91d437f0fb56cfb5b64de81b60bd6738

I discussed the subject with one of colleagues who is a Cloud Computing architect. I’m logging what my comment here

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To continue our previous talk is a huge discussion. I’d recommend you could start to get involved in http://twitter.com and follow

http://twitter.com/mashable
http://twitter.com/j3ffyang -> me
http://twitter.com/OpenIBM -> I own this too as of being admin for IBM Open Source Global community

When you hit any of above, you can see the bytes come from http://aws.amazon.com actually, which is an IaaS with no doubt. Twitter is a kind of social collaboration network -> an application running over Amazon Web Services (AWS). Twitter doesn’t own any hardware resources. Whenever Twitter needs computing capability, it goes to AWS and AWS fulfills its request… on demand. Even though Twitter sometimes out of service due to its overload.

@ IaaS, AWS not only gives power of hardware (CPU, memory, disk and network…), but also provides plugin / API to connect Twitter with Hadoop… and Simple Queue Service (SQS), and Simple Database (SDB).

You shouldn’t be surprised @ Twitter’s power to gather thousand of thousand developers around it, if keeping our eyes open. (Some reasons of the motivation of social collaboration in term of Web2.0). See these:

http://tweetwheel.com
http://ftags.com
http://tweetvalue.com/
http://www.tweetizen.com/
http://twittersnooze.com/
http://mrtweet.net/home/j3ffyang
http://tweettrail.com/search/hadoop
…
…

This list is almost endless. They’re all independent of twitter.com. The above are all SaaS, plugable into Twitter.com where provides API -> http://apiwiki.twitter.com/ and http://twitter.com/downloads – @ PaaS

This is an ecosystem.

Collaboration cross firewall: I started to get involved in a Cloud project and had to travel to Shanghai every week in past one month. While out of my office during trip, or boarding @ airport, or sitting in cab, I’m out of the company firewall! That means I can’t access BlogCentral. My brain must “stop” in front of firewall. If I want to keep it thinking, I’d switch to public Web2.0 places.
Ease of combination: Have you used Ping.fm ? Or you may ask what Ping.fm is? In short, it’s a hub of collaboration and a practice of innovation. Let’s see a scenario: In a cab, I see a scene. I capture a photo by using my Nokia E71 smartphone (iPhone works too). After shooting, a small icon of mail prompts. Click mail icon, I’m in mail mode with the capture picture as an attachment. I pick an email address from contact list. Such email address is like vfr45t@ping.fm that was randomly assigned by Ping.fm . Whatever message sent to such account will automatically be updated into my accounts @ Twitter, Facebook, del.icio.us, LinkedIn, MySpace, Blogger, Identi.ca, WordPress, Flickr, FriendFeed, Mashable, etc, you name it… All these could be finished within one minute. (Security is another topic though. I’d very carefully post the data in this very web2.0 way.)
Performance: WordPress is good. Working on company’s BlogCentral is a challenge. I lean to write @ twitter.com as I’m lazy and don’t have to write much

• Start working Eucalyptus on school machines. 16:50:01
• Does Cloud Computing Mean More Risks to Privacy? > http://tinyurl.com/csyud8 16:16:52
• Re-twit > Google + Twitter = Twoogling? > http://tinyurl.com/bnodlw 06:34:31
• Re-twit > Amazon S3 now hosts over 40 Billion objects. More details in Alyssa Henry’s FAST Keynote; http://cli.gs/yERQ9z #AWS #S3 06:33:11
• My private Eucalyptus starts to service. Woohoo 02:17:09
• export ANT_HOME=/opt/apache-ant ; add into ~/.bashrc ; add $ANT_HOME/bin into $PATH 02:04:32
• For single node @ Eucalyptus 01:29:21
• mkdir -p $/instances/; $EUCALYPTUS/usr/sbin/euca_conf -cc N -cloud N -nc Y -instances $/instances $EUCALYPTUS/etc/eucalyptus/eucalyptus.conf 01:29:03
• @stonelong Thanks and looking forward to it now. in reply to stonelong 01:14:30
• Completed Eucalyptus configuration and installation on my office testcase. Will try school machines tomorrow. 01:13:46

Source: http://blogs.cioinsight.com/knowitall/Gartner….htm

Egham, U.K., August 11, 2008 — Gartner, Inc. has identified 27 emerging technologies and predicts that eight of these will have a transformational business impact and should be strongly considered for adoption by technology planners in the next 10 years, according to the report “Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies, 2008.”

“Although Web 2.0 is now entering the Trough of Disillusionment, it will emerge within two years to have transformational impact, as companies steadily gain more experience and success with both the technologies and the cultural implications,” said Jackie Fenn, vice president and Gartner Fellow. “Later — in between two and five years — cloud computing and service-oriented architecture (SOA), which is moving up the Slope of Enlightenment, will deliver transformation in terms of driving deep changes in the role and capabilities of IT. Finally, public virtual worlds, which are suffering from disillusionment after their peak of hype in 2007, will in the long term represent an important media channel to support and build broader communities of interest.”

Technologies and trends at or around the peak of the Hype Cycle in 2008 (see Figure 1) that will reach the plateau in two to five years are:

• Green IT — Along with broader societal pressure for environmentally sustainable solutions, IT has the opportunity — and in many cases, a requirement — to improve the “greenness” of its own activities, as well as to contribute to broader company and industry environmental initiatives.
• Cloud computing — As companies seek to consume their IT services in the most cost-effective way, interest is growing in drawing a broad range of services (for example, computational power, storage and business applications) from the “cloud,” rather than from on-premises equipment. Many types of technology providers are aligning themselves with this trend, with the result that confusion and hype will continue for at least another year before distinct submarkets and market leaders emerge.
• Social computing platforms — Following the phenomenal success of consumer-oriented social networking sites, such as MySpace and Facebook, companies are examining the role that these sites, or their enterprise-grade equivalents, will play in future collaboration environments. The scope is also expanding to incorporate the notion of social “platforms,” or environments for a broad range of developers to build on the basic application.
• Video telepresence — High-end videoconferencing systems (for example, from HP, Cisco, Teliris and others) that utilize large, high-definition (HD) displays and components to show life-size images of participants in meeting rooms or suites have proven significantly more effective than earlier generations of videoconferencing technology in providing a strong sense of in-room presence between remote participants. High cost is currently the barrier to broader adoption.
• Microblogging — Pioneered by Twitter (although other services such as FriendFeed or Plurk are also available), microblogging is a relatively new addition to the world of social networking, in which contributors post a stream of very short messages providing information about their current activity or thoughts, which can then be subscribed to by others. The phenomenon has caught on among certain online communities, and leading-edge companies are investigating its role in enhancing other social media and channels.

Source: http://research.saugatech.com/fr/researchalerts/466RA.pdf

Author: BRUCE GUPTILL

…

Saugatuck sees the following factors at work behind the resurgent browser aggression:

1. The browser is the client. With SaaS and Web 2.0, the browser becomes, in effect, the client software. Control of the user interface enables control of the user interaction and relationship. The browser provider thus plays a strategic role in the adoption of SaaS, Web 2.0, and Cloud Computing.
2. Advertising revenue. Browser vendors are at the center of the search engine wars, which are currently targeting web-based, search-engine-driven advertising revenues.
3. Simple forward progression of IT. All IT, especially software, gets more powerful and more complex over time. Users expect and demand more from even the simplest technologies over time. Vendor/user relationships depend upon this. Browser providers want and need to protect these relationships.
4. Virtualization of IT. More sophisticated browsers can provide server and OS transparency or independence for SaaS or web-based applications. As users and SaaS providers increasingly adopt various forms of virtualization and multiple OSes (e.g., Windows, Linux, etc.), the browser can provide compatibility for a wide range of web-based applications (i.e., SaaS). One reason browsers have to become more powerful and sophisticated is the advancement of IT virtualization. The user infrastructure is becoming its own cloud, extending to and including multiple outside clouds.
5. Device transparency. Functionally-rich browsers can enable a single version of a web-based application to support devices ranging from varying displays on PC, to PDAs, to smart phones, using different OSes and with vastly different capabilities need to be able to interact/interoperate with these multiple clouds in order for users to do business.

…

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My comments and additional information >

Mint.com – Free personal money management. Check their blog

Zecco.com – Free online stock trading. Check their Community which contains Dashboard, Blog and Forums to collaborate

Prosper.com – Loaning at low rate. Check their Forum to hear of voice from developer, lender, borrower…

PredictWallStreet.com – you may enjoy to play game and contest in its community, where you can find an export to follow. And listen to how other members are saying. A latest list on August 21st shows a member – SilveRazor – made 389 predicts correct out of 586 evaluated. Cool!

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How it works?