January 3rd, 2008

Farewell to ZDNet (and CNET)

Posted by David Berlind @ 9:06 am

Categories: General

Tags: Human Resources, CNET Networks Inc., Media Business, David Berlind

If you were an auditor asked to examine the human resources records of CNET (parent company to ZDNet), you’d discover that even though the company was officially founded in 1992, that there’s a handful of employees whose hire dates actually precede that year. My colleague Dan Farber is one of them. Former MacWeek editor Stephen Howard-Sarin whose name you don’t see too often but who oversees multiple CNET properties including ZDNet is another. My hire date — the day I transitioned from being an IT manager to being a tech journalist — was July 22, 1991.

With so many mergers and acquisitions going on, many of which involve younger companies buying older ones the way CNET bought ZDNet in October of 2000, such “negative employee badge numbers” are probably not unusual. But for some reason that I can’t put my finger on, I’ve always found a strange surrealism in them. Slowly though, as the years have gone by, these anomolies on CNET’s HR books have given way to Father Time who, today, is claiming me as his next victim.

I am moving to CMP where I will be deeply involved with events while at the same time continuing to blog about my second love: technology (the first is my family). As such, this will be my last post on ZDNet.

I’ve already written and rewritten this farewell notice several times. In an attempt to credit the giants on whose shoulders I’ve stood during my last 17 years of tech journalism (not to mention the thousands of readers who have helped to shape my opinions on tech), the initial draft of this blog post was never ending. I wiped it out. At first there were 10 people. Then 15. Eventually 30 and then more . I gave up. There simply isn’t a way to do everyone the justice they deserve without creating a unreadable tome.

So, I will keep the list very short — down to the biggest giants who have, in their own way, enabled my success in fuzzy ways that cannot be easily quantified or characterized: my wife and three children (a fourth is on the way). The media business is intensely competitive and journalism is a travel and time intensive career-choice. The phone can ring at any time with the sort of news that the presses as well as breakfast, lunch, dinner or some other outing must be stopped for.

Thanks to this job, I’ve also been able to travel the world. But it’s never easy leaving the house for the airport when your kids are hanging onto both legs saying “Don’t go!” or you know your going to miss something important while your gone. So, to A, D, S, and N (it’s been my practice to refrain from using their names in this space), thank you for your support from the bottom of my heart.

Finally, it is with incredibly mixed emotions that I am leaving the CNET family of talented and dedicated journalists, editors, staff and readers that I have been with (and who have been with me) for so very long. This company, its managers and my colleagues with whom I’ve worked have always been incredibly kind and generous to me in ways that are simply impossible to enumerate. To them, I say thank you as well for all that you have done for me, both personally and professionally.

December 21st, 2007

With Office Live Workspace in play, Microsoft's Web-competitors (Google, WebEx, Zoho) speak

Posted by Dan Farber @ 1:48 pm

Categories: General, IT Management, Office 2.0, Personal Technology, Software Infrastructure, Video, Web technology

Tags: Microsoft Office Live Workspace, Google Inc., Web, WebEx Communications Inc., Collaboration, Microsoft Office Live, Microsoft Corp., Zoho, Microsoft Office, Office Suites

It was just a couple of weeks ago that Microsoft finally released the beta of Office Live Workspace (OLW) — an offering that many see as as Microsoft’s response to the pressure its flagship Office suite is getting from browser-based competitors such as Google (with Google Apps), WebEx, and Zoho.

Although OLW does in fact contain a browser-based text editor that closely mimics the rich text capabilities of Microsoft Wordpad (a rich text editor that’s built-into Windows) and a rudimentary list editor that includes rows and columns that can be exported to Microsoft Excel, Microsoft is in no way pitching it as an online office suite of the sort that Google offers in Google Apps (see my interview with Google App ‘founder’ Rajen Sheth) or that Zoho offers (at nearly 20 separate applications, Zoho could very well offer the widest breadth of productivity apps of any offering, Web-based or desktop). In my in video interview and demo with Microsoft product manager Kirk Gregersen, I learned that Microsoft really just views OLW as a collaborative infrastructure that’s designed to give users a better way to collaborate on documents than many do now with e-mail and/or USB keys.

But much the same way Google is barely willing to admit that Google Apps is designed to compete with Microsoft Office, Microsoft seems barely willing to admit that Office Live Workspace is a response to the pressure that its Web competitors are bringing to bear.

While the Web is accessible from a range of client-side technologies that’s more diverse than what is supported by any other platform, the range of Web-based collaborative offerings from Microsoft for working with productivity documents has been limited to two offerings; First, Sharepoint which is primarily a Windows Server- and Office-based solution that’s ideally suited to behind-the-firewall collaboration and second, Groove — the far more Internet-driven (than any of Microsoft’s existing tools) collaboration solution that became a part of Microsoft’s overall software portfolio when the software giant acquired Groove Networks in 2005.

But, despite Groove’s strengths as a collaborative solution that works within and across organizations, its brand equity in the marketplace, and more importantly, the clout of former Groove Networks CEO (and now Microsoft CTO) Ray Ozzie, Groove seems more like Microsoft’s forgotten stepchild rather than a brand and a platform on which to build as Microsoft looks to offer a compelling collaborative solution that works on organizational intranets as well as it works on the Internet and the Web. While Microsoft has finally recognized the strengths of the Web as a collaborative platform, especially for ad hoc organization of behind and/or outside-the-firewall collaboration, it has chosen to put its muscle behind Office Live Workspace — a free offering that is more like what WebEx offers in WebOffice than it is like Google Apps or Zoho.

Even so, that doesn’t mean Office Live Workspace doesn’t narrow the gap against Google and Zoho’s Web-based productivity offerings. Microsoft believes that the desktop is still the domain of productivity applications which is why, taken together, the company believes that Microsoft Office and Office Live Workspace make for a better aggregate solution than does Google Apps or Zoho — both of which build many of OLW’s Web-based collaborative capabilities directly in to the application.

While some activities, such as real-time collaboration are doable with the Microsoft Office/OLW duo, they may be more elegantly implemented in Google Apps and Zoho. On the flip side, Microsoft Office has its own strengths. Namely, it works well, even when you’re not connected to the Internet (thanks to Google Gears, Zoho has some offline capabilities as well) and its core applications are far more robust than anything found on the Web. For this reason, Microsoft’s introduction of OLW may very well be enough to keep the Google/Zoho-curious from straying too far from the comfort of Microsoft Office in order to take advantage of Web-driven collaboration.

That said, for those users seeking Web-driven collaboration around productivity documents, one question is “Why not WebEx’s WebOffice?” Not only has the service already been through some battle-testing (whereas OLW is in beta, WebEx is “shipping”), its neutrality in terms of supported applications (for point-and-click editing of Web-stored documents, OLW only supports Microsoft’s Office) means that WebEx has some comforts of its own to offer users.

Now that OLW is out, cutting a circuitous swath between Google, WebEx, and Zoho, I decided to spend some time in Silicon Valley talking to the three companies about their philosophies when it comes to Web-based computing and what if anything they had to say about Microsoft’s OLW. As you can see in the attached video, WebEx’s president of products and technical operations Gary Griffiths and Zoho evangelist Raju Vegesna were not shy in discussing OLW relative to their own offerings. But Google, as a matter of practice, rarely if ever discusses the companies or offerings that others see as the search giant’s competition. In the video, Google’s Rajen Sheth was happy to entertain questions about Google and the way it thinks about applications and collaboration. But Microsoft was not a part of the discussion.

Check out the video and feel free to comment below on what you saw.

December 21st, 2007

Demo: ClusterSeven's Enterprise Spreadsheet Manager tightly monitors spreadsheet integrity

Posted by David Berlind @ 6:49 am

Categories: General, Government, IT Management, Legal, Reviewcasts, Software Infrastructure, Video

Tags: Monitor, Spreadsheet, Cell, Productivity, David Berlind

How many times have you stared at the bottom line of a spreadsheet that’s full of formulas knowing exactly what figures should be there, only to find that there’s a different set of numbers staring back at you than the ones you expected. You know there’s an offending cell somewhere, but the spreadsheet is too complex to find it and, with some deadline looming, out of exasperation, you start replacing formulas with hard coded numbers just to get it fixed, at least until after the deadline when you’ll have more time to figure out what went wrong. What’s the harm? Right? After all, the people looking at the final product might only be looking at a printout or a PowerPoint slide.

Well, given today’s compliance laws, the harm could be huge because of how those numbers can easily bubble up into an quarterly or annual earnings report. If such over-ridden cells end up corrupting some bigger picture report, the results could be disastrous (literally and figuratively). To help organizations and auditors keep spreadsheets from inadvertently (or even purposely) running amok, ClusterSeven has come up with a solution called Enterprise Spreadsheet Manager (ESM). In the attached video, ClusterSeven’s vice president of product marketing Ralph Baxter demonstrates how ESM can be configured to keep a watchful eye over any cell or range of cells in any spreadsheet.

As the contents of those cells change, ESM keeps track of when the changes were made, what the new values are, and who made the changes. In other words the audit trail is extremely tight. As you can see in the demo, one of the cool things ESM does is it monitors if cells are switching from their original programming type to another: for example from a formula to a hard-coded number (a sure sign that a spreadsheet and anything that depends on it could end up in a state of corruption).

ESM also graphically presents trends in cell and spreadsheet integrity. The advantage, which Baxter shows at the end of the video, is that those charged with compliance or auditing can build a single graph that includes trend lines for dozens or even hundreds of spreadsheets. Where a cell exceeds company-set thresholds for integrity (eg: varies from some number by a certain percentage, or a formula is suddenly overridden with hard-coded numbers), the trend-line fluctuates from its steady state wildly (making it easy to spot). Why would this be helpful? Well, if your annual report doesn’t look right but it depends on data coming from 100 or 1000 spreadsheets scattered throughout the organization, a single graph that monitors the integrity of all the spreadsheets that feed into that annual report can help spot the needle in the haystack that’s causing the problem. Otherwise, auditors and financial analysts might have to manually sift through every spreadsheet — a process that could take days or weeks.

All this whizbang functionality would be of limited help if it couldn’t be attached to an alerting mechanism. According to Baxter, there are ways to connect it to e-mail, internal LAN-based alerts (like Netsend) and SMS. ESM supports other spreadsheets beyond Excel (Google Spreadsheets for example). It also doesn’t come cheap with the average starting price ranging between $50K-$100K. But for some large companies where compliance is king, that could be pocket change given the sort of risk it mitigates. Finally, it requires the installation of two servers: Windows Server and Microsoft’s SQL Server 2005.

December 20th, 2007

Google Apps 'founder' Rajen Sheth: We dialog with users through new code

Posted by David Berlind @ 8:38 pm

Categories: General, Google Apps To-Do List, IT Management, Software Infrastructure, Video, Web technology

Tags: Google Inc., Google Apps, E-mail, Productivity, Microsoft Office, Online Communications, Office Suites, Software, David Berlind

Last week, while in California, I had an opportunity to sit down with Rajen Sheth — the man at Google who is credited with coming up with the idea of Google Apps. That interview, along with a demo of some of Google Apps’ more novel features, can be viewed in the attached video.

When most people hear the phrase Google Apps, they see it as a colloquial reference to some of the browser-based applications that Google serves up through the Web such as Google Documents and Google Spreadsheets. However, that’s not really what Google Apps is.

Yes, Google Apps involves Google’s browser-based productivity applications such as Google Docs, Google Spreadsheets, and Gmail. But, more than that, Google Apps is a branded bundle of those and other applications (Page Creator, Web site hosting, calendaring, Google Talk, etc.) that Google targets at organizations. When accessed via Google Apps, that bundle of applications behaves in more of an organizational context than do Google’s applications on the standalone basis that the general public has access to. For example, the apps can be accessed directly through an organization’s Internet domain (eg: http://mail.yourdomain.com or http://docs.yourdomain.com) and, for every such domain, certain users get administrative privileges to globally configure most of Google Apps’ options for all of an organization’s users.

Google Apps is available in two flavors. First, the Standard Edition (GASE) : a version of Google Apps that’s free, but that bears advertising in the Gmail portion and that limits the e-mail storage to 5GB per user. Second, the Premier Edition (GAPE): a far more functional $50 per user per year version with no ads, 25GB of storage per user, 24×7 telephone support, a 99.9 percent uptime service level agreement for e-mail, access to plug-in software from third parties, and more.

In the big picture of the industry, Google Apps is viewed by many as the only suite of productivity software with a real shot at cutting Microsoft Office’s dominant market position down to size. Yes, Google Apps does some things more efficiently than does Microsoft Office. For example, as opposed to the downloads required by Microsoft Office, almost all updates to the service involve little more than pressing the refresh button on a browser (the downloadable Google Talk application is one exception). But even though Google Apps has loads of compelling features, most view its ability to compete with Microsoft Office as having more to with Google’s powerful brand name and its virtually unlimited warchest (a luxury that none of Microsoft Office’s competitors has had).

The result of that warchest is a value that makes it difficult for organizations not to try it out. With GASE being free and GAPE costing only $50 per user per year, just use of the e-mail service alone could end up yielding savings. The availability of GAPE’s 24×7 phone support is reminiscent of the free support provided in the 1980’s by Wordperfect to users of its namesake word processing software — free offering that Wordperfect was eventually forced to abandon in favor of a more expensive paid service. With its deep pockets, Google can much afford to offer Google Apps at any price and, according to Sheth, more than 500,000 organizations are currently using it.

In the interview, we cover a wide range of questions — everything from how Google manages to offer GAPE users a whopping 25GB of storage when most corporations can only offer their own users a fraction of that to questions regarding the potential consolidation of currently bifurcated functionality (for example, tagging taxonomies and HTML authoring). Along the way, Sheth shows me some really interesting functionality including an autofill feature in the spreadsheet that draws upon Google’s experimental Google Sets functionality. In the interview, Sheth says that Google uses code to dialog with its users. Updates to the service are very frequent and sometimes significant.

Sheth also shows off how Google has made Google Calendar extensible with Gadgets. In the example he shows, a Google Gadget automatically populates the calendar with new movie openings and locations. The idea, according to Sheth, is to offer the right extensibility in the right context. It made me think a bit about how FaceBook is in many cases a collection of functionality, a lot of it without context.

Check out the video, and let me know what you think.

December 17th, 2007

Chartered to protect the henhouse, has the FTC turned into a fox?

Posted by David Berlind @ 3:47 pm

Categories: General, Government, Legal, Security

Tags: ZIP Code, Bureau, Database Company, FTC, E-mail, Government, Databases, Online Communications, Enterprise Software, Software

I rarely get e-mail from the USA Today’s Byron Acohido (who from time to time interviews me for my opinions on tech). But today, Acohido drew my attention to a story that he has co-authored with Jon Swartz under the headline FTC under fire as credit bureaus sell consumers’ data.

The story draws attention to a complex Web of potentially conflicting interests involving Federal Trade Commission Chairman Deborah Platt Majoras, the law firm she used to work for, her husband who still works for it, how that law firm represents one of the big three credit reporting bureaus, and whether or not the FTC has morphed into an agent of the credit reporting bureaus’ success from the consumer guardian that The People have entrusted it to be.

While the targets of this follow-the-money like inquest deny any impropriety, I can certainly understand the position of Robert Kuttner, author of The Squandering of America: How the Failure of Our Politics Undermines Our Prosperity who, who in response to the USA Today inquiry, said:

Federal agencies that are supposed to be looking out for the consumer are really protecting the companies that do bad things the agencies were set up to prevent.

I felt precisely this way when virtually all the real teeth were removed out of the proposed legislation that eventually turned into the Can Spam Act. At one point, the legislation included language that prevented senders of bulk commercial e-mail from sending that e-mail to anybody but those individuals with which they had pre-existing relationships. In other words no blind prospecting or solicitations of your inbox.

But, arguing that benefits of unsolicited commercial e-mail (aka SPAM) outweighed the harms, lobbyists for the advertising and marketing industry fought tooth and nail to get that piece of the legislation removed and succeeded. It my mind, it was the ultimate selling-out whereby the government ended up representing the interests of big business rather than those of us in consumer-land who must endure those harms — the worst of which today is that we have no idea whether our e-mails are reaching their intended recipients due to over-zealous spam filters on the other side. It’s a mess.

According to the story:

In February, the National Association of Mortgage Brokers lambasted the FTC for giving the credit bureaus tacit approval to keep selling listings — called “trigger lists” — containing personal and financial data of prospective borrowers. Some unscrupulous lenders used trigger lists to contact people who recently filled out a loan application, and then pitched them subprime mortgages, higher-priced loans aimed at people with spotty credit histories but also marketed to borrowers with good credit.

I have been wondering for a while why, during the earlier part of this year, I received so many solicitations promising to beat my current mortgage rate and how these outfits that I never heard of managed to get a hold of the data that was intimate to me. Now I know. In other words, this is unquestionably one of those data stories involving the thorny question of who gets to control what happens to our personal data when. What this story demonstrates (that’s not readily apparent to the naked eye) is the role that the government can play in protecting us, or perhaps giving the companies it’s protecting us from the carte blanche they want to take advantage of us.

Earlier today, in response to a blog post I wrote earlier this year about the waning anonymity of cash (and how we are sometimes accosted for personal information at the point of sale the way Radio Shack used to do) and how I didn’t mind terribly being asked for my zip code, one ZDNet reader wrote to me:

I used to think this information was used so that stores could figure out where there customers were coming from. But I’ve learned a lot about data aggregation companies like Axciom, Experian, etc. and I’ve learned exactly how the zip code is used.

The zip code is most useful to the retailer when you use a credit card. Because they have your name from the card, and also have your zip code now, you are generally findable on the massive consumer databases housed at Axiom, InfoUsa, etc. For instance, there is probably only one Keith Goodman in my zip code of 20001. The retailer now has a valuable piece of information that they can sell to a consumer database firm: your purchase history. I don’t think they sell the information about the specifics of what you are purchasing, but the general category you purchased. For instance, if you buy something at a sporting goods store, the store probably reports to the database firms that you are “A purchaser of sporting goods.” Don’t be surprised if you start getting LL Bean, Cabellas, and similar catalogs since the consumer database firms are selling your purchase history to buyers.

Well. Now I have a little bit more insight into why trees are dying to fill my mailbox (snailmail box) with catalogs that I never requested. And they are. I have back pain to prove it (back pain from carrying a recycling bin full of heavy stock catalogs to the curb). All of these stories (including the recent FaceBook Beacon debacle) fall into the same category of APD Syndrome: Abuse of Personal Data. The question is, what will be that next evolutionary step that resets things so that we have the final word on such sensitive information.

December 17th, 2007

Google's GMail product manager: 'User data should never be held hostage'

Posted by David Berlind @ 12:22 pm

Categories: Apple, General, Mobile, Personal Technology, Software Infrastructure, Video, Web technology

Tags: Google Inc., Google Gmail, JavaScript, E-mail, IMAP, E-mail Providers, Internet, David Berlind

Last week, while in California, I made the rounds, capturing on video as many interviews as I could with interesting people that would be fun to hear from. One of those was Google Gmail product manager Keith Coleman who, in the attached video, gives us a status update on where Gmail has been, where it’s at, and where it’s going (showing us a thing or two in the current user interface along the way). If there were two things that stood out to me in the discussion, it was (1) how a complete rebuild of the Javascript engine was needed (and completed) in order for Gmail to take some of its next evolutionary steps and (2) how strongly Google feels about a user’s data (like his/her e-mail) — strongly enough that even though Gmail is an advertising-supported Web service, that the company has no qualms about letting users have access to it through user clients (Outlook, Thunderbird, BlackBerries, iPhones, etc.) to which that advertising never flows.

The recent addition of IMAP support demonstrates that philosophy in spades. Normally, when third party clients are used as a front-end to an e-mail service like Gmail, it is done through a protocol known as POP3. But POP3 is extremely limited in what it can do. For example, if you receive a Gmail e-mail into your copy of Outlook and file that e-mail into a folder, your Gmail account remains oblivious to that organizational context. That e-mail may reside in a folder in your Outlook, but it stays in the inbox on Gmail.

Although Gmail’s full support of IMAP is limited to certain clients (as far as mobile is concerned, only Apple’s iPhone is “officially supported”), IMAP support is what makes it possible for mail items that are filed into certain folders on the client side to be automatically tagged with a label on the Gmail side. Today, Gmail eschews folders in favor of what are referred to as “labels” (considered by many to be “tags”). That said, I’m relatively certain we’ll see folders pretty soon in Gmail. In the interview, Coleman says the company is hoping to add foldering capabilities soon — capabilities that would include the ability to drag and drop emails from the inbox to a folder. According to an entry on the official Gmail blog regarding colored labels (mentioned below):

We actually kinda like folders. In fact, we’re doing some work to add some folder-y-ish functionality. Stay tuned.

Going back to the broader discussion of IMAP, enhancing client-side functionality with something as powerful as IMAP when the client-side essentially strips Google of its ability to contextually serve advertisements onto the e-mail page does speak highly of Google’s willingness to set users’ data free.

According to Coleman:

One of Google’s core philosophies is that user data should never be held hostage. We want people to be able to take their data and do whatever it is they want with it. This isn’t something that’s really standard for e-mail services. Particularly Web mail services that rely on ad revenue. There’s a risk if you let people get their mail in Outlook or some other client that they’ll stop using the Web interface and they’ll end up just reading their mail in a desktop client. We believe that if we give users the best possible product and if we create a good Web interface, and let them use their data in these clients like Outlook or like their BlackBerry, that they’ll overall have a better experience and be happier with the product. So, we’ve made a point throughout Gmail’s history to give people this freedom with their data.

We launched POP access back in 2004 which lets users read their mail in these clients and then just recently, we launched IMAP [support] which is a lot like POP except it keeps your data in synch no matter where you are. Let’s say you’re reading your mail in Outook and you read a message and when you go back to go back to your Gmail, you want that message to [to be marked as having been] read there as well. That works with IMAP. With POP that doesn’t work.

Regarding the updates to the underlying Javascript engine, Coleman talks about how, as a result of those changes, not only has the Gmail team been able to add eight new features in as many weeks (colored labels [mentioned above], keyboard shortcuts, instantly opening e-mails [via prefetching], integration of AOL Instant Messaging, group chat, etc.), but about how the pace of change will be very fast which means a great many more enhancements (barring foldering capabilities, none of which Coleman would let slip in the interview) are coming Gmail’s way (some experimental, some not). However, one feature that’s here now, that Coleman did slip-in, is that the storage limit for users of Gmail currently exceeds 5 gigabytes.

One downside to all this upside news is that, for users of the Google Apps-based version of Gmail (the one that organizations would subscribe to), many of the features being rolled out to the larger Gmail population — for example, prefetching and colored labels — are not yet available (I tested this and was disappointed to see that, as a Google Apps, some of these very cool and useful features didn’t work for me). Off camera, and via e-mail, Coleman confirmed this and said that the reason is that the new Javascript engine hasn’t yet been introduced to the Google Apps-based users of Gmail. Wrote Coleman:

Colored labels are currently only available on the version of Gmail that uses the new Javascript implementation. The new Javascript is currently live for Gmail accounts on Firefox, IE7 and Safari 3, and we’re actively working to launch it for Google Apps accounts and IE6….As with colored labels, you’ll see the speed improvements [from prefetching] once we roll out the new [Javascript] to Google Apps accounts.

Finally, as we were packing our video gear up, I asked Coleman why Google still refers to Gmail’s status as being “beta.” After all, the service has been running since 2004. After a bit of joking around about this, Coleman mentioned that the company would like to stabilize a few more of Gmail’s features before officially declaring the beta program over. Although he made no promises, from what I heard, it sounded like that too could be expected relatively soon — probably sometime in 2008.

December 13th, 2007

Google/OpenSocial's director of engineering David Glazer unplugged: 'Shindig is live'

Posted by David Berlind @ 2:14 pm

Categories: General, Software Infrastructure, Video, Web technology

Tags: Bebo, Facebook, Network, Google OpenSocial, Google/OpenSocial, Social Networking, Networking, Online Communications, Marketing, Advertising & Promotion

While at Bebo’s launch event yesterday in San Francisco, I had a chance to catch up with David Glazer, the director of engineering at Google who is overseeing the evolution of the OpenSocial framework that the company announced on November 1, 2007. You can see the interview in the attached video (above).

Bebo claims to be the third largest social network in the world behind MySpace and Facebook and also claims to be the most popular social network in the UK, Ireland and New Zealand. Glazer’s attendance to the Bebo event was particularly interesting given that one of Bebo’s key messages from yesterday’s launch was how applications that are written to run on FaceBook will run without any recoding on Bebo. The FaceBook developer platform is by no means a standard in terms of programmable social networks. But Bebo’s choice to be API-compatible with FaceBook in many ways proves why a standard for interoperability between social networks (interoperability of the sort that’s the supposed province of the OpenSocial framework) can be important.

For example, given the sort of interoperability that’s being demonstrated between the FaceBook and Bebo contexts of Web-based games from Webs.com and Bunchball (described in yesterday’s blog about the Bebo launch), the benefits are pretty clear. If you have an account on multiple social networks, you can have your constituents in social network #1 (perhaps one you use as a consumer) and a separate set of constituents in social network #2 (one that you use for business). To be able to be on the first network and connect to you constituents on the second network without leaving the context of the first can, at the bare minimum, offer a much better user experience than the one we have today where you have to jump from one network to the next just to connect. This sort of interoperability is one of the goals of OpenSocial and not surprisingly, Bebo CEO Michael Birch told us yesterday that Bebo would be supporting OpenSocial next year.

I asked David Glazer to riff on the idea that the interoperability between Bebo and FaceBook could be a proofpoint for why a standard like OpenSocial makes sense. In the course of getting the answer, I learned that just a couple of nights ago, the first open source implementation of the OpenSocial framework was published on the Apache Web site under the name “Shindig.” On Wednesday, under the headling Let’s get this Shindig started, Google OpenSocial API product manager Dan Petersen posted a blog regarding the code’s availability. Glazer also told me that the framework which can be found on Google’s site at code.google.com had advanced from version 0.5 to 0.6 (as it heads towards 1.0 in 2008). Since announcing OpenSocial in November, Google has been digesting feedback from developers and has synthesized that feedback into several change to the framework.

Glazer and I also talked about the business model once something like OpenSocial takes off. For example, will s/he who houses the data or s/he who has the biggest containers of data win? It seems like they might. But Glazer points out that we could have said the same thing about HTML and things worked out there. Clearly 2008 is going to be year that we’ll get to see what sort of impact OpenSocial will have on the Web.

December 12th, 2007

With tech titan support, Green Grid to help datacenters go green with measurement standards

Posted by David Berlind @ 11:43 pm

Categories: General, Green, Hardware Infrastructure, IT Management, IT Matters Podcast, Podcasts

Tags: Data Center, Consortium, Grid, Standards, Organization, Data Centers, Storage, Hardware, Data Management, David Berlind

With so many tech vendors claiming their solutions to be green and looking for a leg up with customers wanting to be more power efficient with everything from their servers right up to their entire datacenters, one big problem in the industry is a lack of standards on how “green” is meaured and what the lexicon is from one discussion (or solution provider to the next). Recognizing that it’s in the best interests of the entire industry to be talking about green-ness in with same language and metrics, more than 100 companies have put their weight behind a consortium know as The Green Grid.

According to the consortium’s home page:

The Green Grid is a consortium of information technology companies and professionals seeking to lower the overall consumption of power in data centers around the globe. The organization is chartered to develop meaningful, platform-neutral standards, measurement methods, processes and new technologies to improve energy efficient performance of global data centers.

Helping to drive that mission are some of the biggest tech titans in the IT business; server companies such as IBM, HP, Dell, and Sun, chip companies such as Intel and AMD, and software giants such as Microsoft. Not on the list of Green Grid supporters so far, however, are two key Internet players both of which are running and/or building huge datacenters right now: Google and Yahoo! Although they could eventually join The Green Grid, it’s not clear whether the efficacy of their membership is a fair trade for their involvement in a consortium where they may be expected to share some of their secrets around datacenter efficiency.

After all, at the size and scale of the datacenters they run, some of Google and Yahoo!’s competitive advantage lies in the degree to which they can efficiently run their datacenters. Sharing their secrets with the world may help to reduce the aggregate carbon footprint of the world’s datacenters. But in terms of maintaining their competitiveness over each other, one aspect of that competitiveness lies in how well they can control datacenter costs without compromising the quality of the end-user experience.

Nevertheless, The Green Grid is fully committed to arriving at standards that its membership can rely on when talking about how green something is. According to AMD senior strategist Larry Vertal and SprayCool founder and CEO Don Tilton, the organization which is divided into three committees (technical, communications, and liaison) has been making progress throughout 2007 since its initiatives were last reported here on ZDNet. Included in that progress were (1) a multi-vendor plugfest involving the measurement of a system’s power efficiency according to standards established by one of the working groups in The Green Grid’s Technical Committee and (2) the scheduling of the consortium’s first major event where a lot of the white papers and findings of the various working groups will be shared for the first time, but only with member organizations and the press. So far, it hasn’t been determined exactly how that information is going to be made public.

To hear my interview of Vertal and Tilton, press the play button in the Flash-based audio player above. Or, feel free to download the MP3 through the Flash-based player’s menus. If you are subscribed to ZDNet’s IT Matters series of podcasts (see how to subscribe), the podcast should show up on your PC, your MP3 player, or both, depending on how you have your podcatcher setup.