+1.408.FRANKMASH (408.372-6562) [ This is my personal blog so all opinions expressed here are mine. I am a product, scalability, operations and monetization advisor and currently employed as Director of Business Operations & Technical Strategy for a top 50 website that delivers billions of page views per month. I was a keynote panelist for Scaling Up or Out keynote at MySQL Conference and speak regularly at conferences and user groups.
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Michael Arrington of TechCrunch demands answers to some tough questions from Twitter. He potentially exposes Twitter's architecture implying that Twitter may be running on a grand total of three MySQL machines.
“Do you really have a grand total of three physical database machines that are POWERING ALL OF TWITTER?” For those out of the loop, Twitter has lately been experiencing some serious disruptions in service.
Looks like the world of collaborative word processing is about to change. Forget Wikis, I am talking about TextFlow, a company that's creating a disruptive product that's focused on parallel word processing. A user can receive multiple edits in parallel in real time and choose or refuse each edit. TextFlow is still in closed beta but is expected to launch soon.
Bernard Kerr, the designer for Delicious, talks about threads, tags and visualizations at Innovations Forum. It's a very interesting presentation covering, among other things, IBM's Remail, thread arcs, and Tag Orbitals.
Some lessons he wants the audience members to take home: - When you are working on visualizing multidimensional data, you cannot use all dimensions, instead you must focus on one or two dimensions. If you focus on more than 1 or 2 dimensions, you'll end up with a spaghetti. - Get real data into visualization as soon as you can. - Try illustrator for quickly visualizing.
I recently came across a cool site named Adonomics that tracks Facebook applications and provides analytics in a variety of a forms. Users can track and compare active usage of Facebook apps. Adonomics also provides a ranking chart and valuation of Facebook apps.
Facebook Lexicon let's you see what words are being used by users on Facebook Wall. Similar in functionality to Google Trends and Technorati, Facebook Lexicon allows you to tap into what's generating the buzz. Facebook blog gives some hints on how the occurrences are calculated:
“How are these numbers calculated? We have a cluster of computers that count the number of occurrences of every term (for example, "juno") across profile, group and event Walls every day. The system strips out all personally identifiable information so that there is no way to track a mention back to a specific person. No human at Facebook ever reads these Wall posts, and Lexicon does not look at personal messages, invitations, or any other private user-to-user communications.” Overall, a nice utility by Facebook. However, one thing that sucks is the lack of embed options, i.e. you cannot post the charts on an external website.
Animoto is experiencing You Tube and Facebook style growth. The difference is that Animoto actually has a proper business model!
Move over, Slide and Rock You! here comes Animoto with a totally kick ass slide show experience. They take your photos, your music and do magic to create slide shows that "feel" the music.
To sign up and save $5, click on the graphic above with code: oxqeiaug
Animoto, which is currently experiencing explosive growth and went from 25,000 users to 250,000 users in just three days, runs on Amazon EC2 and uses S3 for storage.
A demo of Animoto produced slide show is below:
At Startup School 2008, Jeff Bezos, Amazon CEO, talked about Animoto. The video of his talk follows:
According to Right Scale, which Animoto uses for handling their EC2 instances, mentions that Animoto has been adding 40 EC2 instances per minute during their peak time.
“The upshot is that there are a lot of moving parts! Each one of the subsystems consists of many servers and everything needs to scale-up as the load increases. What Animoto CTO Stevie Clifton did really well is to connect all the operations using queues, many of them in SQS. One queue contains work items that list photo URLs to fetch from other sites, such as Facebook, Flickr, etc., and that is processed by one array of worker instances. Another queue has the list of render jobs and each work item in there points to the set of photos sitting at the ready in S3 and at the music files also on S3. All of these queues are held in Amazon SQS and the arrays of worker instances are managed by RightScale. This allows the monitoring part of our service to detect when the queue gets too large and more instances need to be launched. What’s nice about using queues is that it decouples the various parts of the site, so if the renderers get backlogged the queue simply builds up and users have to wait a little longer for their video to be produced. Waiting is not good, but dropping requests on the floor is much worse!”
Right Scale blog also touches on some of the important lessons learned from Animoto's growth:
“First of all, when you scale 10x and then 10x again to run on thousands of servers every little problem turns into a large one. That insignificant error rate of 0.1% gets multiplied by 1000x per second and you end up with an error a second, and actually, the error rate typically increases in itself too because of the added load on the system. So suddenly it’s not something you can ignore anymore. An example for this was having exponential backoff for uploads to S3 when using curl, but forgetting that the 5th retry exceeds the S3 connection timeout. Normally, this happens only once in a blue moon, but when tens of uploader instances are banging hard on one S3 bucket the S3 error rate goes up a bit and suddenly uploads are failing left and right. Once we changed this to a constant retry timeout it all went smooth again.”
Today I came across a sneaky but very smartly implemented social history javascript. By embedding this javascript and making a few simple calls, you can find out if a visitor to your website or blog has visited a particular URL in the past. It does it in a very smart way (I'm not saying anything about whether the purpose of the script is right):
“By using a cute information leak introduced by CSS. The browser colors visited links differently than non-visited links. All you have to do is load up a whole bunch of URLs for the most popular social bookmarking sites in an iframe and see which of those links are purple and which are blue. It’s not perfect (which, from a privacy perspective, is at least a little comforting) but it does get you 80% of the way there. The best/worst part is that this information leak probably won’t be plugged because it’s a fundamental feature of the browser.”
“ * One potential issue that makes social networks resist data portability is the monetizability of the data * Not all user data is created equal, there’s interest versus intent * Social networks generally produce lots of low-value interest data, which has weak ROI attached to it * Search engines, review sites, comparison shopping, etc all produce high-value intent data * Even if you have the data, you have to worry about whether or not you have enough of it to matter - although ad networks and exchanges have started to alleviate that”
Today, I presented my memcached webinar which was hosted by MySQL/Sun. There were more than 560+ users who registered for the webinar. The topic of the webinar was Designing and Implementing Scalable Applications with Memcached and MySQL.
The recording and slides from the webinar are now available for download:
The call volume was quite high. I had to wait about 7-8 minutes before I could join as a panelist. I don't know why WebEx started using a live operator to verify users instead of using an automated system. That created quite a bottleneck and several users had to wait before they got connected. This is not something I expected from Webex. My apologies to all users who experienced connectivity issues. Thanks to everyone who attended and sent feedback.
Overall, the webinar went great. Monty Taylor, my fellow panelist did a great job. He, however, had a mishap and his line dropped. Jimmy Guerrero then picked from that point on. Upon reconnecting Monty generously answered questions of the attendees. Many thanks, Monty and Jimmy!
A friend of mine recently introduced me to Buddy Media, creator of several popular social networking applications and games including AceBucks, Mental Blocks, Sudoku, Pirates vs. Ninjas, Vampires vs. Werewolves, Cops vs. Robbers, Air Hockey and Pub Darts.
Launched in 2007 by Michael Lazerow, Kass Lazerow and Aryeh Goldsmith, Buddy Media also offers application development services for social networking websites. At the time of writing this post, Buddy Media claims that they reach more than 8 million Internet users every month.
Buddy Media also claims to "build an application and drive 1 million users in just a few months" for its clients.
That's a very ambitious claim to offer publicly.
“Buddy Media approves each developer to certify that only developers working on engaging applications can leverage Buddy Media’s sales engine. Our main focus at Buddy Media is not to aggregate the most amount of inventory in the social media space. Frankly, there’s already too much social media inventory. Add together the traffic from MySpace, Facebook, Bebo and the other social networks, social applications, blogs and more, and you get to trillions of impressions a month! We’re only focused on helping developers of quality applications make more money from their apps with access to higher-paying advertisers who value targeted, premium reach.” - Source: Buddy Media Blog
However, the applications created by Buddy Media was not the reason my friend introduced it to me. Instead the reason was Buddy Media's new social media ad network called Buddy Media Advertising Network.
Targeting: Buddy Media allows advertisers to target their ads by age, sex and location. In future more targeting options are expected to be available according to BM website.
Pricing: Buddy Media offers several pricing models including CPC (clicks), CPI (installs) and CPM (impressions). Performance based pricing model is available to a select few marketers.
Creative: Advertisers can either use their existing creative or create new ones using Buddy Media's provided system.
Where ads are shown?: Advertising campaigns delivered through Buddy Media's advertising network reach applications created by an "invitation only" developer network and deployed on various social networking sites including Facebook. Advertisers are offered "visibility into the apps" on which their ads are displayed.
Clients: Buddy Media's clients include Microsoft, FedEx, Anheuser-Busch, Priceline, Readers Digest, Time Inc. and Huffington Post.
Funding: Buddy Media recently raised $6.5 million in series B financing round led by Softbank Capital, European Founders Fund and GreyCroft Partners. Earlier Buddy Media had raised $1.5 million.
Overall Buddy Media seems to promise high ROI and quality exposure for campaigns by carefully choosing developers that create engaging social media applications.
While Buddy Media may be able to create great exposure for brand advertising, I remain skeptical on the short-term immediate conversion part. After a while it is very easy for users to become immune to ads that are embedded in widget or applications.
How many times have you clicked on an ad within your favorite Instant Messenger or similar application that shows ads while you chat?
Userplane, the company that offers free chat solutions based on an advertising-revenue sharing model, embeds ads in their chat client. Yet I can bet that users who use Userplane's application remain involved in their conversation and end up becoming immune to advertising that is present.
The world of widget-embedded advertising is about to get very crowded with Slide and Rock You, among others, working on similar advertising networks.
From a user point of view there is one interesting thing going on here. Widget companies are getting access to the user's data based on the application they developed and then creating new business models and applications based on the information that's passed back from social networking websites.
Only time will tell where Buddy Media can take their current targeting offerings.
I am going to Structure 08, a conference being organized by GigaOm that focuses on cloud computing and how it is changing the landscape of computing infrastructures.
If your organization is contemplating traditional server based infrastructure vs. cloud computing, then this conference is for you.
“Structure 08 will gather the most innovative and influential industry leaders together to explore the latest Internet infrastructure buildout. It will sort through the emerging and disruptive computing technologies and inform businesses on how best to leverage them. And it will provide insight to investors and executives on the best implementations, ideas and startups out there today — and what to look for tomorrow.” The conference has a star studded line of speakers including:
Werner Vogels - VP and CTO, Amazon.com
James Crowe - President and CEO, Level 3
Greg Papadopoulos - CTO, Sun Microsystems
Parker Harris - Founder, Salesforce.com
Mendel Rosenblum - Co-founder, VMWare
Zach Nelson - President & CEO, NetSuite
Christophe Bisciglia - Sr Software Engineer, Google
Jonathan Heiliger - VP, Technical Ops, Facebook
Joe Weinman - VP, Strategic Solutions, AT&T
Debra Chrapaty - Corporate VP, Microsoft
Jeremiah Robison - CTO, Slide
Dr. Albert Esser - VP, Data Center Infrastructure, Dell
Lew Moorman - SVP Strategy, Rackspace
Akash Garg - CTO, hi5 Networks, Inc.
Sandy Jen - Co-founder & VP, Engineering, Meebo
Danny Kolke - Founder & CTO, Etelos
Om Malik - Founder & Editor, Giga Omni Media
Geva Perry - CMO, GigaSpaces Technologies
Scott Wiener - CTO, Cloud9 Analytics
Dave Schrader - Dir, Strategy & Marketing, Teradata
Harald Prokop - SVP of Engineering, Akamai Technologies
Scott Yara - President & Co-founder, Greenplum
The one day Structure 08 conference will be held on June 25 at Mission Bay Conference Center at UCSF, 1675 Owens Street, San Francisco, CA 94158.
I hope to meet new and old friends at the Structure 08 conference. I will be in the area a few days before the conference as I am also attending Velocity Conference by O'reilly. It will be great to meet up if you are in the area.
I came across a post written last year by Dave Winer. In it he talks about the importance of interconnected social networks.
“Closed systems are fine in the early stages of a new technology. They're the training wheels for a new layer of users and uses. But, as we always see, the training wheels eventually come off, explosively, creating new systems that throw out the assumptions of the old.” Dave's wishes, to some extent are getting fulfilled by Google Friend Connect and Facebook Connect: Two services that attempt to make social graphs portable.
“Eventually, soon I think, we'll see an explosive unbundling of the services that make up social networks. What was centralized in the form of Facebook, Linked-in, even YouTube, is going to blow up and reconstitute itself. How exactly it will happen is something the historians can argue about 25 years from now. It hasn't happened yet, but it will, unless the rules of technology evolution have been repealed (and they haven't, trust me).”
If you are passionate about calculus, you should watch "I will Derive." Although I should warn you that this is one of the dorkiest dances you'll see. Enjoy!
“48% of online US users have visited video sharing sites - Use of video sharing sites among women has increased by 120% since 2006 - 76% of Internet users ages 18-29 watch or download videos online.” Following notes about Video Sharing are from [1] PEW Internet Project Data Memo:
Nearly half (48%) of Internet users have visited video sharing sites, for example YouTube, in 2007 compared to 33% a year ago.
Majority of this increase came from increase in female Internet users (59% year over year) compared to 33% year over year increase for male Internet users. [1]
There was a 58% increase in Internet users aged 50-64 visiting video sharing sites compared to a year ago.
46% increase in visits to video sharing sites by users aged 30-49 and an impressive 45% increase by users aged 65+
15% of the survey respondents had visited a video sharing site just a day ago when they were surveyed.
Ethnicity wise, the largest increase in visits to video sharing websites came from Caucasians (45%), followed by "English speaking Latinos" (31%) and African-Americans (12%)
Household income wise, the largest increase in visits was 89% by households making $50,000-$74,999 followed by 43% increase by households with income of $75,000 or more.
22% of online Americans record their own videos and 14% post part of videos online.
Use of video sharing sites by:
women on a typical day increased by 120% (5% in 2006 to 11% in 2007)
men on a typical day increased by 82% (11% in 2006 to 20% in 2007)
Following notes are from [2] Online Video, PEW Internet Project
More than half of American Internet users (58%) have used the Internet to watch or download videos.
19% of Internet users watch download video online on a typical day.
74% of broadband users in US watch or download video.
39% of home dial up users watch or download video online
Who is watching or downloading videos online?
76% of users ages 18-29
57% of users ages 30-49
46% of users ages 50-64
39% of users ages 65+
What videos are being watched on a typical day? Percentage on a typical day / Percentage ever
10%/37% News
7%/31% Comedy
3%/16% movies or TV
4%/22% Music
3%/14% Sports
2%/13% Commercials
2%/15% Political
3%/19% Animation
3%/22% Educational
1%/6% Adult
2%/6% Other
Online consumption of video on a typical day:
31% of Internet users aged 18-29
18% of Internet users aged 30-49
12% of Internet users aged 50-64
10% of Internet users aged 65+
Social Video Sharing - How Online Video Gets Social? “57% of online video viewers share video links with others”
Sources: [1] Video Sharing, PEW Internet Project Data Memo [http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/Pew_Videosharing_memo_Jan08.pdf] [2] Online Video, PEW Internet Project [http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/219/report_display.asp]
Part of my responsibility at my current job is to lead the database team that manages the largest and most active MySQL on Solaris 10/Sun hardware deployment in the world. We have been using Sun hardware to deploy MySQL since the time when most MySQL database experts used to frown on this combination.
Of course, Sun's acquisition of MySQL made me really, really happy.
I was recently interviewed by Sun Microsystems about our Sun and MySQL usage and what do I find so interesting about Sun's UltraSparc T2 Niagara 2 Processors. At my work, I am in the process of replacing most of our database servers with CMT (chip multi-threading) enabled Niagara 2 servers. The video of my discussion is embedded below. Enjoy.
This year, I was part of a keynote panel, Scaling Up or Out, at the MySQL Conference and Expo along with Jeff Rothschild of Facebook/Accel Partners and Paul Tuckfield of YouTube. The event was attended by more than 2,000 attendees.
Keynote Panelists from left to right: Monty Taylor (MySQL),Matt Ingenthron (Sun), John Allspaw (Flickr), me, Domas Mituzas (MySQL/Wikipedia), Jeff Rothschild (Facebook) and Paul Tuckfield (YouTube)
Sheeri took a video of the keynote session that can be viewed below.
Video of Scaling Up or Out keynote session: -
To read more about this scalability keynote, view pics and to watch more videos, see my Scaling Up Or Out Keynote post.
Are you going to use Google AdSense to monetize it?
Scarily, more often than not, the answer is yes to most of these questions. Recently I asked a friend about what is the business model of his employer? To which he replied:
“We don't have a business model but we have buttons with rounded corners” Today I found an article by Stacey Higginbotham that highlights some of the same concerns. The title of the article is 5 stages of a consumer web startup.
In the beginning
The launch
Launch a social network widget
12 months later
The end is near
Some of the interesting links she mentions in her post:
Selling Ads for MySpace is a hard work “We remain incredibly optimistic about social media. But there are specific challenges 1) Tons of inventory. Lack of scarcity creates a liquidity challenge. Working on bringing big brands aboard. 2) People who are visiting social networks there for different reasons, different uses. Figuring out how to target. 3) What's the value of a "friend"? Trying to figure out new metrics to communicate with marketers.”
AOL launched Open Voice API last month to allow VOIP developers and device makers ability to integrate AOL call out services in their application and devices.
- AOL Call out is a pay-as-you-go outbound voice calling service - Users can call landlines and cell phones in more than 200 countries - Rates for AOL call out are available at http://call-out.aim.com/rates - Open Voice API is available at http://dev.aol.com/aimcall - AIM users get an integrated dashboard available at http://call.aim.com/ to manage their call activity. - Call credits can be purchased by users in $5 increments.
Want a free video hosting service for your site, community or social network? Say hello to Mediaplayer by Userplane, an ad-supported free video hosting service for websites.
Userplane, an AOL company, is primarily known for providing free online chat solutions to social networks and online communities based on an ad-supported, revenue sharing model.
Unlike Userplane's chat application, Userplane will not be sharing ad revenues with site publishers, at least not in the beginning.
Users get to upload videos capped at 100MB per video with no limit on bandwidth usage.
Sites using Mediaplayer can choose custom skins to create a unique and custom UI.
Tonight, I went to a wine tasting event hosted by Azul Systems at Rainbow Room. Before the wine tasting began, there was an informative case study by Tony Bishop, Former SVP, Chief Architect of Wachovia Corporate Investment Bank. Tony pointed out that Azul Systems has become an important component of Wachovia's infrastructure and it allowed Wachovia to replace three racks with one machine by Azul Systems. He also mentioned that since IT never gets credit for increased revenue, his team had to make a case for protecting lost revenue to get funding approval for Azul Systems.
Following the keynote, there was a panel discussion with Scott Sellers (President and CEO) Gil Tene, (CTO) and Shyam Pillalamarri (VP of Software Engineering).
Azul was founded on 9/11/2001 and decision to target Java primarily was made at Java One. Azul also introduced Vega 3 which is available in 5U and 13U sizes.
At the event, I had great conversations with Maureen Fleming (Program Director, Business Process Integration and Deployment Software @ IDC) and Jonathan Levine (CTO of LinkShare).
As we were leaving the event, Azul presented each attendee with a bottle of wine.
Did you know that roughly one fifth of the US population has never used email and there are 20 million US households without Internet Access? This is the focus of an upcoming report titled National Technology Scan 2008 by Parks Associates.
“Nearly one out of three household heads has never used a computer to create a document” - John Barrett, director, research Parks Associates
As one would expect, age and education are the major factors with half of those who have never used email are over 65 and about 56 percent "had no schooling beyond high school," according to the report. Only seven percent of the 20 million "disconnected" users plan to get connected "within the next 12 months."
As I pointed in my earlier Internet Trends post, US Internet growth has declined over the recent years.
Tonight we went to see August Osage County, an on Broadway play written by Tracy Letts. I have been wanting to see the play since last year but never got a chance until now. August Osage County has already won the Pulitzer prize and has been nominated for seven Tony Awards including best play.
One of our very good friend, Kimberly Norris Guerrero, plays the role of Johnna Monevata. You may remember Kimberly Guerrero from her "immortalizing" Seinfeld episode "The Cigar Store Indian" in which she plays the role of Jerry's girlfriend Winona.
I think it is not a lot to say that this is hands down the best play I have seen. It was very intense, yet very well balanced. There were several moments of hysterical laughter throughout the jam packed theater. Towards the end, I could sense several people literally crying.
Deanna Dunagan, who played the role of Violet Weston, was truly remarkable in her portrayal of Matriarch of the Weston family.
Amy Morton also gave an extraordinary performance as Barbara Fordham, the eldest sister who wants to control everything.
Throughout the play, it seemed like I was observing a real life conversation between a dysfunctional family. During the three hours and twenty minutes, I just couldn't wait for what will happen next.
We had excellent staff seats (first row on the Mezzanine). Sitting next to us was Monica Payne, who also had wet eyes by the end of the play. Afterwards we went to Artisanal with Johnny and Kimberly Guerrero. We had a great three hour dinner and really enjoyed the company of the Guerreros.
Overall, it turned out to be a night that I will remember for years to come. Thanks to my lovely wife and the excellent company we had.
Gimme! book is an eye opening book for marketers as it touches on the long ignored aspects of marketing: "how human beings are wired and how they work emotionally." For too long, marketers have been taught to focus on unique selling proposition (USP). Now John Hallward tells us about the reality of USP and how it is "not a consumer-centric view."
The "wired" part is especially interesting to me as it touches on the hidden powers of socially targeted advertising and marketing.
“Consumers do not want one characteristic or one USP. Consumers want it all.Why should a consumer have to choose between the longest lasting pain reliever versus the fast acting, or the safest, most gentle, or the cheapest priced? The concept of marketing a USP is not a consumer-centric view. It is not a realistic, relevant reflection of how consumers operate. Furthermore, a USP for a brand is limiting in appeal by the very definition of trying to sell one main benefit to the sub-segment of consumers which most values that one benefit. Consumers want pain relievers to be fast-acting, and safe, and strong, and inexpensive and more.”
I have just started reading the book, "Gimme! The Human Nature of Successful Marketing" and I have already found the "wow" factor that's all over this book. If you'd like to preview the contents of Gimme! check out the "lessons learned" section of the book's website. Highly recommended!
“The frequency of visitation to social networking websites globally implies that many Internet users are no longer simply ‘trying out’ these sites, but rather adopting social-networking as a significant part in their evolving digital lifestyle. What will be interesting to monitor is the affect social networking will have on other online and offline entertainment behaviors that ultimately compete for a share of the consumer’s disposable time. We have already seen some effects of social networking cannibalizing other online activities in some markets.” - Brian Cruikshank, Executive Vice President & Managing Director (Ipsos)
According to the graph above
Penetration of social networking sites is highest in South Korea where as many as 66 percent of Internet users belong to a social network.
In USA only 32 percent of Internet users use a social network, 24 percent of those users visited within the last 30 days.
55 percent of Internet users in South Korea visited a social networking site in past 30 days. This is the highest of all countries surveyed, followed by Brazil (41%), China (27%), Mexico (26%), USA (24%), UK (20%), Canada (16%), India (16% based on an Urban sample), Germany (14%), France (12%), Japan (9%) and Russia (1%).
In Japan, it seems that although 22% of users use a social network, less than half of those users visited the social network in the past 30 days.
In Brazil, majority of social network users visited their favorite social networking site in the past 30 days. Similar trends can be seend in USA, UK and Germany.
Social networking sites have very low penetration in Russia, where only 3% of Internet users belong to a social network, according to the graph.
“Writing is difficult. Part of the trick of writing is to be able to focus on the writing itself—there's no point making things harder than they already are. So choose your writing environment carefully, and defend it when necessary.”Dave has tips on dealing with book reviewers, writing rules and finding your voice among other things. Definitely worth checking out if you're writing a book.
“For years, I have said that the easiest way to break a cryptographic product is almost never by breaking the algorithm, that almost invariably there is a programming error that allows you to bypass the mathematics and break the product. A similar thing is going on here. The easiest way to guess a password isn't to guess it at all, but to exploit the inherent insecurity in the underlying operating system.” - "Secure Passwords Keep You Safer" by Bruce Schneier
May be, now is the time to ditch that insecure operating system?
On a related note, it's amazing to me how many people use insecure passwords and then repeat those passwords for every site they are a member of. Worse, I can't understand sites that still keep passwords in plain text format.
“Last year, companies with less than $250 million in annual revenue spent a median of $6,120 per employee on technology” - Computer Economics | quote from Inc. Magazine May 2008
I spent quite some time today on setting up Treo 700wx to work as EVDO (Dial up Networking/DUN) modem for my Mac (Macbook Pro). Thanks to Verizon screw up, my home phone and DSL aren't working. Funny thing is I was given a window of 8AM to 8PM on Saturday during which a Verizon tech will come to fix the issue.
Anyway, using Treo 700wx as bluetooth modem for was a bit of a hassle as Verizon officially doesn't support Mac OS X.
Most of the steps I took would apply to setting other smart phones on Macbook Pro as well. Here's what I did in a nutshell:
First, I paired my Treo 700wx smart phone with my Macbook Pro
Then, open up System Preferences utility and then open Network settings.
Add a new Bluetooth connection and use settings similar to the following:
Telephone number: #777
Account name: your ten digit Verizon cell phone number followed by @vzw3g.com
example: if your cell phone number is 1234567890 then your account name is 1234567890@vzw3g.com
Password: vzw
this is the default password
Next, click on Advanced button to open advanced settings for this connection
On the modem tab, select Vodafone
If you choose "other" for Vendor, you will see a Verizon modem listed under "Model", however this setting won't work (or I should say it didn't work for me).
For modem model choose VC701SI
For dial mode, select "ignore dial tone when dialing"
Now click on PPP tab
Check "Connect automatically when needed"
Uncheck "disconnect if idle..."
Hit OK
Click apply and then try to connect
If everything went right, you can now start browsing via bluetooth at pretty respectable speeds.
Remember to dial *22899 on your Treo 700wx or your Verizon Wireless smart phone to update your phone's roaming software and database of cellular towers. Verizon Wireless recommends to dial this number at least once a month for better signal. If you don't have a smart phone, you can dial *22899 (of course, without an EVDO enabled smart phone you really cannot use your phone as a modem)
Note that even though Verizon Wireless support told me that I should have "Modem Link" (under Programs) activated, I didn't need that to get it to work.
I wish I could set my phone to work as a modem over USB, however Palm's site mentions that "Palm does not support wireless modem connection on Mac OS X computers. Third-party solutions may be available, but these solutions are not supported by Palm." I find it really ridiculous of Palm and Verizon to not officially support Mac OS X.
Make sure you have an unlimited broadband access plan (costs about $15/month) or you will get a crazy bill for extended usage.
Guitar Hero 4 fans are delighted to know that Guitar Hero 4 seems just around the corner as details of the game are released.
Activision is introducing several new features in Guitar Hero 4 by adding a guitar, bass guitar, Drums, and microphone for vocals. Addition of these features makes Guitar Hero 4 somewhat similar to Rock Band by original creators of Guitar Hero, Harmonix.
Guitar Hero 4 players will be able to create their own songs and upload a maximum of 5 songs for "distribution." If user created songs hit a certain popularity threshold, then the upload limit will be increased to 10 songs. Guitar Hero 4 Drum Set. Photo Courtesy Guitar Hero News.
There is active debate on the Internet whether Guitar Hero 4 will be superior than Rock Band or just a copy cat. Which game do you think will end up winning?
Yahoo! has taken the next step in geotagging by providing developers with the ability to easily geo tag their content. Specifically Yahoo! has opened up their geotagging API using which developers can now get real-time WOEID (Where on Earth ID) information.
Dan Catt of Flickr (Yahoo!) has more regarding WOEIDs on geobloggers.com. In his blog post he points out Flickr photos search by WOEID which allows you to enter WOEID and get all photos that are of that area. He also highlights the differences between Flickr API and Yahoo! geo API:
“Over at Flickr, we only use specific ‘levels’ of geo information, such as city, region, state, country, while the APIs over at Yahoo will spit out far more levels in-between the ones Flickr uses, as well as deeper down to neighborhood levels, which Flickr doesn’t do (yet).”
One thing to note is that WOEID isn't assigned at address level, only at town or neighborhood level.
Email marketing is taking online marketers by storm thanks to the incredible ROI it promises.
“ ... email [marketing] ROI will hit $45.65 for every dollar spent in 2008, more than twice the ROI of other mediums including search and display.” - Datran Media's second annual survey of online marketing professionals (conducted Dec. 2007)
Of all the respondents to the survery:
55 percent expect ROI from email marketing to be higher "than any other [marketing] channel
67 percent state "email has helped boost sales through other channels."
80 percent indicate "email was the strongest performing media buy ahead of search (70.6%) and display (37.6%)."
Among the lowest ROI generators were mobile (1.2%), RSS (2.4%), Cable (7.1%), Broadcast (10.6%) and Print (16.5%).
80 percent send targeted email campaigns
82.4 percent expect to increase use of email marketing in 2008 compared to 2007
55.3 percent expect email marketing ROI to be higher than other channels in 2008
25.9 percent expect email ROI to be 'roughly equal to other channels'
71.8 percent think that search complements the email marketing channel followed by display advertising (51.8%), direct (41.2%) mobile (24.7%), broadcast (17.6%) and cable (10.6%)
80 percent plan to employ email to send newsletters followed by 78.8% to drive sales, 70.6% to enhance customer relationships, 67.1% to increase upsell or cross sell opportunities, 64.7% to increase brand awareness and/or lift, 50.6% to send transactional messages and 52.9% to send messages to reactive dormant customers.
63.5 percent plan on integrating marketing messages in transactional emails in 2008.
69.4 percent currently use and/or plan on using an outside vendor for email marketing.
Of the companies that currently send targeted email campaigns, 63.5% target based on demographics and/or geography, 56.5% target based on actions, 4.12% target based on psychographics or interests and 20% don't send targeted campaigns.
Email marketing serves as an excellent way to keep in touch with customers in industries where otherwise the contact would only happen once or twice a year.
Jennifer LeClaire of NewsFactor looks at the effects of virtualization on the worldwide server market and writes:
“ IDC's new server market report, titled "Virtualization and Multicore Innovations Disrupt the Worldwide Server Market," indicates that multicore and virtualization will cost the x86 market more than 4.5 million shipments and $2.4 billion in customer spending between 2006 and 2010. Overall, x86 shipments that were once projected to increase 61 percent by 2010 are now facing just 39 percent growth during that same period.” Like the article points out, Virtualization is stil of importance in development and QA environments.
I would like to add one more point that Virtualization is going to be mostly useful for blueshift organizations, and not for redshift organizations that must scale up.
The joke among scalability professionals is that Facebook runs on Rails because of its need to keep throwing money at its scalability issues. There are some rumors about Facebook's poorly chosen network based partitioning (sharding) strategy. Facebook has now announced that it will be borrowing $100 million to buy approximately 50,000 servers. This will significantly raise Facebook's gearing ratio bringing it closer to being a high geared company.
Facebook is not the only one with massive need for servers. Business Week quotes Forrester Research's Frank E. Gillet who estimates that Google is consuming as much as half a million servers each year whereas Microsoft is buying close to 200,000 servers a year.
As several media sites have reported, capital expenditure like this is an ideal reason for not diluting equity. Jim Labe, CEO of Triple Point, a company that specializes in lending venture money to start ups, tells Business Week:
“ The last thing the entrepreneur wants to do is see those precious equity dollars flowing into equipment purchases. It's a very unproductive use of equity to plow it into fixed assets.” However, many industry pundits ponder whether this indicates Facebook's trouble in raising more venture capital. Some even wonder whether Microsoft over-valued Facebook with its $240 million investment for a 1.6% stake in the company. CNN raises a similar question as to why Microsoft isn't buying Facebook.
A Morgan Stanley team consisting of "Queen of the Net" Mary Meeker, David Joseph and Anand Thaker recently did a presenation on Internet Trends.
The presentation focused on the topics of usage patterns, social networking, widgetization and componentization, measurability and transparency, customer satisfaction, video, monetization, mobile, emerging markets and last but not least, recession.
According to the presentation, consumer IP traffic will surpass business IP traffic in 2008 as consumers use more than 5,000,000 TB of data per month. Since 2005E, there has been a 58% CAGR in IP traffic.
"The surge in online content is at the center of the most dramatic changes affecting the Internet today. In three years' time, 20 typical households will generate more traffic than the entire Internet today."
"Fifteen years ago, enterprise technology was higher-quality than consumer technology. That's not true anymore. It used to be that you used enterprise technology because you wanted uptime, security and speed. None of those things are as good in enterprise software anymore (as they are in some consumer software). The biggest thing to ask is, 'When consumer software is useful, how can I use it to get costs out of my environment?'"
Douglas originally gave this quote in a WSJ interview while answering the question, "What's driving the "consumerization" of tech in the enterprise, where companies are borrowing tech ideas from the consumer Internet?"
Massive Transition in Available Ad Units This part of the presentation shows massive decline in the number of page views Yahoo! used to enjoy since 2002. At the same time the Alexa graph comparing Yahoo!'s page views to Google, Facebook and Youtube shows interesting patterns. Specifically YouTube's rapid rise to become the #2 destination on the Internet. This slide also touches on an important point that Supply of ad units is now greater than demand. An important thing to note is that Alexa changed their ranking algorithm recently. The latest Alexa graph for these sites doesn't go back to 2002, however it tells a slightly different story:
- Page views wise, Yahoo! is still number 1, followed by YouTube, Google and Facebook. - Reach wise, Google is number 1 followed by Yahoo!
Social Networking Characteristics - Fast Growth and Low Penetration
Next slide has a graph from from comScore's "Digital World: State Of The Internet" report which highlights growth in Emerging Internet Markets. The graph shows very fast growth for social networking sites but at the cost of low penetration. In contrast, the online search sector showed very high penetration but low levels of growth. Online personals, retail movies and Retail music industries depicted significant decrease in growth. Multimedia, on the other hand, shows decent growth but much higher penetration than social networks. Visitors growth to community focused sites that aren't social networks also decreased although these sites still have a strong penetration (even stronger than social networks).
Some other interesting findings from the comScore report that weren't in the Morgan Stanley presentation:
more than 300 million Internet users from Asia Pacific region, 15 years of age or older, were online in January 2008. This shows an increase of 14 percent over 2007 numbers (compare this to 10.4% increase in worldwide users). According to comScore, this increase "makes Asia Pacific the largest of the five worldwide regions"
Latin America and Middle East-Africa are two other regions that have also experienced "above average audience growth" since 2007. Latin America experienced 16.6% growth where Middle East-Africa experienced 20.2% growth, the highest percentage of growth among five worldwide regions.
US online audience now only represents 21% of worldwide Internet users.
Visits to social networking sites by global Internet users increased 34%
approximately 2 out of every 3 Internet users now visit a social network site with total visitors to social networking sites exceeding 530 million
MySpace and Facebook both now attract more than 100 million visitors per month
YouTube leads the way in online entertainment. Video is now the "dominant online entertainment format." More than 250 million visitors visited YouTube in January alone.
Social Networking Sites Gaining Significant Share of Online Traffic The next presentation slide highlights new entrants in the top-10 list of Alexa as well as top-10 sites of 2005 that have lost significant traffic. The sites that lost their top-10 ranking since 2005 include ebay.com, amazon.com, microsoft.com (not counting Microsoft Passport), google.co.uk, aol.com and go.com.
The new entrants in the top-10 list as of 2008 (based on old Alexa ranking model) included youtube.com, live.com, facebook.com, hi5.com, wikipedia.org and orkut.com. If the ranking list was a top-15 list, my employer would have been included at number 13.
How People Worldwide Spend Their Time Online
22% time is spent in online communication
16% time is spent in social communication. The presentation makes a note that this category didn't exist 3 years ago.
8% time is spent in online shopping activities
14% time is spent in entertainment and leisure activities
6% time is spent in work, business and education activities
Another interesting point made by the presentation, although no surprise, is that younger users (aged 15-24) tend to communicate more via Facebook whereas older Internet users (aged 44+) tend to use Yahoo! Mail more to communicate. The presentation raises the question whether email is becoming more archaic.
Comparison of popular sites
Facebook (#4 in global minutes) has experienced most growth (305%) since last year reaching 101 million members according to comScore. YouTube (#3 in global minutes) had the second highest growth (94%) with a total of 258 million users. Other two sites mentioned are PayPal and Skype, both eBay properties.
Two interesting facts about YouTube that I didn't know: A very high number of YouTube visitors (51%) visit the site weekly and half of the users "watch all videos to the end"
What is the most important source of Information?
Citing a study titled "Online World As Important to Internet Users as Real World?" conducted by Annenberg School for Communication , the presentation makes an important point: personal and online sources are two most important sources of information, and together they are the "essecnce of a social network."
The original report by digitalcenter.org also says that "online communities are a catalyst for connection and activism" and that "involvement in online communities leads to offline actions. More than one-fifth of online community members (20.3 percent) take actions offline at least once a year that are related to their online community." The original report also states that online activism is making online users get involved "in causes that were new to them when they began participating on the Internet" and that "more than 40 percent (43.7 percent) of online community members participate more in social activism since they started participating in online communities."
Another interesting point is that according to the Digital Future Project, Internet users 17 years of age or older trust Internet more (80%) than personal source (73%)
Some other important findings from USC-Annenberg Digital Future Project's report:
64.9 percent are involved in new causes
43.7 percent now participate more in social activism
56.6 percent log in to their community once a day
70.4 percent of community members "sometimes or always interact with other members of their community while logged in"
7.4 percent of American Internet users maintain a blog
23.6 percent of Internet users now post photos online. Previously only 11 percent were posting photos online.
12.5 percent of users now maintain their own website.
Internet users meet an average of 4.65 "friends online whom they have never met in person" and 1.6 "friends met in person whom they originally met online"
Facebook growth
Next, there are some metrics from Facebook's growth. Some highlights
as of 03/08 there were more than 14 million photo uploads a day being uploaded to Facebook and 6 million active user groups on Facebook.
there are 55,000 total networks (partitions?/shards? :) ) and 50% of the networks are outside of college. I wonder how many networks are location based?
Segment of users who are 25 years or older are the fastest growing segment. No surprise for me as my mother in law just joined Facebook.
There are more than 250,000 new registrations per day since January of 2007.
There are more than 859 million installations of 20,000 applications
Super Wall by Rock You! is the most popular application with 28 million installs on Facebook followed by Top Friends (26 million installs) and Fun Wall (25 million), both by Slide
Both Slide and Rock You! have 3 applications each in top 10 applications.
Facebook's own Video application is ranked #7.
Reasons for Facebook growing faster than MySpace
advertising that is considered less intrusive
news feed that is personalized
UI that is cleaner
friends section that receives more prominence
ads that are more personalized
more applications
more mobile friendly
facebook focusing more on monetizing word-of-mouth and conversations
The presentation titled Internet Trends is available on Slide Share, thanks to Tech Crunch.
Most Web 2.0 sites utilize some form of email confirmation mechanism where an activation email with a special embedded code is sent to a newly registered user. This user then checks his/her email and clicks on the link to activate their account.
Depending on the site's policy, the registration data of the newly registered user may be deleted if the user doesn't confirm their email account within a specified period of time. Some websites delete such data within 24 hours.
A few days ago, Mark Atwood, a good friend of mine sent me an invite to Dopplr, a Web 2.0 site that tracks people who travel frequently. I registered, however I forgot to activate my account. To my pleasant surprise, I today received an email from them regarding my Dopplr journal in which they politely reminded me that I haven't confirmed my account. Edited contents of the email follow:
Ever since you joined Dopplr, we haven't checked with you that this is your correct email address. Would you mind telling us that this is the address you use with Dopplr by following this link?
There has been 1 thing reported in your journal since Tuesday April 29th.
I happily confirmed my email this time and Dopplr gets to keep me as a new user. Had they deleted my registration data, I probably wouldn't have cared to re-register.
There is no other place on the web that takes as good care of your photos as Smugmug.
That said, while I am a very happy Smugmug customer, I am very disappointed that Smugmug doesn't offer a Flickr style badge. I have a pro Smugmug account and it sucks that there is no badge available for me to easily integrate my photos on my blog through javascript. Worse, the RSS feeds generated by Smugmug aren't focused towards photos rather they have a lot of junk text that I really don't care about.
Some thoughts for Smugmug: - How about creating a feed that just has photos in it, minus all the noise? - How about having a feed that displays random photos from my gallery, not just the recent photos? - Smugmug's pro account is pricey (I am not saying it's not worth the price) so at least the pro members should be allowed to have a Flickr style badge. - How about putting all the description noise about "user updated gallery" and gallery descriptions incorporated as alt and title tags?
I used Rss to Javascript site to display my photos for now but frankly, the presentation looks very crappy, or should I say not up to Smugmug standard. A badge can act as a marketing tool for Smugmug if it does photos justice in presentation.
I am going to send these suggestions to Smugmug's founder Don McAskill. He cares a lot about his customers so hopefully it is just a matter of time that he will have a Smugmug badge that looks as gorgeous as Smugmug galleries. BTW, I am a big fan of Don McAskill and his work and recently wrote about him on my other blog.
For now, I am thinking of one day writing a quick badge myself. It should be a couple hours of hacking. Since badge creation is generally quite easy, I wonder why hasn't this been accomplished yet by Smugmug.
Reid Hoffman, Chairman and President, Products at LinkedIn, talks in this business and marketing keynote, presented at Graphing Social Patterns 2007, about the Business of Facebook Applications.
He addresses five themes:
Social Networks and Platforms What makes social networks, platforms? What sets Web 2.0 social networks apart? Is Social Networking a feature, an application, or a platform? He talks about Friendster being referred to as Match.com but with a friends list added on top of it and for that reason it was considered a feature. He credits MySpace allowing the ability to "hack in 'widgets'" as the start of social network as a platform. He clarifies that according to his understanding it wasn't a 'deliberate design decision' by MySpace but rather an 'artifact of their platform' that didn't turn off or filter javascripts. This by accident lead to a 'robust ecosystem' through which users were including rich media etc. Ning then created a 'different conception of social networking as a platform,' allowing users to build any kind of social network. Facebook then 'launched the first platform on a large social graph.' Facebook applications could then rely upon the social graph in order to build.
He believes that social networks are platforms and has invested in several different social networks.
What makes a social network interesting? What creates a robust and interesting environment? "The key thing is that a social network takes patterns of important relationships we have in real life and then pus them on the web in ways that empowers important applications." People still care more about their offline world so if you can "import the relationships that matter to people here and make them available to [either] generate thin or light app yourselves which most of these networks do or provide them as a platform for other people, it actually enables applications that can really change people's lives"
The key elements 'from a sociological perspective' of Facebook's platforms are "extending functions of profiles, communications and messaging and the newsfeed." He goes on to say that Facebook's newsfeed is an example of many to many messaging. Then, you can 'integrate general web applications with data, relationships and communications'
He then goes on to contrast and compare several social networks including Facebook, MySpace and Ning. Facebook offered developers a massive social graph that allows them to acquire customers, leverage key relationships and leverage existing communication scheme. With Ning, although you can build your own social network feature wise, you are also left to build your own user base. For developers the key thing was that if they built something Facebook could get them in front of millions of potential customers. An example of leveraging existing communication scheme is that most Facebook apps have spread through messaging or emails or through newsfeed.
The remaining four themes of the video:
- Social Networks and Professional Networks - One graph to rule them all? - Facebook Platform: some of the opportunities enabled - What does the social platform mean for the evolution of the web?
Dallas News' Tech Blog noticed that "Just for fun" applications dominate overall percentage of apps and points the obvious: "The sad truth is that the collective intelligence of thousands of programmers has done nothing but devise new ways for people with too much time to annoy their acquaintances with pointless 'games.'"
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Michael Arrington of TechCrunch demands answers to some tough questions from Twitter. He potentially exposes Twitter's architecture implying that Twitter may be running on a grand total of three MySQL machines. 
I am going to 
