I have been away for a week due to some server issues. Now that those are resolved I am back with the post on latest announcement from Amazon. As you know Amazon has been pushing the web-services agenda for quite some time now. By enabling S3 and EC2 among other services they have had significant success in this space. On Friday they added a powerful weapon in their armory.
SimpleDB, the latest entrant into the AWS portfolio is a web-services database for structured storage. Typical databases use SQL type query language to add, modify and delete data in a structured fashion. SimpleDB simplifies this by enabling a web-services interface on top of such a “cloud-based” database.
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1and1 my hosting provider is having some issues with the infrastructure where my blog is hosted. As a result the performance of the site is quite slow.
Hence, I am having troubles generating my usual posts. Hopefully this should be resolved in few days, after which I will post again.
Please stay tuned…
Update: The problem with my servers has gone away now. Seems like there was an issue with my Wordpress version and possibly the shared database at 1and1. Anyways things are better now and I will punch out some posts quickly.
Most of you know about the infamous mobile Walled Garden, enforced by the big boys of wireless in the North American market. This approach to lock the wireless offering has led to significant frustrations for the service / application providers and subscribers alike.
The walled garden established by the carriers, allowed them to have complete / absolute control of the content and applications provided to the handset base. Application developers were at the mercy of the carrier, who essentially controlled most aspects of their business. Right from application functionality, marketing/promotions, discoverability and pricing were mandated by the carriers. Unless you as an app developer partnered with the carrier and deployed a native application (specific to their ecosystem), you had little or no chance of getting into the mobile ecosystem.
As expected this mode of operation has received lot of heat from the application developer community over time. Lately the pressure increased after Google decided to throw down the gauntlet for the upcoming 700 MHz auction. Google’s approach to open the ecosystem drew a fair bit of heat from the incumbents (obviously).
However one thing was certain, the mobile landscape was about to change. Participation from Google and other’s with the strong software background meant that carriers could no longer operate in a close environment. They would have to rethink their strategy.
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I haven’t done much weekly wrap ups on this blog. However the past week was pretty interesting. That’s why I am thinking of introducing a weekly post where I cover some of the salient stories for the week.
Google Officially in the Race
Google, who has been dabbling with the idea of participating in the FCC’s 700 MHZ auction, finally confirmed their participation on Friday. This comes after various discussions on this topic during most of 2007. The news was first broken by WSJ.
Here is some of my previous coverage around Google’s wireless plans.
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As you know from few posts on this blog, I am a huge supporter of user’s owning their social graphs. Over multiple posts, I have been laying out the need for a consolidated service, which hosts the graph (along with identity) for a user.
Last week this discussion caught some steam with some great posts by Tim Berners-Lee and Dave Winer. Dave’s post made me think that the data ownership problem is bigger than just the graph. Theoretically a user owns all the content they generate on any of these services. You know, things like Amazon ratings, YouTube videos, etc. While I don’t see anyone having the need for getting an XML file with this content for personal use. I do see them wanting to use this data on other services. For example (from Dave’s post) one can use their movie ratings at NetFlix and use it with Vudu or share it with their friends on Facebook.
This thought process clearly reflects that there are many graphs (social or otherwise) within many dimensions of services on the web. Every new service with any user generated content is creating a new graph. I talked about the need for consolidating the access to this graph in my last post. Given the dispersed nature of the graphs it will be pretty unrealistic for any web service to physically do that. Hence in this post I am recommending a slightly different mechanism whereby we can enable an ecosystem on the web and achieve the same results. So here it goes:
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Welcome to the 100th edition of the carnival. This is a momentous milestone and it comes to you from foggy Santa Cruz. I have been participating in the carnival for past few months and am certainly lucky enough to host the 100th edition.
Before we jump into the posts, we should offer our gratitude to the people who made this happen. People who started this carnival and have maintained it for folks like us to enjoy. Please join me in thanking the following:
Russell Buckley and Carlo Longino of MobHappy who started it all back in Oct 2005. Along with Rudy De Waele they were original the visionaries. Finally Judy Breck and Troy Norcross for keeping the carnival going. Their efforts are really appreciated and without their leadership we wouldn’t have been enjoying this.
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Few days back I talked about the OpenSocial initiative and how I believe that it can help making the online Social experience much better by enabling interoperability. Before that I have also talked about consolidation of online social experience. My theme continues to remain the same. How do we fix “Social Network Overload”? So in this post I am going deeper to the basics of the problem.
What is a Social Graph?
The term popularized by Mr. Zuckerberg (CEO Facebook) is a better name for your Social Network. Social Graph represents your network of acquaintances. It is a graph of your contacts (friends, family, coworkers etc). Services build upon the social graph and offer applications, which let you interact with your friends and acquaintances. Check out the Wikipedia page for in-depth details.
Where does it exist?
For a typical user, the social graph is broken and distributed among various services and applications. For example my graph exists across:
- Social networks I belong to, such as Facebook, Orkut, MySpace etc
- Business networks I belong to, such as LinkedIn, Plaxo etc
- My Email contacts, which exist on GMail, Outlook etc
- My IM buddy list
- My phonebook on my mobile handset
- Finally my blog visitors and Twitter followers
For some of you this list will probably be longer. Now these services and people I interact with represent my social realm of influence. So as you can see my overall graph is spread all over the place, over various services. I am sure most users are this way.
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