move content closer to users, reducing WAN latency. “Using a global network of edge locations this new service can deliver popular data stored in Amazon S3 to customers around the globe through local access,” announced Amazon CTO Werner Vogels on his blog. Om beat me to the punch on this one and has a great writeup, too.
The service gives Amazon a much-needed footprint in Asia, but also serves notice to CDN companies that the days of long-term, minimum-rate, negotiated contracts and favored pricing are nearing their end. [Read more]
Bitcurrent is part blog, part analyst firm, and part resource site for web operations. We're a loose federation of pundits and entrepreneurs with experience in networking and technology.
