Last night listened to the The Social Web Tv - Episode 14, which was about Mashups and API's. What really stuck in my mind was a comment by John McCrea from Plaxo about the social web. John said ......
"the web going social and the social web going open"
and I find this to be true and wanted to give some examples to back this up.
Years ago, social networks like facebook, friendster, myspace and linkedin were destinations, where they would restrict your data to their site and they would try and keep you on their site. However, we have really changed from this model to a more open model where you can push and pull data to and from each network. This gives us the benefit of flexibility and allows us to control of our data.
Now there are many ways to add social interaction on your blog or web site. Facebook Connect, Google's Friend Connect, and Friendfeed are all great examples of how you can share and integrate your data on the web. These sites are no longer just destinations but are becoming the fabric of the web along with many others that are adopting this open model.
My family and close friends know that I have been spending a lot of time reading, writing and listening to stories and strategies about Micro-blogging, and in particular, the new Open Source Micro-blogging service Identi.ca. I have also been asked a lot about Micro-blogging or the value of twitter and that is what I want to outline in this post, however instead of twitter, I am going to identify why you should use Identi.ca.
Communication, Communication, Communication.
Micro-blogging is about communication, and we often communicate with many people on a daily basis, and often with many different groups of people. Micro-blogging is another way of electronically communicating with others, and it enables folks to follow subjects of interest, or activities of friends, family and others that we would like to follow.
Think of Micro-blogging as "the email of the early 80's", and I predict that in the future, everyone will have an email address and a micro-blogging address. Micro-blogging is like IM on steroids, but I in my opinion, Micro-blogging is better than IM because the folks that you are communicating with do not have to be present when you send the message, and topics can easily be viewed and discussed by a large number of folks. It's so lightweight and flexible that adoption in the mobile market is simple, which leads to increased adoption by the mobile community.
Twitter Jaiku, and Pownce are three well know Micro-blogging services, but all three are somewhat proprietary and not as open a Identi.ca. Pownce has some real nice features and Twitter has the mass market, however neither can talk directly to each other, however we are moving to period where all Micro-blogging tools will be talking to each other, and that will be very advantageous for us, because it will not matter which service that you use.
I really like Identi.ca for a couple of reasons, it's open source software (by laconi.ca), it is somewhat federated, which means that it can easily exchange data with other open services, there is much more of a technical stream and conversation happening on identi.ca and it feels more dynamic that twitter. I also think that Identi.ca has so much potential, and is leading the way to a more open distributed Micro-blogging universe. Finally, I also really like the distributed model, because it will give organizations the flexibility they need to offer open (in front of the firewall) or closed/protected (behind the firewall) Micro-blogging resources.
However, there are still many challenges to overcome. Standardizing feeds into and out of Identi.ca or laconi.ca instances is one challenge. Tracking and searching across multiple federated sites is another, and of course there is the scalability question, what will happen when Identi.ca has 2 million users.
Many others see these challenges and this past Friday (9/12/08), a group lead by Steve Gilmore of the Gilmore Gang sat down to discuss these issues. The meeting was called the BearHugCamp and I have included links to summaries and a video of the BearHugCamp discussions:
Jack Moffitt from metajack.im attended BearHug Camp and wrote a nice outline of the proceedings from his perspective. Cem Basman also pulled together a BearHugCamp outline that includes links to pictures. Leo Laporte from TWIT recorded the event and you can find the video here. And, my impression is that this was a great starting point to make sure that we all understand the rewards and challenges and hopefully this will lead to an opening of all Micro-Blogging services and Social Networking sites.
I have received a lot of great feedback on my Cloud Computing Examples post and want to share some thoughts on supporting resources in the Cloud.
Much like managing physical servers, maintaining resources in the cloud will fall on the shoulders of the System and Application Administrators, and these administrators are always looking for tools and scripts to help them automate their duties.
Starting, stopping and rebooting instances in the cloud is a little trickier than starting, stopping and rebooting resources on the server in your computer room. Should there be a real problem with the resource in your computer room, you can always go into the computer room and power down your hardware and restart, knowing that everything (bios, drivers, memory) have been initialized. But this is not true in the cloud, because in the cloud, you can count on re-initializing your resource, however it takes a little more work to make sure that it comes back.
This is one of the points that Justin D. Leider made in his Running your own hardware vs EC2 and Rightscale post. Justin points out the issue of maintaining persistence after reboots. Paul Stamatiou outlined how to do this in his Getting Started with EC2 post, and recently Lubos Rendek who contributes to www.linuxconfig.org, outlined a strategy to create and maintain a EC2 bundle for Ubuntu with this post Howto CREATE-BUNDLE-UPLOAD & ACCESS custom Debian AMI using ubuntu.
These are all great examples and really show the need for products and services that can help automate these functions. We need to make the support of resources in the cloud, similar to the support of resources in our computer rooms. That means balancing cloud access, security, performance, reliability, backups and recoverability, and ensuring that these new types of services are as maintainable and supportable as the services in our computer rooms.