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<title>Dare Obasanjo aka Carnage4Life</title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/" />
<icon>favicon.ico</icon>
<updated>2008-07-21T05:57:33.015625-07:00</updated>
<author>
<name>Dare Obasanjo</name>
</author>
<subtitle>Smoke like a hippie, drink like a pirate and code like a hacker</subtitle>
<id>http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/</id>
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<title>Some Thoughts on Amazon S3's Recent Outage</title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/2008/07/21/SomeThoughtsOnAmazonS3sRecentOutage.aspx" />
<id>http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/PermaLink.aspx?guid=efd9527e-c59f-4031-9f28-243005aa0562</id>
<published>2008-07-21T05:57:33.015625-07:00</published>
<updated>2008-07-21T05:57:33.015625-07:00</updated>
<category term="Web Development" label="Web Development" scheme="http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/CategoryView.aspx?category=Web+Development" />
<content type="html">
<p>
Yesterday <a href="http://aws.amazon.com/s3">Amazon's S3 service</a> had an outage
that lasted about six hours. Unsurprisingly this has led to a bunch of wailing and
gnashing of teeth from the very same pundits that were hyping the service a year ago.
The first person to proclaim the sky is falling is Richard MacManus in his <a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/more_amazon_s3_downtime.php">More
Amazon S3 Downtime: How Much is Too Much?</a> who writes 
</p>
<blockquote>
<p>
<em>Today's big news is that Amazon's S3 online storage service has experienced significant
downtime. Allen Stern, who hosts his blog's images on S3, reported that the </em>
<a href="http://www.centernetworks.com/amazon-s3-down-july-2008">
<em>downtime
lasted</em>
</a>
<em>
<s>3.5</s> over 6 hours. Startups that use S3 for their storage,
such as SmugMug, have also </em>
<a href="http://smugmug.wordpress.com/2008/07/20/amazon-s3-outage-causes-smugmug-outage/">
<em>reported
problems</em>
</a>
<em>. Back in February this same thing happened. At the time RWW
feature writer Alex Iskold defended Amazon, in a must-read analysis entitled </em>
<a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/reaching_for_the_sky_through_compute_clouds.php">
<em>Reaching
for the Sky Through The Compute Clouds</em>
</a>
<em>. But it does make us ask questions
such as: <font color="#ff0000">why can't we get 99% uptime?</font> Or: isn't this
what an SLA is for?</em>
</p>
</blockquote>
<p>
Om Malik joins in on the fun with his post <a href="http://gigaom.com/2008/07/20/amazon-s3-outage-july-2008/">S3
Outage Highlights Fragility of Web Services</a> which contains the following 
</p>
<blockquote>
<p>
<em>Amazon’s S3 cloud storage service </em>
<a href="http://www.centernetworks.com/amazon-s3-down-july-2008">
<em>went
offline</em>
</a>
<em> this morning for an extended period of time — the second big
outage at the service this year. </em>
<a href="http://gigaom.com/2008/02/15/amazon-s3-service-goes-down/">
<em>In
February</em>
</a>
<em>, Amazon suffered a major outage that knocked many of its customers
offline.</em>
</p>
<p>
<em>It was no different this time around. I first learned about today’s outage when
avatars and photos (stored on S3) </em>
<a href="http://tapulous.com/blog/2008/07/amazon-s3-outages-causing-problems-in-ttr-and-twinkle/">
<em>used
by</em>
</a>
<em>
</em>
<a href="http://gigaom.com/2008/07/18/twinkle-twinkletwitter-star/">
<em>Twinkle</em>
</a>
<em>,
a Twitter-client for iPhone, vanished.</em>
<br>
<em>…</em>
<br>
<em>That said, the outage shows </em>
<a href="http://gigaom.com/2008/07/01/10-reasons-enterprises-arent-ready-to-trust-the-cloud/">
<em>that
cloud computing still has a long road ahead</em>
</a>
<em> when it comes to reliability.
NASDAQ, Activision, Business Objects and Hasbro are some of the large companies using
Amazon’s S3 Web Services. But even as cloud computing starts to gain traction with
companies like these and most of our business and communication activities are shifting
online, web services are still fragile, in part because we are still using technologies </em>
<a href="http://gigaom.com/2008/06/27/storage-outages-can-todays-hardware-handle-the-cloud/">
<em>built
for a much less strenuous</em>
</a>
<em> web.</em>
</p>
</blockquote>
<p>
Even though the pundits are trying to raise a stink, the people who should be most
concerned about this are Amazon S3's customers. Counter to Richard MacManus's claim,
not only is there a <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/browse.html?node=379654011">Service
Level Agreement (SLA) for Amazon S3</a>, it promises 99.9% uptime or you get a partial
refund. 6 hours of downtime sounds like a lot until you realize that 99% uptime is
8 hours of downtime a month and over three and a half days of downtime a year. Amazon
S3 is definitely doing a lot better than that. 
</p>
<p>
The only question that matters is whether Amazon's customers can get better service
elsewhere at the prices Amazon charges. If they can't, then this is an acceptable
loss which is already covered by their SLA. 99.9% uptime still means over eight hours
of downtime a year. And if they can, it will put competitive pressure on Amazon to
do a better job of managing their network or lower their prices. 
</p>
<p>
This is one place where market forces will rectify things or we will reach a healthy
equilibrium. Network computing is inherently and no amount of outraged posts by pundits
will ever change that. Amazon is doing a better job than most of its customers can
do on their own for cheaper than they could ever do on their own. Let's not forget
that in the rush to gloat about Amazon's down time. 
</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>
<b>Now Playing:</b>
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/search/ref=sr_adv_m_pop/?search-alias=popular&amp;unfiltered=1&amp;field-keywords=&amp;field-artist=2Pac&amp;field-title=&amp;field-label=&amp;field-binding=&amp;sort=relevancerank&amp;Adv-Srch-Music-Album-Submit.x=19&amp;Adv-Srch-Music-Album-Submit.y=6">2Pac</a> - <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_dmusic?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-music&amp;field-keywords=2Pac+Life Goes On&amp;x=0&amp;y=0">Life
Goes On</a></p>
<div class="feedflare">
<a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/Carnage4life?a=3Zf7hj"><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/Carnage4life?i=3Zf7hj" border="0"></img></a> <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/Carnage4life?a=bo1WSj"><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/Carnage4life?i=bo1WSj" border="0"></img></a> <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/Carnage4life?a=G1XmWj"><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/Carnage4life?i=G1XmWj" border="0"></img></a> <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/Carnage4life?a=buFbvJ"><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/Carnage4life?i=buFbvJ" border="0"></img></a>
</div><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Carnage4life/~4/341525035" height="1" width="1"/></content>
</entry>
<entry>
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<title>Software as a Service: When Your Business Model Becomes a Paradox</title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/2008/07/21/SoftwareAsAServiceWhenYourBusinessModelBecomesAParadox.aspx" />
<id>http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/PermaLink.aspx?guid=44431b10-1324-40a5-84db-fa52168db013</id>
<published>2008-07-21T04:45:49.53125-07:00</published>
<updated>2008-07-21T04:45:49.53125-07:00</updated>
<category term="Competitors/Web Companies" label="Competitors/Web Companies" scheme="http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/CategoryView.aspx?category=Competitors%2fWeb+Companies" />
<category term="Technology" label="Technology" scheme="http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/CategoryView.aspx?category=Technology" />
<content type="html">
<p>
For the past few years, the technology press has been eulogizing desktop and server-based
software while proclaiming that the era of Software as a Service (SaaS) is now upon
us. According to the lessons of the <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Innovators-Dilemma-Revolutionary-Business-Essentials/dp/0060521996">Innovator's
Dilemma</a> the cheaper and more flexible SaaS solutions will eventually replace traditional
installed software and the current crop of software vendors will turn out to be dinosaurs
in a world that belongs to the warm blooded mammals who have conquered cloud based
services. 
</p>
<p>
So it seems the answer is obvious, software vendors should rush to provide Web-based
services and extricate themselves from their "legacy" shrinkwrapped software
business before it is too late. What could possibly go wrong with this plan? 
</p>
<p>
Sarah Lacy wrote an informative article for Business Week about the problems facing
software vendors who have rushed into the world of SaaS. The Business Week article
is entitled <a title="http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/jul2008/tc20080717_362776.htm" href="http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/jul2008/tc20080717_362776.htm">On-Demand
Computing: A Brutal Slog</a> and contains the following excerpt 
</p>
<blockquote>
<p>
<em>On-demand represented a welcome break from the traditional way of doing things
in the 1990s, when swaggering, elephant hunter-style salesmen would drive up in their
gleaming BMWs to close massive orders in the waning days of the quarter. It was a
time when representatives of Oracle (</em>
<a href="http://investing.businessweek.com/research/stocks/snapshot/snapshot.asp?symbol=ORCL">
<em>ORCL</em>
</a>
<em>),
Siebel, Sybase (</em>
<a href="http://investing.businessweek.com/research/stocks/snapshot/snapshot.asp?symbol=SY">
<em>SY</em>
</a>
<em>),
PeopleSoft, BEA Systems, or SAP (</em>
<a href="http://investing.businessweek.com/research/stocks/snapshot/snapshot.asp?symbol=SAP">
<em>SAP</em>
</a>
<em>)
would extol the latest enterprise software revolution, be it for management of inventory,
supply chain, customer relationships, or some other area of business. Then there were
the billions of dollars spent on consultants to make it all work together—you couldn't
just rip everything out and start over if it didn't. There was too much invested already,
and chances are the alternatives weren't much better. </em>
</p>
<p>
<em>Funny thing about the Web, though. It's just as good at displacing revenue as
it is in generating sources of it. Just ask the music industry or, ahem, print media.
Think Robin Hood, taking riches from the elite and distributing them to everyone else,
including the customers who get to keep more of their money and the upstarts that
can more easily build competing alternatives. </em>
</p>
<p>
<em>But are these upstarts viable? On-demand software has turned out to be a brutal
slog. Software sold "as a service" over the Web doesn't sell itself, even
when it's cheaper and actually works. Each sale closed by these new Web-based software
companies has a much smaller price tag. And vendors are continually tweaking their
software, fixing bugs, and pushing out incremental improvements. Great news for the
user, but the software makers miss out on the once-lucrative massive upgrade every
few years and seemingly endless maintenance fees for supporting old versions of the
software. </em>
<br>
<em>…</em>
<br>
<em>Nowhere was this more clear than on Oracle's </em>
<a href="http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/jun2008/tc20080625_978576.htm">
<em>most
recent earnings call</em>
</a>
<em> (BusinessWeek.com, 6/26/08). Why isn't Oracle a
bigger player in on-demand software? It doesn't want to be, Ellison told the analysts
and investors. "We've been in this business 10 years, and we've only now turned
a profit," he said. "The last thing we want to do is have a very large business
that's not profitable and drags our margins down." No, Ellison would rather enjoy
the bounty of an acquisition spree that handed Oracle a bevy of software companies,
hordes of customers, and associated maintenance fees that trickle straight to the
bottom line.</em>
<br>
<em>…</em>
<br>
<em>SAP isn't having much more luck with Business by Design, its foray into the on-demand
world, I'm told. SAP said for years it would never get into the on-demand game. Then
when it sensed a potential threat from NetSuite, SAP decided to embrace on-demand.
Results have been less than stellar so far. "SAP thought customers would go to
a Web site, configure it themselves, and found the first hundred or so implementations
required a lot of time and a lot of tremendous costs," Richardson says. "Small
businesses are calling for support, calling SAP because they don't have IT departments.
SAP is spending a lot of resources to configure and troubleshoot the problem."</em>
</p>
</blockquote>
<p>
In some ways, SaaS vendors have been misled by the consumer Web and have failed to
realize that they still need to spend money on sales and support when servicing business
customers. Just because Google doesn't advertise it's search features and Yahoo! Mail
doesn't seem to have a huge support staff that hand holds customers as it uses their
product doesn't mean that SaaS vendors can expect to cut their sales and support calls.
The dynamics of running a free, advertising based service aimed at end users is completely
different from running a service where you expect to charge business tens of thousands
to hundreds of thousands to use your product. 
</p>
<p>
In traditional business software development you have three major cycles with their
own attendant costs; you have to write the software, you have to market the software
and then you have to support the software. Becoming a SaaS vendor does not eliminate
any of these costs. Instead it adds new costs and complexities such as managing data
centers and worrying about hackers. In addition, thanks to free advertising based
consumer services and the fact that companies like Google that have subsidized their
SaaS offerings using their monopoly profits in other areas, business customers expect
Web-based software to be cheaper than its desktop or server-based alternatives. Talk
about being stuck between a rock and a hard place as a vendor. 
</p>
<p>
Finally, software vendors that have existing ecosystems of partners that benefit from
supporting and enhancing their shrinkwrapped products also have to worry about where
these partners fit in a SaaS world. For an example of the kinds of problems these
vendors now face, below is an excerpt from a rant by Vladimer Mazek, a system administrator
at <a href="http://www.exchangedefender.com/">ExchangeDefender</a>, entitled <a title="http://www.vladville.com/2008/07/houston-we-have-a-problem.html" href="http://www.vladville.com/2008/07/houston-we-have-a-problem.html">Houston…
we have a problem</a> which he wrote after attending one of Microsoft's partner conferences 
</p>
<blockquote>
<p>
<em>
<b>Lack of Partner Direction:</b> By far the biggest disappointment of the show.
All of Microsoft’s executives failed to clearly communicate the partnership benefits.
That is why partners pack the keynotes, to find a way to partner up with Microsoft.
If you want to gloat about how fabulous you are and talk about exciting commission
schedules as a brand recommender and a sales agent you might want to go work for Mary
Kay. This is the biggest quagmire for Microsoft – it’s competitors are more agile
because they do not have to work with partners to go to market. Infrastructure solutions
are easy enough to offer and both Google and Apple and Amazon are beating Microsoft
to the market, with far simpler and less convoluted solutions. How can Microsoft compete
with its partners in a solution ecosystem that doesn’t require partners to begin with?</em>
</p>
</blockquote>
<p>
This is another example of the kind of problems established software vendors will
have to solve as they try to ride the Software as a Service wave instead of being
flattened by it. Truly successful SaaS vendors will eventually have to deliver
platforms that can sustain a healthy partner ecosystems to succeed in the long term.
We have seen this in the consumer space with the <a href="http://developers.facebook.com/anatomy.php">Facebook
platform</a> and in the enterprise space with <a href="http://www.salesforce.com/appexchange/">SalesForce.com's
AppExchange</a>. Here is one area where the upstarts that don't have a preexisting
shrinkwrap software businesses can turn a disadvantage (lack of an established partner
ecosystem) into an advantage since it is easier to start from scratch than to retool.
</p>
<p>
The bottom line is that creating a Web-based version of a popular desktop or server-based
product is just part of the battle if you plan to play in the enterprise space. You
will have to deal with the sales and support that go with selling to businesses as
well as all the other headaches of shipping "cloud based services" which
don't exist in the shrinkwrap software world. After you get that figured out, you
will want to consider how you can leverage various ISVs and startups to enhance the
stickiness of your service and turn it into a platform before one of your competitor's
does. 
</p>
<p>
I suspect we still have a few years before any of the above happens. In the meantime
we will see lots more software companies complaining about the paradox of embracing
the Web when it clearly cannibalizes their other revenue streams and is less lucrative
than what they've been accustomed to seeing. Interesting times indeed.
</p>
<p>
<b>Now Playing:</b>
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/search/ref=sr_adv_m_pop/?search-alias=popular&amp;unfiltered=1&amp;field-keywords=&amp;field-artist=Flobots&amp;field-title=&amp;field-label=&amp;field-binding=&amp;sort=relevancerank&amp;Adv-Srch-Music-Album-Submit.x=19&amp;Adv-Srch-Music-Album-Submit.y=6">Flobots</a> - <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_dmusic?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-music&amp;field-keywords=Flobots+Handlebars&amp;x=0&amp;y=0">Handlebars</a></p>
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<a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/Carnage4life?a=WSmhhj"><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/Carnage4life?i=WSmhhj" border="0"></img></a> <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/Carnage4life?a=hHUHfj"><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/Carnage4life?i=hHUHfj" border="0"></img></a> <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/Carnage4life?a=GWZ2Tj"><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/Carnage4life?i=GWZ2Tj" border="0"></img></a> <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/Carnage4life?a=YHFKYJ"><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/Carnage4life?i=YHFKYJ" border="0"></img></a>
</div><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Carnage4life/~4/341478676" height="1" width="1"/></content>
</entry>
<entry>
<link xmlns:thr="http://purl.org/syndication/thread/1.0" rel="replies" type="application/atom+xml" thr:count="1" href="http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/SyndicationService.asmx/GetEntryCommentsRss?guid=e97a826e-fbdf-4d3a-b3a1-cdc422ec0d22" />
<title>PodTech: What Happens When You Misunderstand the Long Tail</title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/2008/07/21/PodTechWhatHappensWhenYouMisunderstandTheLongTail.aspx" />
<id>http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/PermaLink.aspx?guid=e97a826e-fbdf-4d3a-b3a1-cdc422ec0d22</id>
<published>2008-07-21T04:39:41.546875-07:00</published>
<updated>2008-07-21T04:39:41.546875-07:00</updated>
<category term="Current Affairs" label="Current Affairs" scheme="http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/CategoryView.aspx?category=Current+Affairs" />
<content type="html">
<p>
Sometime last week I learned that podcasting startup <a title="http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/07/17/podtech-sells-for-less-than-500k/" href="http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/07/17/podtech-sells-for-less-than-500k/">PodTech
was acquired for less than $500,000</a>. This is a rather ignominious exit for a startup
that initially entered the public consciousness with its <a href="http://scobleizer.com/2006/06/10/correcting-the-record-about-microsoft/">high
profile hire of Robert Scoble</a> and the intent to build a technology news media
empire using RSS and podcasts instead of radio waves and news print. 
</p>
<p>
When I first heard about PodTech via Robert Scoble's blog, it seemed like a bad business
to jump into given the lessons of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Long_Tail">The
Long Tail</a>. The Web creates an overabundance of content and products, which is
good for aggregators but bad for creators. Even in 2006 when PodTech was founded you
could see this in the success of "Web 2.0" companies that acted as content
aggregators like Google, YouTube, Wikipedia and Flickr while content creators like
music labels and news papers were beginning to scramble for relevance and revenue. 
</p>
<p>
Kevin Kelly has a great post about this called <a title="http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2008/07/wagging_the_lon.php" href="http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2008/07/wagging_the_lon.php">Wagging
the Long Tail of Love</a> where he writes 
</p>
<blockquote>
<p>
<em>So as one crosses the sections -- going from the short head to the long tail --
one should be consistent and view it from the aggregator's point of view or the creator's
point of view. I think it is a mistake to conflate the two view points. </em>
</p>
<p>
<em>I've been wrestling with this for a while and I think the only advantage to the
creator that I can see in the long tail is that aggregators can invent or produce
a long tail domain that was not present before. Like Seth's </em>
<a href="http://www.squidoo.com/">
<em>Squidoo</em>
</a>
<em> does.
Before Squidoo or Amazon or Netflix came along there was no market at all for many
of the creations they now distribute. The proposition that long tail aggregators can
offer to creators is profound, but simple: you have a choice between a itsy bitsy
niche audience (with nano profits) or no audience at all. Before the LT was expanded
your masterpiece on breeding salt water aquarium fishes from the Red Sea would have
no paying fans. Now you have maybe 100. </em>
</p>
<p>
<em>One hundred readers/watchers/listeners is not economical. There is no business
equation that can sustain profits for continual creation from so few buyers. (It can
of course support the business of aggregation above the level of creation.) But the
long tail niche creation operates perfectly well in the realm of passion, enthusiasm,
obsession, curiosity, peerage, love, and the gift economy. In the exchange of
psychic energy, encouragement, meaning of life, and reasons to live, the long now
is a boon. </em>
</p>
<p>
<em>That is not true about profits. Economically, the more the long tail expands,
the more stuff there is to compete with our limited attention as an audience, the
more difficult it is for a creator to sell profitably. Or, the longer the tail, the
worse for sales.</em>
</p>
</blockquote>
<p>
The Web has significantly reduced the costs of producing and distributing content.
Anyone with a computer can publish to a potential audience of hundreds of millions
of people for as little as the cost of their Internet connection. This is great for
content consumers but it has significantly increased the amount of competition among
content creators while also reducing their chances of generating profits from their
work since the Web/Internet has provided lots of options for getting quality content
for free (both legally and illegally). 
</p>
<p>
All of this is a long way of saying that in the era of "Web 2.0" it was
quite unwise for a <u><strong>VC funded</strong></u> startup to jump into the pool
of content creators and thus become a victim of The Long Tail instead of becoming
a content aggregator and thus benefiting from the Long Tail instead. Of course, even
that may not have saved them since the market for podcast aggregators pretty much
dried up<a href="http://www.apple.com/itunes/store/podcasts.html"> once Apple entered
the fray</a>. 
</p>
<p>
<b>Now Playing:</b>
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/search/ref=sr_adv_m_pop/?search-alias=popular&amp;unfiltered=1&amp;field-keywords=&amp;field-artist=Lil Wayne&amp;field-title=&amp;field-label=&amp;field-binding=&amp;sort=relevancerank&amp;Adv-Srch-Music-Album-Submit.x=19&amp;Adv-Srch-Music-Album-Submit.y=6">Lil
Wayne</a> - <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_dmusic?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-music&amp;field-keywords=Lil Wayne+I'm Me&amp;x=0&amp;y=0">I'm
Me</a></p>
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</entry>
<entry>
<link xmlns:thr="http://purl.org/syndication/thread/1.0" rel="replies" type="application/atom+xml" thr:count="1" href="http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/SyndicationService.asmx/GetEntryCommentsRss?guid=aeaeccbe-8df2-4072-9134-637d087abb86" />
<title>The Problem with Trying to "Spread Virally"</title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/2008/07/17/TheProblemWithTryingToSpreadVirally.aspx" />
<id>http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/PermaLink.aspx?guid=aeaeccbe-8df2-4072-9134-637d087abb86</id>
<published>2008-07-17T06:10:14.515625-07:00</published>
<updated>2008-07-17T06:10:14.515625-07:00</updated>
<category term="Social Software" label="Social Software" scheme="http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/CategoryView.aspx?category=Social+Software" />
<content type="html">
<p>
One of the problems you have to overcome when building a social software application
is that such applications often depend on network effects to provide value to users.
An instant messaging application isn't terribly useful unless your friends use the
same application and using <a href="http://www.twitter.com">Twitter</a> feels kind
of empty if you don't follow anyone. On the flip side, once an application crosses
a particular tipping point then network effects often push it to near monopoly status
in certain social or regional networks. This has happened with eBay, Craigslist, MySpace,
Facebook and a ton of other online services depend on network effects. Thus there
is a lot of incentive for developers of social software applications to do their best
to encourage and harness network effects in their user scenarios. 
</p>
<p>
These observations have led to the notion of <a href="http://www.digitalpodcast.com/podcastnews/2008/03/04/designing-viral-applications/">Viral
Applications</a>, applications which spread like viruses. The problem with a lot of
the thinking behind "viral applications" and applications that borrow <a title="The Top 5 Viral Facebook Techniques" href="http://www.allfacebook.com/2007/07/the-top-5-viral-facebook-techniques/">their
techniques</a> is that attempting to spread by any means necessary can be very harmful
to the user experience. Here are two examples taken from this week's headlines 
</p>
<p>
From Justine Ezaric, a post entitled <a href="http://tastyblogsnack.com/2008/07/14/the-loopt-debacle/">The
Loopt Debacle</a> where she writes 
</p>
<blockquote>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
<a href="http://www.loopt.com">Loopt</a>
</strong> is a location based
social networking site that uses GPS to determine your exact location and share it
with your friends.. and then spam your entire contact list via an SMS invite.</em>
</p>
<p>
<em>There’s a good chance that if you installed this application you’ve made the same
mistake that most people made. While searching for friends who were on the service,
apparently a text message was sent out to a large portion of my contact list, along
with my phone number and my exact location (you know, since that’s the point of the
application). Granted, you would think that if you have someone’s phone number, they’d
have yours as well…</em>
</p>
<p>
<em>Hi, hey.. Over here!! People change their phone number for a reason!! With the
ease of syncing contacts on the iPhone, it’s not always guaranteed that everyone in
your contact list is a BFF (read: best friend forever). Also, there’s always people
you just never want to text.. Like Steve Jobs, or an old boss, or maybe even an ex
who would rather push you in front of a bus than get a text message from you?</em>
</p>
</blockquote>
<p>
From Marshal Kirkpatrick, a post entitled <a title="http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2008/07/updates-to-gmail-contact-manager.html" href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/gmail_tries_to_be_less_creepy.php">Gmail
Tries To Be Less Creepy, Fails</a> which states
</p>
<blockquote>
<p>
<a href="http://gmail.com">
<em>Gmail</em>
</a>
<em>, Google's powerful web based email
service, </em>
<a href="http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2008/07/updates-to-gmail-contact-manager.html">
<em>announced
some changes</em>
</a>
<em> to its contact management features today. Contact management
has for some time been a contentious matter among Google Account holders - the company
does strange and mysterious things with your email contacts, including tying them
in to some other applications without anyone's permission.</em>
</p>
<p>
<em>Today's new changes failed to alleviate those concerns, perhaps making the situation
even less clear than it was before.</em>
</p>
<h4>
<em>There Are Your Contacts and Then There Are Your Contacts</em>
</h4>
<p>
<em>The post on the official Gmail blog today announced a new policy. There are now
two types of contacts in your Gmail contacts list. There are your explicitly added
My Contacts and there are your frequently emailed Suggested Contacts. The distinction
between the two is unclear enough that I won't even try to summarize it. Read the
following closely.</em>
</p>
<blockquote>
<em>
<font color="#ff0000">My Contacts contains the contacts you explicitly
put in your address book (via manual entry, import or sync) as well as any address
you've emailed a lot (we're using five or more times as the threshold for now). </font>
</em>
<p>
<em>
<font color="#ff0000">Suggested Contacts is where Gmail puts its auto-created
contacts. By default, Suggested Contacts you email frequently are automatically added
to My Contacts, but for those of you who prefer tighter control of your address books,
you can choose to disable usage-based addition of contacts to My Contacts (see the
checkbox in the screenshot above). Once you do this, no matter how many times you
email an auto-added email address it won't move to My Contacts.</font>
</em>
</p>
</blockquote>
<p>
<em>…</em>
<br>
<em>When you open up </em>
<a href="http://google.com/reader">
<em>Google Reader</em>
</a>
<em>,
the company's RSS reader, you'll find not just the feeds you've subscribed to but
also the feeds of shared items from your "friends." Those friendships were
defined somehow by Google, according to who you email in Gmail apparently. They can
opt-out of having their shared items publicly visible at all, but short of doing that
- you are seeing their shared items and someone, presumably, is seeing your shared
items too. No one knows for sure.</em>
</p>
</blockquote>
<p>
Both Loopt and Gmail + Google Talk + Google Reader are examples of applications choosing
approaches that encourage <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virality">virality</a> of
the application or features of the application at the risk of putting users in <u><strong>socially
awkward situations</strong></u>. As Justine mentions in the Loopt example, just because
a person's phone number is in the contact list on your phone doesn't mean they would
like to receive a text message from you at some random time of the day asking them
to try out some social networking application. A phone isn't a social networking site.
I have my doctor, my boss, his boss, our childcare provider, co-workers whose numbers
I have in case of emergency and a bunch of other folks in my phone's contact list.
These aren't the people I want to send spammy invites to try out some social networking
application which probably doesn't even work on their phone. However I'm sure there
has been some positive user growth from their "viral" techniques, but at
what cost to their brand? Plaxo is still dealing with damage to their brand from <a href="http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=plaxo+spam&amp;go=&amp;form=QBLH">their
spammy era</a>. 
</p>
<p>
The Gmail behavior is even worse primarily because Google didn't fix the problem.
Especially since people have been <a href="http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2007/12/who-are-my-gmail-contacts.html">complaining
about it for a while</a>. No one can blame Google for wanting to jump start network
effects for features like Shared Items in Google Reader or products like Google Talk,
but it seems pretty ridiculous to decide to automatically add people I email to an
IM application so they can see when I'm online and contact me anytime or to the list
of people who are notified whenever I share something in Google Reader. It's just
email, it does <u><strong>not</strong></u> imply an intimate social relationship.
The worst thing about Google's practices is how it backfires, I'm less likely to use
that combination of Google products so as not to cause inadvertent information leakage
because some "viral algorithm" decided that because I sent a bunch of emails
to my child care provider she needs to know whenever I share a link in Google Reader. 
<br>

<br>
If you decide to spread virally, you should be careful that you don't end up causing
people to avoid your product like the diseases you are trying to emulate. 
</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>
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</entry>
<entry>
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<title>Project Cassandra: Facebook's Open Source Alternative to Google BigTable</title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/2008/07/14/ProjectCassandraFacebooksOpenSourceAlternativeToGoogleBigTable.aspx" />
<id>http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/PermaLink.aspx?guid=c573171e-8e62-45b4-b85c-7b411b528e51</id>
<published>2008-07-14T04:41:09.15625-07:00</published>
<updated>2008-07-14T04:41:09.15625-07:00</updated>
<category term="Competitors/Web Companies" label="Competitors/Web Companies" scheme="http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/CategoryView.aspx?category=Competitors%2fWeb+Companies" />
<category term="Platforms" label="Platforms" scheme="http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/CategoryView.aspx?category=Platforms" />
<content type="html">
<p>
About a week ago, the Facebook Data team quietly released <a href="http://code.google.com/p/the-cassandra-project/">the
Cassandra Project on Google Code</a>. The Cassandra project has been described as
a cross between Google's BigTable and Amazon's Dynamo storage systems. An overview
of the project is available in <a href="http://www.slideshare.net/jhammerb/data-presentations-cassandra-sigmod/">the
SIGMOD presentation on Cassandra</a> available at SlideShare. A summary of the salient
aspects of the project follows. 
</p>
<p>
The problem Cassandra is aimed at solving is one that plagues social networking sites
or any other service that has lots of relationships between users and their data.
In such services, data often needs to be denormalized to prevent having to do lots
of joins when performing queries. However this means the system needs to deal with
the increased write traffic due to denormalization. At this point if you're using
a relational database, you realize you're pretty much breaking every major rule of
relational database design. Google tackled this problem by coming up with <a href="http://labs.google.com/papers/bigtable.html">BigTable</a>.
Facebook has followed their lead by developing Cassandra which they admit is inspired
by BigTable. 
</p>
<p>
The Cassandra data model is fairly straightforward. The entire system is a giant table
with lots of rows. Each row is identified by a unique key. Each row has a column family,
which can be thought of as the schema for the row. A column family can contain thousands
of columns which are a tuple of {name, value, timestamp} and/or super columns which
are a tuple of {name, column+} where column+ means one or more columns. This is very
similar to the data model behind Google's BigTable. 
</p>
<p>
As I mentioned earlier, denormalized data means you have to be able to handle a lot
more writes than you would if storing data in a normalized relational database. Cassandra
has several optimizations to make writes cheaper. When a write operation occurs, it
doesn't immediately cause a write to the disk. Instead the record is updated in memory
and the write operation is added to the commit log. Periodically the list of pending
writes is processed and write operations are flushed to disk. As part of the flushing
process the set of pending writes is analyzed and redundant writes eliminated. Additionally,
the writes are sorted so that the disk is written to sequentially thus significantly
improving seek time on the hard drive and reducing the impact of random writes to
the system. How important is improving seek time when accessing data on a hard drive?
It can <a href="http://stuartsierra.com/2008/04/17/disk-is-the-new-tape">make the
difference between taking hours versus days</a> to flush a hundred gigabytes of writes
to a disk. <em>Disk is the new tape. </em></p>
<p>
Cassandra is described as "always writable" which means that a write operation
always returns success even if it fails internally to the system. This is similar
to the model exposed by <a href="http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2007/10/amazons_dynamo.html">Amazon's
Dynamo</a> which has an <em>eventual consistency</em> model. From what I've
read, it isn't clear how writes operations that occur during an internal failure are
reconciled and exposed to users of the system. I'm sure someone with more knowledge
can chime in in the comments. 
</p>
<p>
At first glance, this is a very nice addition to the world of Open Source software
by the Facebook team. Kudos.
</p>
<p>
Found via <a href="http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2008/07/12/FacebookReleasesCassandraAsOpenSource.aspx">James
Hamilton</a>. 
</p>
<p>
PS: Is it me or is this <a href="http://stuartsierra.com/2008/07/10/thrift-vs-protocol-buffers">the
second significant instance</a> of Facebook Open Sourcing a key infrastructure component
"inspired" by Google internals? 
</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>
<b>Now Playing:</b>
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J</a> - <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_dmusic?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-music&amp;field-keywords=Ray J+Gifts&amp;x=0&amp;y=0">Gifts</a></p>
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</entry>
<entry>
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<title>Scalability: I Don't Think That Word Means What You Think It Does</title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/2008/07/14/ScalabilityIDontThinkThatWordMeansWhatYouThinkItDoes.aspx" />
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<published>2008-07-14T04:40:12.359375-07:00</published>
<updated>2008-07-14T04:40:12.359375-07:00</updated>
<category term="Web Development" label="Web Development" scheme="http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/CategoryView.aspx?category=Web+Development" />
<category term="XML" label="XML" scheme="http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/CategoryView.aspx?category=XML" />
<content type="html">
<p>
Via <a title="Protocol buffers: the early reviews are in" href="http://diveintomark.org/archives/2008/07/12/protobuf">Mark
Pilgrim</a> I stumbled on an article by Scott Loganbill entitled <a href="http://www.webmonkey.com/blog/Google_s_Open_Source_Protocol_Buffers_Offer_Scalability__Speed">Google’s
Open Source Protocol Buffers Offer Scalability, Speed</a> which contains the following
excerpt 
</p>
<blockquote>
<p>
<em>The best way to explore Protocol Buffers is to compare it to its alternative.
What do Protocol Buffers have that XML doesn’t? As the </em>
<a href="http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/2008/07/protocol-buffers-googles-data.html">
<em>Google
Protocol Buffer blog post mentions</em>
</a>
<em>, <font color="#ff0000">XML isn’t scalable</font>:</em>
</p>
<p>
<em>"As nice as XML is, it isn’t going to be efficient enough for [Google’s]
scale. When all of your machines and network links are running at capacity, XML is
an extremely expensive proposition. Not to mention, writing code to work with the
DOM tree can sometimes become unwieldy."</em>
</p>
<p>
<em>We’ve never had to deal with XML in a scale where programming for it would become
unwieldy, but we’ll take Google’s word for it.</em>
</p>
<p>
<em>Perhaps the biggest value-add of Protocol Buffers to the development community
is as <font color="#ff0000">a method of dealing with scalability before it is necessary</font>.
The biggest developing drain of any start-up is success. How do you prepare for the
onslaught of visitors companies such as Google or </em>
<a href="http://www.webmonkey.com/blog/Twitter_Asks_for_Scalability_Help_From_Community">
<em>Twitter
have experienced</em>
</a>
<em>? Scaling for numbers takes critical development time,
usually at a juncture where you should be introducing much-needed features to stay
ahead of competition rather than paralyzing feature development to keep your servers
running.</em>
</p>
<p>
<em>Over time, Google has tackled the problem of communication between platforms with
Protocol Buffers and data storage with </em>
<a href="http://labs.google.com/papers/bigtable.html">
<em>Big
Table</em>
</a>
<em>. Protocol Buffers is the first open release of the technology making
Google tick, although you can utilize Big Table with </em>
<a href="http://code.google.com/appengine/">
<em>App
Engine</em>
</a>
<em>.</em>
</p>
</blockquote>
<p>
It is unfortunate that it is now commonplace for people to throw around terms like
"scaling" and "scalability" in technical discussions without actually
explaining what they mean. Having a Web application that scales means that your application
can handle becoming popular or being more popular than it is today in a <u><strong>cost
effective manner</strong></u>. Depending on your class of Web application, there are
different technologies that have been proven to help Web sites handle significantly
higher traffic than they normally would. However there is no silver bullet. 
</p>
<p>
The fact that Google uses <a href="http://labs.google.com/papers/mapreduce.html">MapReduce</a> and <a href="http://labs.google.com/papers/bigtable.html">BigTable</a> to
solve problems in a particular problem space does not mean those technologies work
well in others. MapReduce isn't terribly useful if you are building an instant messaging
service. Similarly, if you are building an email service you want an infrastructure
based on message queuing not BigTable. A binary wire format like Protocol Buffers
is a smart idea if your applications bottleneck is network bandwidth or CPU used when
serializing/deserializing XML. As part of building their search engine Google
has to cache a significant chunk of the World Wide Web and then perform data intensive
operations on that data. In Google's scenarios, the network bandwidth utilized when
transferring the massive amounts of data they process can actually be the bottleneck.
Hence inventing a technology like Protocol Buffers became a necessity. However, that
isn't Twitter's problem so a technology like Protocol Buffers isn't going to "help
them scale". Twitter's problems have been <a title="It's Not Rocket Science, But It's Our Work" href="http://blog.twitter.com/2008/05/its-not-rocket-science-but-its-our-work.html">clearly
spelled out by the development team</a> and nowhere is network bandwidth called out
as a culprit.
</p>
<p>
Almost every technology that has been loudly proclaimed as unscalable by some pundit
on the Web is being used by a massively popular service in some context. Relational
databases don't scale? Well, <a title="Inside eBay's Massive Oracle Database" href="http://www.dba-oracle.com/oracle_news/news_ebay_massive_oracle.htm">eBay
seems to be doing OK</a>. PHP doesn't scale? I believe it <a title="PHP and Facebook" href="http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=2356432130">scales
well enough for Facebook</a>. Microsoft technologies aren't scalable? <a title="MySpace Architecture" href="http://highscalability.com/myspace-architecture">MySpace
begs to differ</a>. And so on…
</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>
If someone tells you "technology X doesn't scale" without qualifying that
statement, it often means the person either doesn't know what he is talking about
or is trying to sell you something. Technologies don't scale, services do. Thinking
you can just sprinkle a technology on your service and make it scale is the kind of
thinking that led Blaine Cook (former architect at Twitter) to publish <a href="http://www.slideshare.net/Blaine/scaling-twitter/">a
presentation on Scaling Twitter</a> which claimed their scaling problems where solved
with their adoption of memcached. That was in 2007. In 2008, let's just say the <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/scriptingnews/2537265280/">Fail
Whale</a> begs to differ. 
</p>
<p>
If a service doesn't scale it is more likely due to bad design than to technology
choice. Remember that.
</p>
<p>
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&amp; Roger</a> - <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_dmusic?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-music&amp;field-keywords=Zapp and Roger+Computer Love&amp;x=0&amp;y=0">Computer
Love</a></p>
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</entry>
<entry>
<link xmlns:thr="http://purl.org/syndication/thread/1.0" rel="replies" type="application/atom+xml" thr:count="11" href="http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/SyndicationService.asmx/GetEntryCommentsRss?guid=1585211c-cce8-4961-892d-feab08c952c4" />
<title>Giving Sh*t Away is not a Business Strategy</title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/2008/07/12/GivingShtAwayIsNotABusinessStrategy.aspx" />
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<published>2008-07-11T23:38:09-07:00</published>
<updated>2008-07-11T23:38:09-07:00</updated>
<content type="html">
<p>
I read two stories about companies adopting Open Source this week which give some
interesting food for thought when juxtaposed. 
</p>
<p>
The first is a blog post on C|Net from Matt Asay titled <a href="http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-9987160-16.html?hhTest=1">Ballmer:
We'll look at open source, but we won't touch</a> where he writes 
</p>
<blockquote>
<p>
<em>Ballmer lacks the imagination to conceive of a world where Microsoft could open-source
code and still make a lot of money (He's apparently not heard of "Google."):</em>
</p>
<blockquote>
<em>No. 1, are our products likely to be open-sourced? No. We do provide
our source code in special situations, but open source also implies free, free is
inconsistent with paying for lunches at the partner conference. (Applause.) </em>
</blockquote>
<p>
<em>But at least he's willing to work with those who do grok that the future of software
business (meaning: money) is open source:</em>
</p>
</blockquote>
<p>
The second is an article on InfoWorld by Paul Krill entitled <a href="http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/07/11/Sun-lays-off-approximately-1000-employees_1.html">Sun
lays off approximately 1,000 employees</a> which contains the following excerpts 
</p>
<blockquote>
<p>
<em>Following through on a </em>
<a href="http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/05/02/Sun-blames-revenue-drop-on-weak-US-economy_1.html">
<em>restructuring
plan announced in May</em>
</a>
<em>, Sun on Thursday laid off approximately 1,000 employees
in the United States and Canada. All told, the company plans to reduce its workforce
by approximately 1,500 to 2,500 employees worldwide. Additional reductions will occur
in other regions including EMEA (Europe, Middle East, Africa), Asia-Pacific, and Latin
America. Reducing the number of employees by 2,500 would constitute a loss of about
7 percent of the company's employees.</em>
<br>
...<br><em>He also addressed the question of whether Sun should abandon its new strategy
of giving away its software. Sun will not stop giving it away, according to Schwartz,
citing a priority in developer adoption.</em></p>
</blockquote>
<p>
When it comes to the financial benefits of Open Source, you need to look at two perspectives.
The perspective of the software vendor (the producer) and the perspective of the software
customer (the consumer). A key benefit of Open Source/Free Software to software
consumers is that it tends to drive the price of the software to zero. On the other
hand, although software producers like Sun Microsystems spend money to produce
the software they cannot directly recoup that investment by charging for the software. Thus
if you are a consumer of software, it is clear why Open Source is great for your bottom
line. On the flip side, it isn't so clear if your <strong><u>primary business</u></strong> is
producing software. 
</p>
<p>
Matt Asay's usage of Google as an example of a company "making money" from Open Source
is a prime example of this schism in perspectives. <em>Google's primary business is
selling advertising</em>. Like every other media business, they gather an audience
by using their products as bait and then sell that audience to advertisers. Every
piece of software not directly related to the business of selling ads is tangential
to Google's business. The only other software that is important to Google's business
is the software that gives them a differentiated offering when it comes to gathering
that audience. Both classes of software are <strong><u>proprietary</u></strong> to
Google and always will be. 
</p>
<p>
This is why you'll never find a Subversion source repository on <a href="http://code.google.com">http://code.google.com</a> with
the source code behind Google's AdSense or Adwords products or the current
algorithms that power their search engine. Instead you will find Google supporting
and releasing lots of Open Source software that is tangential its core business
while keeping the software that actually makes them money proprietary. 
</p>
<p>
This means that in truth Google makes money from proprietary software. However
since it doesn't distribute its proprietary software to end users, there isn't anyone
complaining about this fact. 
</p>
<p>
Unlike Google, Sun Microsystems doesn't really seem to know how they plan to make
money. There is a lot of data out there that shows that the Sun Microsystems' model
of scaling services is dying. Recently, Kai Fu Lee of Google argued that <a href="http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2008/06/25/GooglesDrKaiFuLeeOnCloudComputing.aspx">scaling
out on commodity hardware is 33 times more efficient than using expensive hardware</a>.
This jibes with the sentiments of people who work on cloud services at Microsoft
and Amazon that I've talked to when comparing the use of lots of "commodity" servers
versus more expensive "big iron" server systems. This means Sun's hardware
business is being squeezed because it is betting against industry experience. Giving
away their software does not fix this problem, it makes it worse by cutting of a revenue
stream as their core business is turning into a dinosaur before their eyes. 
</p>
<p>
The bottom line is that giving something away that costs you money to produce only
makes sense as part of a strategy that makes you even more money than selling what
you gave away (e.g. free T-shirts with corporate logos). Google gets that. It seems
Sun Microsystems does not. Neither does Matt Asay. 
</p>
<p>
<strong>Now Playing:</strong>
<a href="http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZSearch.woa/wa/advancedSearchResults?artistTerm=Inner Circle">Inner
Circle</a> - <a href="http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZSearch.woa/wa/advancedSearchResults?songTerm=Sweat (A La La La La Long)&amp;artistTerm=Inner Circle">Sweat
(A La La La La Long)</a></p>
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</entry>
<entry>
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<title>Network Attached Memory: Terracota as an Alternative to Memcached</title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/2008/07/10/NetworkAttachedMemoryTerracotaAsAnAlternativeToMemcached.aspx" />
<id>http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/PermaLink.aspx?guid=561d1467-05a1-43c1-b1f2-153b56dba371</id>
<published>2008-07-10T07:23:56.140625-07:00</published>
<updated>2008-07-10T07:25:09.296875-07:00</updated>
<category term="Web Development" label="Web Development" scheme="http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/CategoryView.aspx?category=Web+Development" />
<content type="html">
<p>
When it comes to scaling Web applications, every experienced Web architect eventually
realizes that <strong><a href="http://stuartsierra.com/2008/04/17/disk-is-the-new-tape">Disk
is the New Tape</a></strong>. Getting data from off of the hard drive disk is slow
compared to getting it from memory or from over the network. So an obvious way to
improve the performance of your system is to reduce the amount of disk I/O your systems
have to do which leads to the adoption of in-memory caching. In addition, there is
often more cacheable data on disk than there is space in memory since memory to disk
ratios are often worse than 1:100 (Rackspace's <a href="http://www.rackspace.com/solutions/configurations/index.php">default
server config</a> has 1GB of RAM and 250 GB of hard disk ). Which has led to the growing
popularity of distributed, in-memory, object caching systems like <a href="http://www.danga.com/memcached/">memcached</a> and
Microsoft's soon to be released <a href="http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/2008/06/06/VelocityADistributedInMemoryCacheFromMicrosoft.aspx">Velocity</a>. 
</p>
<p>
memcached can be thought of as a distributed hash table and its programming model
is fairly straightforward from the application developer's perspective. Specifically,
There is a special hash table class used by your application which is in actuality
a distributed hashtable whose contents are actually being stored on a cluster of machines
instead of just in the memory of your local machine. 
</p>
<p>
With that background I can now introduce <a href="http://www.terracotta.org/">Terracotta</a>,
a product that is billed as "Network Attached Memory" for Java applications.
Like distributed hash tables such as memcached, Terracotta springs from the observation
that accessing data from a cluster of in-memory cache servers is often more optimal
than getting it directly from your database or file store. 
</p>
<p>
Where Terracotta differs from memcached and other distributed hash tables is that
it is completely transparent to the application developer. Whereas memcached and systems
like it require developers to instantiate some sort of "cache" class and
then use that as the hash table of objects that should be stored, Terracotta attempts
to be transparent to the application developer by hooking directly into the memory
allocation operations of the JVM. 
</p>
<p>
The following is an excerpt from the Terracotta documentation on <a href="http://www.terracotta.org/confluence/display/explore/How+Terracotta+Works">How
Terracotta Works</a></p>
<blockquote>
<p>
<em>Terracotta uses </em>
<a href="http://asm.objectweb.org">
<em>ASM</em>
</a>
<em> to
manipulate application classes as those classes load into the JVM. Developers can
pick Sun Hotspot or IBM's runtime, and any of several supported application servers 
<br>
…</em>
<br>
<em>The Terracotta configuration file dictates which classes become clustered and
which do not. Terracotta then examines classes for fields it needs to cluster, and
threading semantics that need to be shared. For example, if to share customer objects
throughout an application cluster, the developer need only tell Terracotta to cluster
customers and to synchronize customers cluster-wide.</em>
</p>
<p>
<em>Terracotta looks for bytecode instructions like the following (not an exhaustive
list):</em>
</p>
<ul>
<li>
<b>
<em>GETFIELD</em>
</b>
</li>
<li>
<b>
<em>PUTFIELD</em>
</b>
</li>
<li>
<b>
<em>AASTORE</em>
</b>
</li>
<li>
<b>
<em>AALOAD</em>
</b>
</li>
<li>
<b>
<em>MONITORENTRY</em>
</b>
</li>
<li>
<b>
<em>MONITOREXIT</em>
</b>
</li>
</ul>
<p>
<em>On each of those, Terracotta does the work of Network Attached Memory. Specifically:</em>
</p>
<table cellspacing="0" cellpadding="2" width="485" border="1">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td valign="top" width="125">
<b>
<em>BYTECODE</em>
</b>
</td>
<td valign="top" width="358">
<b>
<em>Injected Behavior</em>
</b>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td valign="top" width="125">
<b>
<em>GETFIELD</em>
</b>
</td>
<td valign="top" width="358">
<em>Read from the Network for certain objects. Terracotta also has a heap-level cache
that contains pure Java objects. So GETFIELD reads from RAM if-present and faults
in from NAM if a cache miss occurs. </em>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td valign="top" width="125">
<b>
<em>PUTFIELD</em>
</b>
</td>
<td valign="top" width="358">
<em>Write to the Network for certain objects. When writing field data through the
assignment operator "=" or through similar mechanisms, Terracotta writes
the changed bytes to NAM as well as allowing those to flow to the JVM's heap.</em>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td valign="top" width="125">
<b>
<em>AASTORE</em>
</b>
</td>
<td valign="top" width="358">
<em>Same as PUTFIELD but for arrays</em>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td valign="top" width="125">
<b>
<em>AALOAD</em>
</b>
</td>
<td valign="top" width="358">
<em>Sames as GETFIELD but for arrays</em>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td valign="top" width="125">
<b>
<em>MONITORENTRY</em>
</b>
</td>
<td valign="top" width="358">
<em>Get a lock inside the JVM on the specified object AND get a lock in NAM in case
a thread on another JVM is trying to edit this object at the same time</em>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td valign="top" width="125">
<b>
<em>MONITOREXIT</em>
</b>
</td>
<td valign="top" width="358">
<em>Flush changes to the JVM's heap cache back to NAM in case another JVM is using
the same objects as this JVM</em>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
</blockquote>
<p>
The <a href="http://www.terracotta.org/confluence/display/docs1/Configuration+Guide+and+Reference#ConfigurationGuideandReference-ApplicationConfigurationSection">instrumented-classes
section of the Terracotta config file</a> is where application developers specify
which objects types should be stored in the distributed cache and it is even possible
to say that all memory allocations in your application should go through the distributed
cache. 
</p>
<p>
In general, the approach taken by Terracotta seems more complicated, more intrusive
and more error prone than using a distributed hash table like Velocity or memcached.
I always worry about systems that attempt to hide or abstract away the fact that network
operations are occurring. This often leads to developers writing badly performing
or unsafe code because it wasn't obvious that network operations are involved (e.g.
a simple lock statement in your Terracotta-powered application may actually be acquiring
distributed locks without it being explicit in the code that this is occuring). 
</p>
<blockquote>
<p>
</p>
</blockquote>
<p>
<b>Now Playing:</b>
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/search/ref=sr_adv_m_pop/?search-alias=popular&amp;unfiltered=1&amp;field-keywords=&amp;field-artist=Dream&amp;field-title=&amp;field-label=&amp;field-binding=&amp;sort=relevancerank&amp;Adv-Srch-Music-Album-Submit.x=19&amp;Adv-Srch-Music-Album-Submit.y=6">Dream</a> - <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_dmusic?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-music&amp;field-keywords=Dream+I Luv Your Girl (Remix) (feat. Young Jeezy)&amp;x=0&amp;y=0">I
Luv Your Girl (Remix) (feat. Young Jeezy)</a></p>
<div class="feedflare">
<a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/Carnage4life?a=IIn2Qj"><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/Carnage4life?i=IIn2Qj" border="0"></img></a> <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/Carnage4life?a=UIqj0j"><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/Carnage4life?i=UIqj0j" border="0"></img></a> <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/Carnage4life?a=c0Vzzj"><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/Carnage4life?i=c0Vzzj" border="0"></img></a> <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/Carnage4life?a=ZuzztJ"><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/Carnage4life?i=ZuzztJ" border="0"></img></a>
</div><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Carnage4life/~4/331785248" height="1" width="1"/></content>
</entry>
<entry>
<link xmlns:thr="http://purl.org/syndication/thread/1.0" rel="replies" type="application/atom+xml" thr:count="9" href="http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/SyndicationService.asmx/GetEntryCommentsRss?guid=898f56ef-0439-4100-90da-08701be03c13" />
<title>The Revenge of RPC: Google Protocol Buffers and Facebook Thrift</title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/2008/07/10/TheRevengeOfRPCGoogleProtocolBuffersAndFacebookThrift.aspx" />
<id>http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/PermaLink.aspx?guid=898f56ef-0439-4100-90da-08701be03c13</id>
<published>2008-07-10T07:23:19.078125-07:00</published>
<updated>2008-07-10T07:23:19.078125-07:00</updated>
<category term="Platforms" label="Platforms" scheme="http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/CategoryView.aspx?category=Platforms" />
<category term="Programming" label="Programming" scheme="http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/CategoryView.aspx?category=Programming" />
<content type="html">
<p>
In the past year both Google and Facebook have released the remote procedure call
(RPC) technologies that are used for communication between servers within their data
centers as Open Source projects. 
</p>
<p>
<a href="http://developers.facebook.com/thrift/">Facebook Thrift</a> allows you to
define data types and service interfaces in a <a href="http://developers.facebook.com/thrift/tutorial.thrift">simple
definition file</a>. Taking that file as input, the compiler <a href="http://developers.facebook.com/thrift/Calculator.h">generates
code</a> to be used to easily build RPC clients and servers that communicate seamlessly
across programming languages. It supports the following programming languages; C++,
Java, Python, PHP and Ruby. 
</p>
<p>
<a title="http://code.google.com/p/protobuf/" href="http://code.google.com/p/protobuf/">Google
Protocol Buffers</a> allows you to define data types and service interfaces in a <a href="http://code.google.com/apis/protocolbuffers/docs/proto.html">simple
definition file</a>. Taking that file as input, the compiler <a href="http://code.google.com/apis/protocolbuffers/docs/reference/cpp-generated.html">generates
code</a> to be used to easily build RPC clients and servers that communicate seamlessly
across programming languages. It supports the following programming languages; C++,
Java and Python. 
</p>
<p>
That’s interesting. Didn’t Steve Vinoski recently claim that <a title="Convenience over Correctness" href="http://steve.vinoski.net/blog/2008/07/01/convenience-over-correctness/">RPC
and it's descendants are "fundamentally flawed"</a>? If so, why are Google
and Facebook not only using RPC but proud enough of their usage of yet another distributed
object RPC technology <em>based on binary protocols</em> that they are Open Sourcing
them? Didn’t they get the memo that everyone is now on the REST + JSON/XML bandwagon
(<a href="http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2008/07/07/Atom">preferrably AtomPub</a>)? 
</p>
<p>
In truth, Google is on the REST + XML band wagon. Google has the Google Data APIs
(<a href="http://code.google.com/apis/gdata/">GData</a>) which is a consistent set
of RESTful APIs for accessing data from Google's services based on the Atom Publishing
Protocol aka RFC 5023. And even Facebook has a set of plain old XML over HTTP APIs
(POX/HTTP) which they <strong>incorrectly</strong> refer to as the <a href="http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/API">Facebook
REST API</a>. 
</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>
So what is the story here? 
</p>
<p>
It is all about coupling and how much control you have over the distributed end points.
On the Web where you have little to no control over who talks to your servers or what
technology they use, you want to utilize flexible technologies that make no assumptions
about either end of the communication. This is where RESTful XML-based Web services
shine. However when you have tight control over the service end points (e.g. if they
are all your servers running in your data center) then you can use more optimized
communications technologies that add a layer of tight coupling to your system. An
example of the kind of tight coupling you have to live with is that Facebook
Thrift requires specific versions of g++ and Java if you plan to talk to it using
code written in either language and you can’t talk to it from a service written in
C#. 
</p>
<p>
In general, the Web is about openness and loose coupling. Binary protocols that require
specific programming languages and runtimes are the exact opposite of this. However
inside your Web service where you control both ends of the pipe, you can optimize
the interaction between your services and simplify development by going with a binary
RPC based technology. More than likely different parts of your system are already
doing this anyway (e.g. <a href="http://www.danga.com/memcached/">memcached</a> uses
a binary protocol to talk between cache instances, SQL Server uses <a href="http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc448435.aspx">TDS</a> as
the communications protocol between the database and it's clients, etc). 
</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>
Always remember to use the right tool for the job. One size doesn’t fit all when it
comes to technology decisions. 
</p>
<p>
FURTHER READING 
</p>
<ul>
<li>
<a href="http://keithelder.net/blog/archive/2008/01/17/Exposing-a-WCF-Service-With-Multiple-Bindings-and-Endpoints.aspx">Exposing
a WCF Service With Multiple Bindings and Endpoints</a> – Keith Elder describes how
Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) supports multiple bindings that enable developers
to expose their services in a variety of ways. A developer can create a service
once and then expose it to support net.tcp:// or http:// and various versions of http://
(Soap1.1, Soap1.2, WS*, JSON, etc). This can be useful if a service crosses
boundaries between the intranet and the Internet. 
</li>
</ul>
<p>
<b>Now Playing:</b>
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/search/ref=sr_adv_m_pop/?search-alias=popular&amp;unfiltered=1&amp;field-keywords=&amp;field-artist=Pink&amp;field-title=&amp;field-label=&amp;field-binding=&amp;sort=relevancerank&amp;Adv-Srch-Music-Album-Submit.x=19&amp;Adv-Srch-Music-Album-Submit.y=6">Pink</a> - <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_dmusic?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-music&amp;field-keywords=Pink+Family Portrait&amp;x=0&amp;y=0">Family
Portrait</a></p>
<div class="feedflare">
<a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/Carnage4life?a=6POa1j"><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/Carnage4life?i=6POa1j" border="0"></img></a> <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/Carnage4life?a=JO49Oj"><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/Carnage4life?i=JO49Oj" border="0"></img></a> <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/Carnage4life?a=abDzdj"><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/Carnage4life?i=abDzdj" border="0"></img></a> <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/Carnage4life?a=AXoWXJ"><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/Carnage4life?i=AXoWXJ" border="0"></img></a>
</div><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Carnage4life/~4/331785249" height="1" width="1"/></content>
</entry>
<entry>
<link xmlns:thr="http://purl.org/syndication/thread/1.0" rel="replies" type="application/atom+xml" thr:count="9" href="http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/SyndicationService.asmx/GetEntryCommentsRss?guid=501b6a9c-1a26-450e-bf4f-3799ba5d8889" />
<title>Freedom of Speech Doesn’t Mean Freedom from Consequences</title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/2008/07/08/FreedomOfSpeechDoesntMeanFreedomFromConsequences.aspx" />
<id>http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/PermaLink.aspx?guid=501b6a9c-1a26-450e-bf4f-3799ba5d8889</id>
<published>2008-07-08T05:51:20.1267979-07:00</published>
<updated>2008-07-08T05:51:20.1267979-07:00</updated>
<category term="Current Affairs" label="Current Affairs" scheme="http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/CategoryView.aspx?category=Current+Affairs" />
<content type="html">
<p>
</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>
A year ago Loren Feldman produced a controversial video called "TechNigga"
which seems to still be causing him problems today. Matthew Ingram captures the latest
fallout from that controversy in his post <a title="http://www.mathewingram.com/work/2008/07/07/protests-over-verizon-deal-with-1938media/" href="http://www.mathewingram.com/work/2008/07/07/protests-over-verizon-deal-with-1938media/">Protests
over Verizon deal with 1938media</a> where he writes 
</p>
<blockquote>
<p>
<em>Several civil-rights groups and media watchdogs </em>
<a href="http://www.hiphopdx.com/index/news/id.7258/title.verizon-in-hot-water-over-technigga-partnership">
<em>are
protesting</em>
</a>
<em> a decision by telecom giant Verizon to add 1938media’s video
clips to its mobile Vcast service, saying Loren’s "TechNigga" clip is demeaning
to black people. </em>
<a href="http://www.islamichope.org/">
<em>Project Islamic Hope</em>
</a>
<em>,
for example, has issued a statement demanding that Verizon drop its distribution arrangement
with 1938media, which was just announced about </em>
<a href="http://www.1938media.com/excuse-but-im-on-the-phone/">
<em>a
week ago</em>
</a>
<em>, and other groups including the National Action Network and
LA Humanity Foundation are </em>
<a href="http://www.eurweb.com/story/eur45037.cfm">
<em>also
apparently</em>
</a>
<em> calling for people to email Verizon and protest.</em>
</p>
<p>
<em>The video that has Islamic Hope and other groups so upset is one called "TechNigga,"
which Loren </em>
<a href="http://1938media.blip.tv/file/326972">
<em>put together</em>
</a>
<em> last
August. After wondering aloud why there are no black tech bloggers, Loren reappears
with a skullcap and some gawdy jewelry, and claims to be the host of a show called
TechNigga. He then swigs from a bottle of booze, does a lot of tongue-kissing and
face-licking with his girlfriend </em>
<a href="http://www.michelleoshen.com/">
<em>Michelle
Oshen</em>
</a>
<em>, and then introduces a new Web app called "Ho-Trackr,"
which is a mashup with Google Maps that allows prospective johns to locate prostitutes.
In a statement, Islamic Hope </em>
<a href="http://www.blacktalentnews.com/artman/publish/article_1917.shtml">
<em>says
that</em>
</a>
<em> the video "sends a horrible message that Verizon seeks to partner
with racists."</em>
</p>
</blockquote>
<p>
I remember <a title="RE: Where Are The Black Tech Bloggers?" href="http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/2007/08/09/REWhereAreTheBlackTechBloggers.aspx">encountering
the video last year</a> and thinking it was incredibly unfunny. It wasn’t a clever
juxtaposition of hip hop culture and tech geekery. It wasn’t <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satire">satire</a> since
that involves lampooning someone or something you disapprove off in a humorous way
(see <a href="http://www.comedycentral.com/colbertreport/">The Colbert Report</a>). 
Of course, I thought the responses to the video were even dumber; like Robert Scoble
responding to the video with the comment “Dare Obasanjo is black”. 
</p>
<p>
Since posting the video Loren Feldman has lost a bunch of video distribution deals
with the current Verizon deal being the latest. I’ve been amused to read all of the <a href="http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/07/07/1938-media-loses-verizon-deal-over-racism-charges/">comments
on TechCrunch</a> about how this violates Loren’s <strong>freedom of speech</strong>. 
</p>
<p>
People often confuse the fact that it is not a crime to speak your mind in America
with the belief that you should be able to speak your mind without consequence. The
two things are not the same. If I call you an idiot, I may not go to jail but I shouldn’t
expect you to be nice to me afterwards. The things you say can come back and bite
you on butt is something everyone should have learned growing up. So it is always
surprising for me to see people petulantly complain that “this violates my freedom
of speech” when they have to deal with the consequences of their actions. 
</p>
<p>
BONUS VIDEO: A juxtaposition of hip hop culture and Web geekery by a <a href="http://www.theseorapper.com/">black
tech blogger</a>. 
</p>
<div class="wlWriterSmartContent" id="scid:5737277B-5D6D-4f48-ABFC-DD9C333F4C5D:e666d595-ea02-4aa1-878e-8c65d3a3c7f8" style="padding-right: 0px; display: inline; padding-left: 0px; float: none; padding-bottom: 0px; margin: 0px; padding-top: 0px">
<div id="9b9b6ee0-8dc7-4992-8c09-62dbd8d8a89b" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; display: inline;">
<div>
<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a0qMe7Z3EYg" target="_new">
<img src="http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/content/binary/WindowsLiveWriter/FreedomofSpeechDoesntMeanFreedomfromCons_5256/videoe79f529707db.jpg" galleryimg="no" onload="var downlevelDiv = document.getElementById('9b9b6ee0-8dc7-4992-8c09-62dbd8d8a89b'); downlevelDiv.innerHTML = &quot;&lt;div&gt;&lt;object width=\&quot;425\&quot; height=\&quot;355\&quot;&gt;&lt;param name=\&quot;movie\&quot; value=\&quot;http://www.youtube.com/v/a0qMe7Z3EYg\&quot;&gt;&lt;\/param&gt;&lt;param name=\&quot;wmode\&quot; value=\&quot;transparent\&quot;&gt;&lt;\/param&gt;&lt;embed src=\&quot;http://www.youtube.com/v/a0qMe7Z3EYg\&quot; type=\&quot;application/x-shockwave-flash\&quot; wmode=\&quot;transparent\&quot; width=\&quot;425\&quot; height=\&quot;355\&quot;&gt;&lt;\/embed&gt;&lt;\/object&gt;&lt;\/div&gt;&quot;;" alt=""></img>
</a>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<p>
</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>
<b>Now Playing:</b>
<a href="http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZSearch.woa/wa/advancedSearchResults?artistTerm=NWA">NWA</a> – <a href="http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZSearch.woa/wa/advancedSearchResults?songTerm=Niggaz 4 Life&amp;artistTerm=NWA">N*ggaz
4 Life</a></p>
<div class="feedflare">
<a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/Carnage4life?a=9UF3Mj"><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/Carnage4life?i=9UF3Mj" border="0"></img></a> <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/Carnage4life?a=58zfej"><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/Carnage4life?i=58zfej" border="0"></img></a> <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/Carnage4life?a=e2vSkj"><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/Carnage4life?i=e2vSkj" border="0"></img></a> <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/Carnage4life?a=61irAJ"><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/Carnage4life?i=61irAJ" border="0"></img></a>
</div><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Carnage4life/~4/329803702" height="1" width="1"/></content>
</entry>
<entry>
<link xmlns:thr="http://purl.org/syndication/thread/1.0" rel="replies" type="application/atom+xml" thr:count="1" href="http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/SyndicationService.asmx/GetEntryCommentsRss?guid=6610ac1c-1984-4c9f-9efb-dd03f1bac524" />
<title>Gnip: FeedBurner + Ping Server for Web APIs</title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/2008/07/07/GnipFeedBurnerPingServerForWebAPIs.aspx" />
<id>http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/PermaLink.aspx?guid=6610ac1c-1984-4c9f-9efb-dd03f1bac524</id>
<published>2008-07-07T06:13:49.484375-07:00</published>
<updated>2008-07-07T06:13:49.484375-07:00</updated>
<category term="Platforms" label="Platforms" scheme="http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/CategoryView.aspx?category=Platforms" />
<content type="html">
<p>
<a href="http://www.gnipcentral.com/">Gnip</a> is a newly launched startup that pitches
itself as a service that aims to “make data portability suck less”. Mike Arrington
describes the service in his post <a href="http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/07/01/gnip-launches-to-ease-the-strain-on-web-services/">Gnip
Launches To Ease The Strain On Web Services</a> which is excerpted below 
</p>
<blockquote>
<p>
<em>A close analogy is a blog ping server (</em>
<a href="http://www.techcrunch.com/2005/07/08/profile-weblogscom-ping-server/">
<em>see
our overview here</em>
</a>
<em>). Ping servers tell blog search engines like Technorati
and Google Blog Search when a blog has been updated, so the search engines don’t have
to constantly re-index sites just to see if new content has been posted. Instead,
the blog tells the ping server when it updates, which tells the search engines to
drop by and re-index. The creation of the first ping server, Weblogs.com, by Dave
Winer resulted in orders of magnitude better efficiency for blog search engines.</em>
</p>
<p>
<em>
<img alt="" src="http://www.techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/07/gnipchart.jpg"></img>
</em>
</p>
<p>
<em>The same thinking basically applies to Gnip. The idea is to gather simple information
from social networks - just a username and the fact that they created new content
(like writing a Twitter message, for example). Gnip then distributes that data to
whoever wants it, and those downstream services can then access the core service’s
API, with proper user authentication, and access the actual data (in our example,
the actual Twitter message).</em>
</p>
<p>
<em>From a user’s perspective, the result is faster data updates across services and
less downtime for services since their APIs won’t be hit as hard.</em>
</p>
</blockquote>
<p>
From my perspective, Gnip also shares some similarity to services like <a href="http://www.feedburner.com">FeedBurner</a> as
well as blog ping servers. The original purpose of blog ping servers was to make it
cheaper for services like <a href="http://www.technorati.com">Technorati</a> and <a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/blog_search_feedster_quietly_dies.php">Feedster</a> to
index the blogosphere without having to invest in a Google-sized server farm and crawl
the entire Web every couple of minutes. In addition, since blogs often have tiny readerships
and are thus infrequently linked to, crawling alone was not enough to ensure that
they find their way into the search index. It wasn’t about taking load off of the
sites that were doing the pinging. 
</p>
<p>
On the other hand, FeedBurner hosts a site’s RSS feed as a way to take load off of
their servers and then provides analytics data so the site doesn’t miss out from losing
the direct connection to its subscribers. This is more in line with the expectation
that Gnip will take load off of a service’s API servers. However unlike FeedBurner,
Gnip doesn’t actually store the user data from the social networking site. It simply
stores a record that indicates that “user X on site Y made an update of type Z at
time T”. The thinking is that web sites will publish a notification to Gnip
whenever their users perform an update. Below is a sample interaction between Digg
and Gnip where Digg notifies Gnip that the users amy and john.doe have dugg two stories. 
</p>
<blockquote>
<pre>
<code>===&gt; POST /publishers/digg/activity.xml Accept: application/xml
Content-Type: application/xml &lt;activities&gt; &lt;activity at="2008-06-08T10:12:42Z"
uid="amy" type="dugg" guid="http://digg.com/odd_stuff/a_story"/&gt; &lt;activity at="2008-06-09T09:14:07Z"
uid="john.doe" type="dugg" guid="http://digg.com/odd_stuff/really_weird"/&gt; &lt;/activities&gt;
&lt;--- 200 OK Content-Type: application/xml &lt;result&gt;Success&lt;/result&gt; 
</code>
</pre>
</blockquote>
<p>
</p>
<p>
There are two modes in which "subscribers" can choose to interact with the data published
to Gnip. The first is in a mode similar to how blog search engines interact with the <a href="http://www.weblogs.com/api.html#10">changes.xml
file on Weblogs.com</a> and other blog ping servers. For example, services like <a href="http://www.summize.com">Summize</a> or <a href="http://www.tweetscan.com/">TweetScan</a> can
ask Gnip for the last hour of changes on Twitter instead of whatever mechanism they
are using today to crawl the site. Below is what a sample interaction to retrieve
the most recent updates on Twitter from Gnip would look like 
</p>
<blockquote>
<pre>
<code>===&gt;<br>
GET /publishers/<b>twitter</b>/activity/current.xml<br>
Accept: application/xml<br><br>
&lt;---<br>
200 OK<br>
Content-Type: application/xml<br><br>
&lt;activities&gt;<br>
&lt;activity at="2008-06-08T10:12:07Z" uid="john.doe" type="tweet" guid="http://twitter.com/john.doe/statuses/42"/&gt;<br>
&lt;activity at="2008-06-08T10:12:42Z" uid="amy" type="tweet" guid="http://twitter.com/amy/statuses/52"/&gt;<br>
&lt;/activities&gt; </code>
</pre>
</blockquote>
<p>
The main problem with this approach is the same one that affects blog ping servers.
If the rate of updates is more than the ping server can handle then it may begin to
fall behind or lose updates completely. Services that don’t want to risk their content
not being crawled are best off providing their own update stream that applications
can poll periodically. That’s why the folks at Six Apart came up with the <a href="http://updates.sixapart.com/">Six
Apart Update Stream for LiveJournal, TypePad and Vox weblogs</a>. 
</p>
<p>
The second mode is one that has gotten Twitter fans like Dave Winer <a title="I wish Twitter would partner with Gnip" href="http://www.scripting.com/stories/2008/07/01/iWishTwitterWouldPartnerWi.html">raving
about Gnip being the solution to Twitter’s scaling problems</a>. In this mode, an
application creates a <a href="http://docs.google.com/View?docid=dgkhvp8s_3hhwdmdfb#Collections">collection</a> of
one or more usernames they are interested in. Below is what a collection document
created by the <a href="http://arsecandle.org/twadget/">Twadget</a> application to
indicate that it is interested in my Twitter updates might look like. 
</p>
<blockquote>
<p>
&lt;collection name="twadget-carnage4life"&gt;<br>
&lt;uid name="carnage4life" publisher.name="twitter"/&gt;<br>
&lt;/collection&gt;
</p>
</blockquote>
<p>
Then instead of polling Twitter every 5 minutes for updates it polls Gnip every 5
minutes for updates and only talks to Twitter’s servers when Gnip indicates that I’ve
made an update since the last time the application polled Gnip. The interaction between
Twadget and Gnip would then be as follows 
</p>
<blockquote>
<pre>
<code>===&gt;<br>
GET /collections/twadget-carnage4life/activity/current.xml<br>
Accept: application/xml<br>
&lt;---<br>
200 OK<br>
Content-Type: application/xml<br><br>
&lt;activities&gt;<br>
&lt;activity at="2008-06-08T10:12:07Z" uid="carnage4life" type="tweet" guid="<a title="http://twitter.com/Carnage4Life/statuses/850726804" href="http://twitter.com/Carnage4Life/statuses/850726804">http://twitter.com/Carnage4Life/statuses/850726804</a>"/&gt;</code>
<code>
</code>
<br>
<code> &lt;/activities&gt; </code>
</pre>
</blockquote>
<p>
Of course, this makes me wonder why one would think that it is feasible for Gnip to
build a system that can handle the API polling traffic of every microblogging and
social networking site out there but it is infeasible for Twitter to figure out how
to handle the polling traffic for their own service. Talk about lowered expectations. <img title="Wink" style="vertical-align: middle" alt="Wink" src="http://shared.live.com/HjKMzTS-xzcms40%21CabizA/emoticons/smile_wink.gif"></img></p>
<p>
So what do I think of Gnip? I think the ping server mode may be of some interest for
services that think it is cheaper to have code that pings Gnip after every user update
instead building out an update stream service. However since a lot of sites already
have some equivalent of the <a href="http://twitter.com/public_timeline">public timeline</a> it
isn’t clear that there is a huge <strong><u>need</u></strong> for a ping service.
Crawlers can just hit the public timeline which I <em>assume</em> is what services
like Summize and TweetScan do to keep their indexes of tweets up to date. 
</p>
<p>
As for using Gnip as a mechanism for reducing the load API clients put on a microblogging
or similar service? Gnip is <strong><u>totally useless</u></strong> for that in it’s
current incarnation. API clients aren’t interested in updates made by single user.
They are interested in all the updates made by all the people the user is following.
So for Twadget to use Gnip to lighten the load it causes on Twitter’s servers on my
behalf, it has to build a collection of all the people I am following in Gnip and
then keep that list of users in sync with whatever that list is on Twitter. But if
it has to constantly poll Twitter for my friend list, isn’t it still putting the same
amount of load on Twitter? I guess this could be fixed by having Twitter publish follower/following
lists to Gnip but that introduces all sorts of interesting technical and privacy issues.
But that doesn’t matter since the folks at Gnip brag <a title="The HOW of Gnip: keep it simple stupid!" href="http://blog.gnipcentral.com/2008/07/04/the-how-of-gnip-keep-it-simple-stupid/">about
only keeping 60 minutes of worth of updates</a> as the “secret sauce” to their scalability.
This means if I shut my Twitter client hasn’t polled Gnip in a 60 minute window (maybe
my laptop is closed) then it doesn’t matter anyway and it has to poll Twitter. 
I suspect someone didn’t finish doing their homework before rushing to “launch” Gnip. 
</p>
<p>
<u>PS:</u> One thing that is confusing to me is why all communication between applications
and Gnip needs to be over SSL. The only thing I can see it adding is making it more
expensive for Gnip run their service. I can’t think of any reason why the interactions
described above need to be over a secure channel. 
</p>
<p>
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Musik</a></p>
<div class="feedflare">
<a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/Carnage4life?a=MDylXj"><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/Carnage4life?i=MDylXj" border="0"></img></a> <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/Carnage4life?a=mavJXj"><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/Carnage4life?i=mavJXj" border="0"></img></a> <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/Carnage4life?a=x8Szij"><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/Carnage4life?i=x8Szij" border="0"></img></a> <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/Carnage4life?a=ngq2xJ"><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/Carnage4life?i=ngq2xJ" border="0"></img></a>
</div><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Carnage4life/~4/328875494" height="1" width="1"/></content>
</entry>
<entry>
<link xmlns:thr="http://purl.org/syndication/thread/1.0" rel="replies" type="application/atom+xml" thr:count="19" href="http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/SyndicationService.asmx/GetEntryCommentsRss?guid=cfa4d14a-486c-463a-b127-7820690e5eed" />
<title>A List of Companies Working Hard to Screw Up My Web Experience</title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/2008/07/07/AListOfCompaniesWorkingHardToScrewUpMyWebExperience.aspx" />
<id>http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/PermaLink.aspx?guid=cfa4d14a-486c-463a-b127-7820690e5eed</id>
<published>2008-07-07T06:13:08.359375-07:00</published>
<updated>2008-07-07T06:13:08.359375-07:00</updated>
<category term="Rants" label="Rants" scheme="http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/CategoryView.aspx?category=Rants" />
<content type="html">
<p>
Every once in a while I encounter an online service or Web site that is so irritating
that it seems like the people behind the service are just in it to frustrate Web users.
And I don’t mean the obvious candidates like email spammers and purveyors of popup
ads since they’ve been around for so long I’ve either learned how to ignore and avoid
them. 
</p>
<p>
There is a new generation of irritants and many of them are part of the new lunacy
we call “Web 2.0” 
</p>
<ol>
<li>
<p>
<b>Flash Widgets with Embedded PDF Documents</b>: Somewhere along the line a bunch
of startups decided that they needed to put a “Web 2.0” spin on the simple concept
of hosting people’s office documents online. You see, lots of people would like to
share documents in PDF or Microsoft Office® formats that aren’t particularly Web friendly.
So how have sites like <a href="http://www.scribd.com">Scribd</a> and <a href="http://www.docstoc.com/">Docstoc</a> fixed
this problem? By creating a Flash widgets containing the embedded PDF/Office documents
like the one shown <a href="http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/04/28/docstoc-raises-325-million-in-series-b-funding/">here</a>.
So not only are the documents still in a Web unfriendly format but now I can’t even
download them and use the tools on my desktop to read them. It’s like let’s combine
the FAIL of putting non-Web documents on the Web with the fail of a Web-unfriendly
format like Flash. FAIL++. By the way, it’s pretty ironic that <a title="Overview of Exchange 2007 Outlook Web Access WebReady Document Viewing" href="http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2007/03/23/437257.aspx">a
Microsoft enterprise product</a> gets this right where so many “Web 2.0” startups
get it wrong. 
</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>
</p>
<strong>Hovering Over Links Produces Flash Widgets as Pop Over Windows</strong>: The
company that takes the cake for spreading this major irritant across the blogosphere
is <a href="http://www.snap.com">Snap Technologies</a> and their Snap Shots™ product.
There’s nothing quite as irritating as hovering over a link <em>on your way to click
another link</em> and leaving a wake of pop over windows with previews of the Web
pages at the end of said links. I seriously wonder if anyone finds this useful? 
<p></p></li>
<li>
<p>
<b>Facebook Advertisers</b>: One of the promises of <a href="http://www.facebook.com">Facebook</a> is
that its users will see more relevant advertising because there is all this rich demographic
data about the site’s users in their profiles. Somewhere along the line this information
is either getting lost or being ignored by Facebook’s advertisers. Even though my
profile says I’m married and out of my twenties I keep getting <a href="http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=131598&amp;l=37514&amp;id=500050028">borderline
sleazy ads</a> whenever I login to play <a href="http://apps.facebook.com/scrabulous/">Scrabulous</a> asking
if I want to meet college girls. Then there are the ads which aren’t for dating sites
but still use sleazy imagery anyway. It’s mad embarrassing whenever my wife looks
over to see what I’m doing on my laptop to have dating site ads blaring in her face.
Obviously she knows I’m not on a dating site but still…
</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>
<b>Forums that Require Registration Showing Up in Search Results </b>: Every once
in a while I do a <a href="http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=site%3Awww.experts-exchange.com+order+of+constructor+calls&amp;go=&amp;form=QBRE">Web
search for a programming problem</a> and a couple of links to <a href="http://www.experts-exchange.com/">Experts
Exchange</a> end up in the results. What is truly annoying about this site is that
the excerpt on the search result page makes it seem as though the answer to
your question is one click away but when you click through you are greeted with <em>“All
comments and solutions are available to <b>Premium Service</b> Members only”.</em> I
thought search engines had rules about banning sites with that sort of obnoxious behavior? 
</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>
<b>Newspaper Websites with Interstitial Ads and Registration Requirements</b>: Newspapers
such as the <a href="http://www.nytimes.com">New York Times</a> often act as if they
don’t really want me reading the content on their Web site. If I click on a link to
a story on the New York Times site such as <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/05/business/05nocera.html?_r=1&amp;partner=rssnyt&amp;emc=rss&amp;oref=slogin">this
one</a>, one of two things will happen; I’m either taken to a full page animated advertisement
with an option to skip the ad in relatively small font or I get a one sentence summary
of the story with a notice that I need to register on their Web site before I can
read the story. Either way it’s a bunch of bull crap that prevents me from getting
to the news. 
</p>
</li>
</ol>
<p>
There are two things that strike me about this list as notable. The first is that
there are an increasing number of “Web 2.0” startups out there who are actively using
Flash to <strong><u>cause</u></strong> more problems than they claim to be solving.
The second is that requiring registration to view content is an amazingly stupid trend
that is beyond dumb. It’s not like people need to register on your site to see ads
so why reduce the size of your potential audience by including this road block? That’s
just stupid. 
</p>
<p>
<b>Now Playing:</b>
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P</a> - <a href="http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZSearch.woa/wa/advancedSearchResults?songTerm=Rock Bottom (feat. Lil Wayne)&amp;artistTerm=Pleasure P">Rock
Bottom (feat. Lil Wayne)</a></p>
<div class="feedflare">
<a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/Carnage4life?a=2xiFzj"><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/Carnage4life?i=2xiFzj" border="0"></img></a> <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/Carnage4life?a=IEP4Hj"><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/Carnage4life?i=IEP4Hj" border="0"></img></a> <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/Carnage4life?a=e0Qlxj"><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/Carnage4life?i=e0Qlxj" border="0"></img></a> <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/Carnage4life?a=XqD3nJ"><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/Carnage4life?i=XqD3nJ" border="0"></img></a>
</div><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Carnage4life/~4/328875495" height="1" width="1"/></content>
</entry>
<entry>
<link xmlns:thr="http://purl.org/syndication/thread/1.0" rel="replies" type="application/atom+xml" thr:count="6" href="http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/SyndicationService.asmx/GetEntryCommentsRss?guid=5bd5b38e-ae00-4616-86b4-7e35b59435f3" />
<title>In Defense of XML</title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/2008/07/02/InDefenseOfXML.aspx" />
<id>http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/PermaLink.aspx?guid=5bd5b38e-ae00-4616-86b4-7e35b59435f3</id>
<published>2008-07-02T05:56:10.14-07:00</published>
<updated>2008-07-02T05:56:10.14-07:00</updated>
<category term="XML" label="XML" scheme="http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/CategoryView.aspx?category=XML" />
<content type="html">
<p>
Jeff Atwood recently published two anti-XML rants in his blog entitled <a href="http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001114.html">XML:
The Angle Bracket Tax</a> and <a href="http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001139.html">Revisiting
the XML Angle Bracket Tax</a>. The source of his beef with XML and his recommendations
to developers are excerpted below 
</p>
<blockquote>
<p>
<em>Everywhere I look, programmers and programming tools seem to have standardized
on </em>
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XML">
<em>XML</em>
</a>
<em>. Configuration
files, build scripts, local data storage, code comments, project files, you name it
-- <b>if it's stored in a text file and needs to be retrieved and parsed, it's probably
XML.</b> I realize that we have to use something to represent reasonably human readable
data stored in a text file, but XML sometimes feels an awful lot like using an enormous
sledgehammer to drive common household nails. </em>
</p>
<p>
<em>I'm deeply ambivalent about XML. I'm reminded of this Winston Churchill quote: </em>
</p>
<blockquote>
<em>It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except
all the others that have been tried. </em>
</blockquote>
<p>
<em>XML is like democracy. Sometimes it even works. On the other hand, it also means
we end up with stuff like this:</em>
</p>
<pre>&lt;SOAP-ENV:Envelope xmlns:SOAP-ENV="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/" 
SOAP-ENV:encodingStyle="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/encoding/"&gt;
&lt;SOAP-ENV:Body&gt;
&lt;m:GetLastTradePrice xmlns:m="Some-URI"&gt;
&lt;symbol&gt;DIS&lt;/symbol&gt;
&lt;/m:GetLastTradePrice&gt;
&lt;/SOAP-ENV:Body&gt;
&lt;/SOAP-ENV:Envelope&gt;</pre>
… 
<br><em>You could do worse than XML. It's a reasonable choice, and if you're going to
use XML, then at least <a href="http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000647.html"><em>learn
to use it correctly</em></a><em>. But consider: </em></em><ol><li><em>Should XML be the default choice? </em></li><li><em>Is XML the simplest possible thing that can work for your intended use? </em></li><li><em>Do you </em><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20060325012720/www.pault.com/xmlalternatives.html"><em>know
what the XML alternatives are</em></a><em>? </em></li><li><em>Wouldn't it be nice to have easily readable, understandable data and configuration
files, without all those sharp, pointy angle brackets jabbing you directly in your
ever-lovin' eyeballs?</em></li></ol><p><em>I don't necessarily think </em><a href="http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?XmlSucks"><em>XML
sucks</em></a><em>, but the mindless, blanket application of XML as </em><a href="http://snltranscripts.jt.org/75/75ishimmer.phtml"><em>a
dessert topping and a floor wax</em></a><em> certainly does. Like all tools, it's
a question of how you use it. Please think twice before subjecting yourself, your
fellow programmers, and your users to <b>the XML angle bracket tax</b>. &lt;CleverEndQuote&gt;Again.&lt;/CleverEndQuote&gt;</em></p></blockquote>
<p>
The question of if and when to use XML is one I am intimately familiar with given
that I spent the first 2.5 years of my professional career at Microsoft working on
the XML team as the “face of XML” on MSDN.
</p>
<p>
My problem with Jeff’s articles is that they take a very narrow view of how to evaluate
a technology. No one should argue that XML is the simplest or most efficient technology
to satisfy the uses it has been put to today. It isn’t. The value of XML isn’t in
its simplicity or its efficiency. It is in the fact that there is a <strong><u>massive</u></strong> ecosystem
of knowledge and tools around working with XML. 
</p>
<p>
If I decide to use XML for my data format, I can be sure that my data will be consumable
using a variety off-the-shelf tools on practically every platform in use today. In
addition, there are a variety of tools for authoring XML, transforming it to HTML
or text, parsing it, converting it to objects, mapping it to database schemas, validating
it against a schema, and so on. Want to convert my XML config file into a pretty HTML
page? I can use XSLT or CSS. Want to validate my XML against a schema? I have my choice
of Schematron, Relax NG and XSD. Want to find stuff in my XML document? XPath and
XQuery to the rescue. And so on. 
</p>
<p>
No other data format hits a similar sweet spot when it comes to ease of use, popularity
and breadth of tool ecosystem.
</p>
<p>
So the question you really want to ask yourself before taking on the “Angle Bracket
Tax” as Jeff Atwood puts it, is whether the benefits of avoiding XML outweigh the <strong>costs</strong> of
giving up the tool ecosystem of XML and the familiarity that practically every developer
out there has with the technology? In some cases this might be true such as when deciding
whether to go with JSON over XML in AJAX applications (I’ve given <a title="JSON vs. XML: Browser Security Model" href="http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/2007/01/02/JSONVsXMLBrowserSecurityModel.aspx">two</a><a title="JSON vs. XML: Browser Programming Models" href="http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/2007/01/02/JSONVsXMLBrowserProgrammingModels.aspx">reasons</a> in
the past why JSON is a better choice). On the other hand, I can’t imagine a
good reason to want to roll your own data format for office documents or application
configuration files as opposed to using XML.
</p>
FURTHER READING 
<ul><li><a title="http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms950805.aspx" href="http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms950805.aspx">The
XML Litmus Test</a> - Dare Obasanjo provides some simple guidelines for determining
when XML is the appropriate technology to use in a software application or architecture
design. (6 printed pages) 
</li><li><a href="http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa468558.aspx">Understanding XML</a> -
Learn how the Extensible Markup Language (XML) facilitates universal data access.
XML is a plain-text, Unicode-based meta-language: a language for defining markup languages.
It is not tied to any programming language, operating system, or software vendor.
XML provides access to a plethora of technologies for manipulating, structuring, transforming
and querying data. (14 printed pages) 
</li></ul><p><b>Now Playing:</b><a href="http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZSearch.woa/wa/advancedSearchResults?artistTerm=Metallica" target="_blank">Metallica</a> - <a href="http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZSearch.woa/wa/advancedSearchResults?songTerm=The God That Failed&amp;artistTerm=Metallica" target="_blank">The
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<entry>
<link xmlns:thr="http://purl.org/syndication/thread/1.0" rel="replies" type="application/atom+xml" thr:count="0" href="http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/SyndicationService.asmx/GetEntryCommentsRss?guid=9a778e9f-da8f-40e5-a17b-f9fcd398700d" />
<title>Some Thoughts on Google Adopting OAuth for GData APIs</title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/2008/07/02/SomeThoughtsOnGoogleAdoptingOAuthForGDataAPIs.aspx" />
<id>http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/PermaLink.aspx?guid=9a778e9f-da8f-40e5-a17b-f9fcd398700d</id>
<published>2008-07-02T05:52:45.374375-07:00</published>
<updated>2008-07-02T05:52:45.374375-07:00</updated>
<category term="Platforms" label="Platforms" scheme="http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/CategoryView.aspx?category=Platforms" />
<category term="Web Development" label="Web Development" scheme="http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/CategoryView.aspx?category=Web+Development" />
<content type="html">
<p>
Late last week, the folks on the Google Data APIs blog announced that <a title="OAuth for Google Data APIs" href="http://googledataapis.blogspot.com/2008/06/oauth-for-google-data-apis.html">Google
will now be supporting OAuth</a> as the delegated authentication mechanism for all
Google Data APIs. This move is meant to encourage the various online services that
provide APIs that access a user’s data in the “cloud” to stop reinventing the wheel
when it comes to delegated authentication and standardize on a single approach. 
</p>
<p>
Every well-designed Web API that provides access to a customer’s data in the cloud
utilizes a delegated authentication mechanism which allows users to grant 3rd party
applications access to their data without having to give the application their username
and password. There is a good analogy for this practice in the <a href="http://oauth.net/about/">OAuth:
Introduction page</a> which is excerpted below 
</p>
<blockquote>
<h5>What is it For?
</h5>
<p>
Many luxury cars today come with a valet key. It is a special key you give the parking
attendant and unlike your regular key, will not allow the car to drive more than a
mile or two. Some valet keys will not open the trunk, while others will block access
to your onboard cell phone address book. Regardless of what restrictions the valet
key imposes, the idea is very clever. You give someone limited access to your car
with a special key, while using your regular key to unlock everything.
</p>
<p>
Everyday new website offer services which tie together functionality from other sites.
A photo lab printing your online photos, a social network using your address book
to look for friends, and APIs to build your own desktop application version of a popular
site. These are all great services – what is not so great about some of the implementations
available today is their request for your username and password to the other site.
When you agree to share your secret credentials, not only you expose your password
to someone else (yes, that same password you also use for online banking), you also
give them full access to do as they wish. They can do anything they wanted – even
change your password and lock you out.
</p>
<p>
This is what OAuth does, it allows the you the User to grant access to your private
resources on one site (which is called the Service Provider), to another site (called
Consumer, not to be confused with you, the User). While OpenID is all about using
a single identity to sign into many sites, OAuth is about giving access to your stuff
without sharing your identity at all (or its secret parts).
</p>
</blockquote>
<p>
So every service provider invented their own protocol to do this, all of which are
different but have the same basic components. Today we have <a href="http://code.google.com/apis/gdata/authsub.html">Google
AuthSub</a>, <a href="http://developer.yahoo.com/auth/">Yahoo! BBAuth</a>, <a href="http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc287637.aspx">Windows
Live DelAuth</a>, <a href="http://dev.aol.com/api/openauth">AOL OpenAuth</a>, the <a href="http://www.flickr.com/services/api/auth.spec.html">Flickr
Authentication API</a>, the <a href="http://developers.facebook.com/documentation.php?doc=auth">Facebook
Authentication API</a> and others. All different, proprietary solutions to the same
problem. 
</p>
<p>
This ends up being problematic for developers because if you want to build an application
that talks to multiple services you not only have to deal with the different APIs
provided by these services but also the different authorization/authentication models
they utilize as well. In a world where “social aggregation” is becoming more commonplace
with services like <a href="http://www.plaxo.com/tour">Plaxo Pulse</a> &amp; <a href="http://friendfeed.com/about/">FriendFeed</a> and
more applications are trying to bridge the desktop/cloud divide like <a href="http://www.melsam.com/outsync/">OutSync</a> and <a title="RSS Bandit Syncs RSS Feeds Between Desktop and Google Reader" href="http://lifehacker.com/396865/rss-bandit-syncs-rss-feeds-between-desktop-and-google-reader">RSS
Bandit</a>, it sucks that these applications have to rewrite the same type of code
over and over again to deal with the basic task of getting permission to access a
user’s data. Standardizing on OAuth is meant to fix that. A number of startups like
Digg &amp; Twitter as well as major players like Yahoo and Google have promised to
support it, so this should make the lives of developers easier. 
</p>
<p>
Of course, we still have work to do as an industry when it comes to the constant wheel
reinvention in the area of Web APIs. Chris Messina points to another place where every
major service provider has invented a different proprietary protocol for doing the
same task in his post <a title="http://factoryjoe.com/blog/2008/06/04/inventing-contact-schemas-for-fun-and-profit-ugh/" href="http://factoryjoe.com/blog/2008/06/04/inventing-contact-schemas-for-fun-and-profit-ugh/">Inventing
contact schemas for fun and profit! (Ugh)</a> where he writes
</p>
<blockquote>
<p>
<em>And then </em>
<a href="http://code.google.com/apis/contacts/">
<em>there</em>
</a>
<em>
</em>
<a href="http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb463989.aspx">
<em>were</em>
</a>
<em>
</em>
<a href="http://developer.yahoo.com/addressbook/">
<em>three</em>
</a>
<br>
<em>... 
<br>
Today, Yahoo! </em>
<a href="http://developer.yahoo.net/blog/archives/2008/06/addressbook_api.html">
<em>announced
the public availability</em>
</a>
<em> of their own </em>
<a href="http://developer.yahoo.com/addressbook/">
<em>Address
Book API</em>
</a>
<em>. </em>
</p>
<p>
<em>However, I have to lament yet more needless reinvention of contact schema. Why
is this a problem? Well, as I pointed out about Facebook’s approach to developing
their own platform methods and formats, having to write and debug against yet another
contact schema makes the “tax” of adding support for contact syncing and export increasingly
onerous for sites and web services that want to better serve their customers by letting
them host and maintain their address book elsewhere.</em>
</p>
<p>
<em>This isn’t just a problem that I have with Yahoo!. It’s </em>
<a href="http://factoryjoe.com/blog/2007/11/01/hcard-for-openid-simple-registration-and-attribute-exchange/">
<em>something
that I encountered last November</em>
</a>
<em> with the </em>
<a href="http://openid.net/specs/openid-simple-registration-extension-1_0.html">
<abbr>
<em>SREG</em>
</abbr>
</a>
<em> and proposed </em>
<a href="http://www.axschema.org/types/">
<em>Attribute
Exchange profile definition</em>
</a>
<em>. And yet again when </em>
<a href="http://googledataapis.blogspot.com/2008/03/3-2-1-contact-api-has-landed.html">
<em>Google
announced their Contacts API</em>
</a>
<em>. And then again when </em>
<a href="http://dev.live.com/blogs/devlive/archive/2008/03/25/237.aspx">
<em>Microsoft
released theirs</em>
</a>
<em>! Over and over again we’re seeing better ways of fighting
the password anti-pattern flow of inviting friends to new social services, but having
to implement support for countless contact schemas. <strong>What we need is one common
contacts interchange format and I strongly suggest that it inherit from vcard with
allowances or extension points for contemporary trends in social networking profile
data.</strong></em>
</p>
<p>
<em>I’ve gone ahead and whipped up a </em>
<a href="http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pSGbbhtwI4kN_nJ1GXeQ7Qg">
<em>comparison
matrix between the primary contact schemas</em>
</a>
<em> to demonstrate the mess we’re
in.</em>
</p>
</blockquote>
<p>
Kudos to the folks at Google for trying to force the issue when it comes to standardizing
on a delegated authentication protocol for use on the Web. However there are still
lots of places across the industry where we speak different protocols and thus incur
a needless burden on developers when a single language might do. It would be nice
to see some of this unnecessary redundancy eliminated in the future. 
</p>
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</entry>
<entry>
<link xmlns:thr="http://purl.org/syndication/thread/1.0" rel="replies" type="application/atom+xml" thr:count="33" href="http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/SyndicationService.asmx/GetEntryCommentsRss?guid=4ab11c6e-6b8f-4c5e-92a8-3fd92f27abda" />
<title>The GOOG->MSFT Exodus: Working at Google vs. Working at Microsoft</title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/2008/06/29/TheGOOGMSFTExodusWorkingAtGoogleVsWorkingAtMicrosoft.aspx" />
<id>http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/PermaLink.aspx?guid=4ab11c6e-6b8f-4c5e-92a8-3fd92f27abda</id>
<published>2008-06-29T08:57:25.171-07:00</published>
<updated>2008-06-29T21:28:36.765625-07:00</updated>
<category term="Life in the B0rg Cube" label="Life in the B0rg Cube" scheme="http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/CategoryView.aspx?category=Life+in+the+B0rg+Cube" />
<content type="html">
<p>
Recently I’ve been bumping into more and more people who’ve either left Google to
come to Microsoft or got offers from both companies and picked Microsoft over Google.
I believe this is part of a larger trend especially since I’ve seen lots of people
who left the company for “greener pastures” return in the past year (at least 8 people
I know personally have rejoined) . However in this blog post I’ll stick to talking
about people who’ve chosen Microsoft over Google. 
</p>
<p>
First of all there’s the post by Sergey Solyanik entitled <a href="http://1-800-magic.blogspot.com/2008/06/back-to-microsoft.html">Back
to Microsoft</a> where he primarily gripes about the culture and lack of career development
at Google, some key excerpts are 
</p>
<blockquote>
<p>
<em>Last week I left Google to go back to Microsoft, where I started this Monday (and
so not surprisingly, I was too busy to blog about it) 
<br>
… 
<br>
So why did I leave? </em>
</p>
<p>
<em>There are many things about Google that are not great, and merit improvement.
There are plenty of silly politics, underperformance, inefficiencies and ineffectiveness,
and things that are plain stupid. I will not write about these things here because
they are immaterial. I did not leave because of them. No company has achieved the
status of the perfect workplace, and no one ever will.</em>
</p>
<p>
<em>I left because Microsoft turned out to be the right place for me. 
<br>
… 
<br>
Google software business is divided between producing the "eye candy" - web properties
that are designed to amuse and attract people - and the infrastructure required to
support them. Some of the web properties are useful (some extremely useful - search),
but most of them primarily help people waste time online (blogger, youtube, orkut,
etc) 
<br>
… 
<br>
This orientation towards cool, but not necessarilly useful or essential software really
affects the way the software engineering is done. Everything is pretty much run by
the engineering - PMs and testers are conspicuously absent from the process. While
they do exist in theory, there are too few of them to matter. </em>
</p>
<p>
<em>On one hand, there are beneficial effects - it is easy to ship software quickly…On
the other hand, I was using Google software - a lot of it - in the last year, and
slick as it is, there's just too much of it that is regularly broken. It seems like
every week 10% of all the features are broken in one or the other browser. And it's
a different 10% every week - the old bugs are getting fixed, the new ones introduced.
This across Blogger, Gmail, Google Docs, Maps, and more 
<br>
… 
<br>
The culture part is very important here - you can spend more time fixing bugs, you
can introduce processes to improve things, but it is very, very hard to change the
culture. And the culture at Google values "coolness" tremendously, and the quality
of service not as much. At least in the places where I worked. 
<br>
… 
<br>
The second reason I left Google was because I realized that I am not excited by the
individual contributor role any more, and I don't want to become a manager at Google. </em>
</p>
<p>
<em>The Google Manager is a very interesting phenomenon. On one hand, they usually
have a LOT of people from different businesses reporting to them, and are perennially
very busy. </em>
</p>
<p>
<em>On the other hand, in my year at Google, I could not figure out what was it they
were doing. The better manager that I had collected feedback from my peers and gave
it to me. There was no other (observable by me) impact on Google. The worse manager
that I had did not do even that, so for me as a manager he was a complete no-op. I
asked quite a few other engineers from senior to senior staff levels that had spent
far more time at Google than I, and they didn't know either. I am not making this
up!</em>
</p>
</blockquote>
<p>
Sergey isn’t the only senior engineer I know who has contributed significantly
to Google projects and then decided Microsoft was a better fit for him. Danny Thorpe <a href="http://dannythorpe.com/about2/">who
worked on Google Gears is back at Microsoft</a> for his second stint working on developer
technologies related to Windows Live. These aren’t the only folks I’ve seen
who’ve decided to make the switch from the big G to the b0rg, these are just the ones
who have blogs that I can point at. 
</p>
<p>
Unsurprisingly, the fact that Google isn’t a good place for senior developers is also
becoming clearly evident in their interview processes. Take this post from Svetlin
Nakov entitled <a href="http://www.nakov.com/blog/2008/03/15/rejected-a-program-manager-position-at-microsoft-dublin-my-successful-interview-at-microsoft/">Rejected
a Program Manager Position at Microsoft Dublin - My Successful Interview at Microsoft</a> where
he concludes 
</p>
<blockquote>
<h4>
<em>My Experience at Interviews with Microsoft and Google</em>
</h4>
<p>
<em>Few months ago I was interviewed for a software engineer in Google Zurich. If
I need to compare Microsoft and Google, I should tell it in short: Google sux! Here
are my reasons for this:</em>
</p>
<p>
<em>1) Google interview were not professional. It was like Olympiad in Informatics.
Google asked me only about algorithms and data structures, nothing about software
technologies and software engineering. It was obvious that they do not care that I
had 12 years software engineering experience. They just ignored this. The only think
Google wants to know about their candidates are their algorithms and analytical thinking
skills. Nothing about technology, nothing about engineering.</em>
</p>
<p>
<em>2) Google employ everybody as junior developer, ignoring the existing experience.
It is nice to work in Google if it is your first job, really nice, but if you have
12 years of experience with lots of languages, technologies and platforms, at lots
of senior positions, you should expect higher position in Google, right?</em>
</p>
<p>
<em>3) Microsoft have really good interview process. People working in Microsoft are
relly very smart and skillful. Their process is far ahead of Google. Their quality
of development is far ahead of Google. Their management is ahead of Google and their
recruitment is ahead of Google.</em>
</p>
<h4>
<em>Microsoft is Better Place to Work than Google</em>
</h4>
<p>
<em>At my interviews I was asking my interviewers in both Microsoft and Google a lot
about the development process, engineering and technologies. I was asking also my
colleagues working in these companies. I found for myself that Microsoft is better
organized, managed and structured. Microsoft do software development in more professional
way than Google. Their engineers are better. Their development process is better.
Their products are better. Their technologies are better. Their interviews are better.
Google was like a kindergarden - young and not experienced enough people, an office
full of fun and entertainment, interviews typical for junior people and lack of traditions
in development of high quality software products.</em>
</p>
</blockquote>
<p>
Based on my observations, I have theory that Google’s big problem is that the company
hasn’t realized that it isn’t a startup anymore. This disconnect between the company’s
status and it’s perception of itself manifests in a number of ways 
</p>
<ol>
<li>
<p>
Startups don’t have a career path for their employees. Does anyone at Facebook know
what they want to be in five years besides <b>rich</b>? However once riches are no
longer guaranteed and the stock isn’t firing on all cylinders (<a href="http://finance.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&amp;chdd=1&amp;chds=1&amp;chdv=1&amp;chvs=maximized&amp;chdeh=0&amp;chdet=1214749539170&amp;chddm=48484&amp;cmpto=INDEXNASDAQ:.IXIC;INDEXDJX:.DJI&amp;q=NASDAQ:GOOG&amp;">GOOG
is underperforming both the NASDAQ and DOW Jones industrial average this year</a>)
then you need to have a better career plan for your employees that goes beyond “free
lunches and all the foosball you can handle". 
</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>
There is no legacy code at a startup. When your code base is young, it isn’t a big
deal to have developers checking in new features after an overnight coding fit powered
by caffeine and pizza. For the most part, the code base shouldn’t be large enough
or interdependent enough for one change to cause issues. However it is practically
a law of software development that the older your code gets the more lines of code
it accumulates and the more closely coupled your modules become. This means changing
things in one part of the code can have adverse effects in another. 
</p>
<p>
As all organizations mature they tend to add PROCESS. These processes exist to insulate
the companies from the mistakes that occur after a company gets to a certain size
and can no longer trust its employees to always do the right thing. Requiring code
reviews, design specifications, black box &amp; whitebox &amp; unit testing, usability
studies, threat models, etc are all the kinds of <em><u>overhead</u></em> that differentiate
a mature software development shop from a “fly by the seat of your pants” startup.
However once you’ve been through enough fire drills, some of those processes don’t
sound as bad as they once did. This is why senior developers value them while junior
developers don’t since the latter haven’t been around the block enough. 
</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>
There is less politics at a startup. In any activity where humans have to come together
collaboratively to achieve a goal, there will always be people with different agendas.
The more people you add to the mix, the more agendas you have to contend with. Doing
things by consensus is OK when you have to get consensus from two or three people
who sit in the same hallway as you. It’s a totally different ball game when you need
to gain it from lots of people from across a diverse company working on different
projects in different regions of the world who have different perspectives on how
to solve your problems. At Google, even <a href="http://valleywag.com/tech/google/google-checks-applicants-undergrad-gpa-156925.php#c66653">hiring
an undergraduate candidate has to go through several layers of committees</a> which
means hiring managers need to possess some political savvy if they want to get their
candidates approved. The <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/dpstyles/460987802/">founders
of Dodgeball quit the Google after their startup was acquired</a> after they realized
that they didn’t have the political savvy to get resources allocated to their project. 
</p>
</li>
</ol>
<p>
The fact that Google is having problems retaining employees isn't news, Fortune wrote <a title="Where does Google go next?" href="http://money.cnn.com/2008/05/09/technology/where_does_google_go.fortune/">an
article about it</a> just a few months ago. The technology press makes it seem like
people are ditching Google for hot startups like FriendFeed and Facebook. However
the truth is more nuanced than that. Now that Google is just another big software
company, lots of people are comparing it to other big software companies like Microsoft
and finding it lacking.
</p>
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<entry>
<link xmlns:thr="http://purl.org/syndication/thread/1.0" rel="replies" type="application/atom+xml" thr:count="6" href="http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/SyndicationService.asmx/GetEntryCommentsRss?guid=193de2bb-5f52-4182-a3d5-6a975b3cabaf" />
<title>Is the Semantic Web Really the Next Frontier in Search Engine Technology?</title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/2008/06/26/IsTheSemanticWebReallyTheNextFrontierInSearchEngineTechnology.aspx" />
<id>http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/PermaLink.aspx?guid=193de2bb-5f52-4182-a3d5-6a975b3cabaf</id>
<published>2008-06-26T05:37:36.59375-07:00</published>
<updated>2008-06-26T05:37:36.59375-07:00</updated>
<category term="Technology" label="Technology" scheme="http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/CategoryView.aspx?category=Technology" />
<content type="html">
<p>
Last week TechCrunch UK wrote about a search startup that utilizes AI/Semantic
Web techniques named True Knowledge. The post entitled <a href="https://mail.microsoft.com/redir.aspx?C=b6ae77ee262f4137a7dafe2ee6519e02&amp;URL=http%3a%2f%2fuk.techcrunch.com%2f2008%2f06%2f19%2fvcs-price-true-knowledge-at-20m-pre-money-is-this-the-uks-powerset%2f">VCs
price True Knowledge at £20m pre-money. Is this the UK’s Powerset?</a> stated
</p>
<blockquote>
<p>
The chatter I’m hearing is that True Knowledge is being talked about in hushed tones,
as if it might be the <a href="http://PowerSet.com">Powerset</a> of the UK. To put
that in context, Google has tried to buy the Silicon Valley search startup several
times, and they have only <a href="http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/05/11/powerset-launches-showcase-for-user-search-experience/">launched
a showcase</a> product, not even a real one. However, although True Knowledge and
Powerset are similar, they are different in significant ways, more of which later.<br>
...<br>
Currently in private beta, True Knowledge says their product is capable of intelligently
answering - in plain English - questions posed on any topic. Ask it if Ben Affleck
is married and it will come back with "Yes" rather than lots of web pages which may
or may not have the answer (don’t ask me!).<br>
...<br>
Here’s why the difference matters. True Knowledge <em>can infer answers that the system
hasn’t seen</em>. Inferences are created by combining different bits of data together.
So for instance, without knowing the answer it can work out how tall the Eiffel Tower
is by inferring that it is shorter that the Empire State Building but higher than
St Pauls Cathedral.<br>
...<br>
AI software developer and entrepreneur William Tunstall-Pedoe is the founder of True
Knowledge. He previously developed a technology that can solve a commercially published
crossword clues but also explain how the clues work in plain English. See the connection?
</p>
</blockquote>
<p>
The scenarios described in the TechCrunch write up should sound familiar to anyone
who has spent any time around fans of the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web">Semantic
Web</a>. Creating intelligent agents that can interrogate structured data on the Web
and infer new knowledge has turned out to be easier said than done because for
the most part content on the Web isn't organized according to the structure of
the data. This is primarily due to the fact that HTML is a presentational language.
Of course, even if information on the Web was structured data (i.e. idiomatic
XML formats) we still need to build machinary to translate between all of these XML
formats. 
</p>
<p>
Finally, in the few areas on the Web where structured data in XML formats is commonplace
such as Atom/RSS feeds for blog content, not a lot has been done with this data to
fulfill the promise of the Semantic Web. 
</p>
<p>
So if the Semantic Web is such an infeasible utopia, why are more and more search
startups using that as the angle from which they will attack Google's dominance of
Web search? The answer can be found in Bill Slawski's post from a year ago entitled <a href="http://searchengineland.com/070705-010321.php">Finding
Customers Through Anti-Commercial Queries</a> where he wrote 
</p>
<blockquote>
<p>
<b>
<em>Most Queries are Noncommercial</em>
</b>
</p>
<p>
<em>The first step might be to recognize that most queries conducted by people at
search engines aren't aimed at buying something. A paper from the WWW 2007 held this
spring in Banff, Alberta, Canada, </em>
<a href="http://www2007.org/posters/poster989.pdf">
<em>Determining
the User Intent of Web Search Engine Queries</em>
</a>
<em>, provided a breakdown of
the types of queries that they were able to classify.</em>
</p>
<p>
<em>Their research uncovered the following numbers: "80% of Web queries are informational
in nature, with about 10% each being navigational and transactional." The research
points to the vast majority of searches being conducted for information gathering
purposes. One of the indications of "information" queries that they looked for were
searches which include terms such as: “ways to,” “how to,” “what is.”</em>
</p>
</blockquote>
<p>
Although the bulk of the revenue search engines make is from people performing commercial
queries such as searching for "incredible hulk merchandise", "car insurance quotes"
or "ipod prices", this is actually a tiny proportion of the kinds of queries people
want answered by search engines. The majority of searches are about <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_Ws">the
five Ws (and one H)</a> namely "who", "what", "where", "when", "why" and "how". Such
queries don't really need a list of Web pages as results, they simply require an answer.
The search engine that can figure out how to always answer user queries directly on
the page without making the user click on half a dozen pages to figure out the answer
will definitely have moved the needle when it comes to the Web search user experience. 
</p>
<p>
This explains why scenarios that one usually associates with AI and Semantic Web evangelists
are now being touted by the new generation of "Google-killers". The question
is whether knowledge inference techniques will prove to be more effective than traditional
search engine techniques when it comes to providing the best search results especially
since a lot of the traditional search engines are <a href="http://www.google.com/intl/en/press/pressrel/universalsearch_20070516.html">learning</a> <a href="http://blogs.msdn.com/livesearch/archive/2008/05/30/wikipedia-gets-big.aspx">new
tricks</a>. 
</p>
<p>
<strong>Now Playing:</strong>
<a href="http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZSearch.woa/wa/advancedSearchResults?artistTerm=Bob Marley">Bob
Marley</a> - <a href="http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZSearch.woa/wa/advancedSearchResults?songTerm=Waiting In Vain&amp;artistTerm=Bob Marley">Waiting
In Vain</a></p>
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</entry>
<entry>
<link xmlns:thr="http://purl.org/syndication/thread/1.0" rel="replies" type="application/atom+xml" thr:count="3" href="http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/SyndicationService.asmx/GetEntryCommentsRss?guid=179b69d3-5b69-4d12-9e13-34888e955714" />
<title>The "Popularity" of FriendFeed is a Bug in the Social Software Ecosystem</title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/2008/06/26/ThePopularityOfFriendFeedIsABugInTheSocialSoftwareEcosystem.aspx" />
<id>http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/PermaLink.aspx?guid=179b69d3-5b69-4d12-9e13-34888e955714</id>
<published>2008-06-26T05:37:19.1875-07:00</published>
<updated>2008-06-26T05:37:19.1875-07:00</updated>
<category term="Social Software" label="Social Software" scheme="http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/CategoryView.aspx?category=Social+Software" />
<content type="html">
<p>
At the end of February of this year, I wrote a post entitled <a href="http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/2008/02/28/NoContestFriendFeedVsTheFacebookNewsFeed.aspx">No
Contest: FriendFeed vs. The Facebook News Feed</a> where I argued that it would
be a two month project for an enterprising developer at Facebook to incorporate all
of the relevant features of FriendFeed that certain vocal bloggers had found
so enticing. Since then we've had two announcements from Facebook 
</p>
<p>
From <a href="http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=13245367130">A new way to share
with friends</a> on April 15th
</p>
<blockquote>
<p>
<em>we've introduced a way for you to import activity from other sites into your Mini-Feed
(and into your friends' News Feeds). </em>
</p>
<p>
<em>
<img src="http://photos.l3.facebook.com/photos-l3-sf2p/v233/75/57/500031439/n500031439_809927_3757.jpg"></img>
</em>
</p>
<p>
<em>
<img src="http://photos.l3.facebook.com/photos-l3-sf2p/v233/75/57/500031439/n500031439_809926_6052.jpg"></img>
</em>
</p>
<p>
<em>The option to import stories from other sites can be found via the small "Import"
link at the top of your Mini-Feed. Only a few sites—Flickr, Yelp, Picasa, and del.icio.us—are
available for importing at the moment, but we'll be adding Digg and other sites in
the near future. These stories will look just like any other Mini-Feed stories, and
will hopefully increase your ability to share information with the people you care
about.</em>
</p>
</blockquote>
<p>
From on <a href="http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=20877767130">We're Open For
Commentary</a> on June 25th (Yesterday) 
</p>
<blockquote>
<p>
<em>In the past, you've been able to comment on photos, notes and posted items, but
if there was something else on your friend's profile—an interesting status, or a cool
new friendship—you'd need to send a message or write a Wall post to talk about it.
But starting today, you can comment on your friends' Mini-Feed stories right from
their profile. </em>
</p>
<p>
<em>
<img src="http://photos-f.ak.facebook.com/photos-ak-sf2p/v258/50/121/20531316728/n20531316728_1057085_6070.jpg"></img>
</em>
</p>
<p>
<em>Now you can easily converse around friends' statuses, application stories, new
friendships, videos, and most other stories you see on their profile. Just click on
the comment bubble icon to write a comment or see comments other people have written.</em>
</p>
</blockquote>
<p>
It took a little longer than two months but it looks like I was right. For some reason
Facebook isn't putting the comment bubbles in the news feed but I assume that is only
temporary and they are trying it out in the mini-feed first. 
</p>
<p>
FriendFeed has always seemed to me to be a weird concept for a stand
alone application. Why would I want to go to whole new site and create yet another
friend list just to share what I'm doing on the Web with my friends? Isn't that what
social networking sites are for? It just sounds so inconvenient, <em>like carrying
around a pager instead of a mobile phone</em>. 
</p>
<p>
As I said in my original post on the topic, all FriendFeed has going for it is the
community that has built around the site. Especially since the functionality it provides
can be easily duplicated and actually fits better as a feature of an existing social
networking site. The question is whether that community is the kind that will grow
into making it a mainstream success or whether it will remain primarily
a playground for Web geeks despite all the hype (see <a href="http://avc.blogs.com/a_vc/2008/04/we-need-a-new-p.html">del.icio.us
as an example</a> of this). So far, the chance of the latter seems strong. For comparison,
consider the growth curve of Twitter against that of FriendFeed on <a title="Google Trends Chart: FriendFeed vs Twitter" href="http://trends.google.com/websites?q=twitter.com,+friendfeed.com&amp;sa=N">Google
Trends</a> and <a title="Alexa Chart: FriendFeed vs Twitter" href="http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details/friendfeed.com?site0=friendfeed.com&amp;site1=twitter.com&amp;y=r&amp;z=3&amp;h=300&amp;w=610&amp;range=6m&amp;size=Medium">Alexa</a>. 
Which seems more likely to one day have the brand awareness of a Flickr or a Facebook? 
</p>
<p>
<strong>Now Playing:</strong>
<a href="http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZSearch.woa/wa/advancedSearchResults?artistTerm=Bob Marley">Bob
Marley</a> - <a href="http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZSearch.woa/wa/advancedSearchResults?songTerm=I Shot The Sheriff&amp;artistTerm=Bob Marley">I
Shot The Sheriff</a></p>
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