Tech News: October 2007 Archives

The hot news of these days is Google's response to the Facebook API - OpenSocial.  I had breakfast with a Facebook employee today, and he was already asking me if I would see any value in developing using OpenSocial.  The competition is hot.  So many people are writing about it, and it's hard to find a useful summary because there's not much information available yet, but here is a rundown of what I consider significant about OpenSocial:

• It's really open: The API would allow writing applications for Orkut, Salesforce, LinkedIn, Ning, Hi5, Plaxo, and Friendster (oh, and Oracle - yes that made me wonder too).  TechCrunch has a gallery of some screen shots of certain applications.
  
• The application has access to shared data right on Google's servers - so you're riding on Google's scalability.
• There is no special markup language (FBML in the case of Facebook).  It's based on JS and HTML.
• It provides programmable access to the three key elements of the social networks:  Profile, Friends, and Activities.  Facebook provides sufficient APIs for profile and friends information, but access to activities is vague.
  
• Applications seem to have more flexibility in terms of using the canvas, or the their screen area.  Facebook enforces some serious limitations there.

But there are issues too.  The biggest source of the issues, like any other type of "aggregation" or "common interface" in the world of software, is the differences of these "hosts" (i.e., social networking sites).  It's interesting to watch how the APIs will handle different data elements and different layouts of information hierarchy among these sites.  Obviously Google wants to keep OpenSocial high level to make it work with all of these hosts - we have to see how much granularity will be lost in the process.  If I as a developer end up making host-specific API calls 50% of the time because the high level, common APIs do not give me the data I need, this project has failed.

Another related but outstanding issue is that the nature of these sites is not the same.  LinkedIn is highly business oriented, Friendster is friends and their birthdays.  Yes they both have a social graph, but that's where the similarities start to fade.  The usage pattern is different and hence the activity stream.

Last but not least, there's the issue of placing ads within the applications...  Google cannot be neutral there.  Ads are the "business" of Google, and at the same time most of social sites live on displaying ads.  There's going to be some serious conflict of interest between what the application shows, what the social network shows - after all, they already have contracts, and where Google plays a role in what's displayed where.

Hmmm...  And I cannot resist.  Does anybody bet over whether Facebook will adopt OpenSocial at some point or not?

Yes I'm behind - traveling back from Orange County and LA was exhausting with all the fire and burning going on.  I was not that close to the fire, but seeing the smoke circles going up both in Irvine and in the Valley was sad and horrifying.

So I'll have some blogging to do, but this one is hot off the press...  The official press release is out.  Microsoft invests $240M in Facebook for 2% of the company.  I guess Google did Facebook some good.  The bidding landed Facebook a great valuation, and Microsoft was not in the auction to lose.  But then hey, as somebody said, Microsoft has the money in the bank and $240M to them is just "rounding error".

Being an old time Unix fan I have always admired Bill Joy, and It's great to see a person with his caliber focusing on Green Technology.  He has been with Kleiner Perkins for a couple of years now, which is a very respected VC firm, and therefore Joy has all the right resources to do things in this space.  I'm sure great things will come out of his new focus.

He is looking at all kinds of stuff, from more interlinking of transportation and electricity grids, new chemistries for better batteries, and better use of open parking spots for solar energy accumulation, to advances in materials for more efficiency and lower cost in photovoltaic products.

And he calls Internet investment wacky: "We're still finding really high-quality ventures at an early stage where we think the prices are fair. I wouldn't say that's true in the Internet space. Things in Internet space are wacky right so it's nice to be someplace where things aren't so crowded."

As a natural next step of purchasing Tellme, Microsoft is launching LiveSearch411 with 1-800-CALL-411 as the access number (the number is not active yet). This is in direct competition to Google's 411 service (1-800-GOOG-411).  I feel bad for the 1-800-FREE-411 guys - they could have been acquired in this war (although Yahoo! is still out there without such 411 service, and might approach them).  This is more validation for voice based services such as Frucall.

Amazon announced today that EC2 now offers three different server capacities.  For the uninitiated, the significance of EC2 (Elastic Computing Cloud) is that it provides virtual computers on the Internet which one can operate via web services APIs for utility computing, and the computer can run an OS image with everything you want on it.

So you can create a Linux/Apache/PHP machine as your web server and a Linux/MySQL as your DB server, all just by clicks and API calls - and you can create as many as you want, and shut them down or boot them up any time you want.  Last but not least, EC2 server images can use Amazon S3 (Simple Storage System) distributed storage.

EC2/S3 is something to watch, not only from a technology standpoint being a real, in-production, fully virtual and distributed computing environment, but also from a business standpoint.  EC2/S3 creates a totally new pay-as-you-need approach to data servers, which makes it a lot more easier for startups to build their infrastructure with little money and then scale it up as they move forward.

The new server (or per EC2 terminology, image) capacities makes EC2 more flexible in terms of architecting a solution (e.g., heavy hitter machine for DB, lighter for web servers), or special applications (e.g., video processing, genetic applications).

Rubicon Project has launched their beta program.  Interesting startup to watch.  They are addressing the right problem, and given the profile of their team they must be addressing it right... And, being well funded does not hurt.

The latest Internet Advertisement Bureau (IAB) study (PDF) performed by the New Media Group of PricewaterhouseCoopers is out.  Online ad sales has been $4.9B in 07Q1, and $5.1B in 07Q2 - a total of $10 Billion in the first half of this year.

For comparison, the numbers were $3.8B and $4.1B in 06Q1 and 06Q2.

Well, most of us remember the jaws dropped at the multi-billion dollar valuation of Skype when eBay acquired the company.  It look likes, however, that eBay has started to regret what they did...