Category: xml and web 2.0

Oh lovely another screenshot and example for my presentation about data portability in cloud computing.

Yes Yammer went down yesterday and worst still seemed to be throwing out data all over the place. A work mate of mine reported getting some email from Yammer when he's not even registered with the system. I assume the email address came from when someone else request you join Yammer.

The cloud is great, but examples like this are really worrying!

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So I did say in a few presentations recently, that I'm dying to replace my slide of Microsoft Livemesh and Ray Ozzie's thoughts about cloud computing with something more cloud like. Well yesterday Microsoft unveiled Azure, a operating system for the cloud. From my understanding, its like Google App engine but using .net instead of python. They do say Python, PHP, Ruby, etc are coming soon.

I did sit and watch the Channel9 video where he explains the whole thing over 40mins and it does sound good but not ground breaking in my own mind. Could be useful for the backstage wild west server but I expect the community would litch me before I got close to suggesting it.

So after the cloud computing announcement of Azure, Microsoft went on to surprise us all with a consumer facing announcement that Windows live ID will OpenID 2.0.

Beginning today, Windows Live™ ID is publicly committing to support the OpenID digital identity framework with the announcement of the public availability of a Community Technology Preview (CTP) of the Windows Live ID OpenID Provider. You will soon be able to use your Windows Live ID account to sign in to any OpenID Web site!

I wonder if they ever plan to support access to there own services via openID?

But the biggest announcement was of course a demo of microsoft office live which is like google docs but microsoft office. Unsuprisingly Microsoft will still be selling copies of Microsoft Office 14 in shops.

So Microsoft have certainly put a foot in cloud computing but between livemesh, azure and officelive I'm not exactly wow'ed. More me too that trailblazing.

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The official LateCrunch Party to Web 2.0 Expo, costs roughly 12 pounds, starts at 10pm and ends 4am in the morning. Seems perfect if your planning to catch the easyjet flight (Redeye) back to London at 6am. This also means I'm now committed to going now. Yes I'll be going to BarCampBerlin3, yes I'm going to the conference too. But somewhere in between I need to spend some time with my great german friend Carl who's putting me up at his place during the week. Shame I'll be out most of the time. Anyway i'll make it up to him somehow.

Good on Tim Oreilly too…. Stop building crappy apps and build stuff which changes the world. This is certainly why Backstage and myself finds things like scripting enabled, AMEE and Operation Sleeper Cell really important.

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Tristan Ferne found this the other day,

CEO David Sacks says there are now 10,000 networks and 50,000 users just one week in. Yammer’s business model is to let people use the service for free, spreading it throughout the enterprise. When and if a company wants to take administrative control over the account, Yammer charges $1/user/month. Administrators can set access controls, such as IP controls and SSL.

The company already allows interaction with the service via the site, an AIR client, iPhone, Blackberry, IM, SMS and email. This evening they’ve also launched an API to allow third party developers to build Yammer into their applications.

Maybe it might start at one dollar a month but who knows what it might turn into, because by then your enterprise social network is in there hands. I have no idea why we're not running to Laconi.ca faster. Maybe because it will actually require someone to set it up, keep it running and administrate it?

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So I've been thinking a lot about cloud computing recently and wanted to share a couple of interesting uses of sensor to cloud to visualisation application.

While at BarCampBrighton3, Tom Morris showed me Rescue Time. I originally poopoo'ed it because Miles had showed me about a year ago something exactly the same but it only worked on OSX. But after a little research, I had found the community driven Linux version and was up and running shortly afterwards. My main reason for doing this was to track what I'm doing for work and myself. So I'm now generating tons of data and have to find ways to filter/transform it automaticlly into our BBC time tracking system. Of course I wouldn't have signed up if there wasn't plans to allow you to take your data away later. There's already widgets which are useful but a API is being planned along with other developer tools.

Generally my computer has a little sensor (application in this case) which it uses to work out what application your using and for how long. The real number crunching is then done in the crowd along with the other stacks of data from you and other users. The data is then turned into information which in much more digestable. Don't get me wrong this isn't new, much talked about Fitbit does the exactly the same thing. The little sensor will track how much activity you have been up to while walking, running, working out or even sleeping. This is then sync'ed with a computer and made sense of in the cloud. I think the Nike+iPod thing also does roughly the same but also like Fitbit, I wonder how much of the data will be available to reuse, share and takeaway?

Your creating the data and although they are doing the analysis and processing, is it really a fair swap? I mean once they have the data its entirely possible for them to find trends across multiple users and offer advertising, discounts, etc to those users. So revenue shouldn't be a problem. But if these guys were to make the data available again, you could just imagine the kind of services and applications 3rd parties will make. Something I was alerted to a while back was the amount of services which are offered off the back of Basecamp's API and Data.

Cloud/Utility computing is powerful and with good portability and interoperability it can work to form a good ecosystem for both the user and the provider. Unfortunately this is all being over looked or considered at a much later stage. No wonder people are very edgy about cloud computing.

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The good news is that there is activity showing at Jaiku after months and months of it just ticking over. There are now unlimited invites, so if your after one, ping me a email or pm on twitter with your email address. Oh the same goes for Boxee which has recently been updated (more about that another day).

I can't help but wonder if jaiku left it too late to be a dominate player in the microblogging world? I mean there is no douht that being based on jabber/xmpp/messaging, makes it stronger, scalable, more robust, cleverer and mobile/im happy. But with the jaiku team split up and googlified it was just ticking over while others started to get there platforms together.

I've mentioned before indenti.ca and the software which drives it laconi.ca. As Leo Lapour pointed out in a interview, the ability to have both local and remote communities is a killer feature. Local as in the twit army server and remote as in you can pull your profile from any other laconi.ca install and messages can flow across servers in a federated fashion. I mean thats powerful and honestly think companies must be crazy to use something like twitter or even jaiku over something they can host themselves and still be part of a much wider community. For example, BBC Switch (BBC teens) could now host there own microblogging service which has strict guidelines over language and subject matter but take advantage of the ability to use your profile from another community site running laconi.ca. Maybe this might not be right for teens but someone could also switch a config setting and not allow outside messaging inwards or the other way. The option is in the hoster's hands.

Maybe i'm wrong, but if I was Orange or another mobile phone operator. I would have laconi.ca hosted and be actively throwing them support, money, anything to get it up to speed. I would also be developing software for my latest phones which use our install of laconi.ca from default. I mean the only off putting thing for mobile operators is this could eat right into there Sms/texting cashcows. But if they expect to build a future on sms/text, there sadly mistaken. Imagine if they came up with some killer software too, what would that do at Jaiku? Once the xmpp work is done to laconi.ca there will be little difference between the two (only the rss lifestreaming stuff really). I guess the smart move would be for Jaiku to open up and allow interactions between the two platforms? Jyri care to comment???

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