Tell us in the comments below if you think Home will be a hit or miss for Facebook.

Disclaimer: All videos presented in the “YouTube IT Video of the Week” series are subjectively selected by ITKnowledgeExchange.com community managers and staff for entertainment purposes only. They are not sponsored or influenced by outside sources.

Tell us in the comments below who you think has the better dance moves.

Google

Facebook

Disclaimer: All videos presented in the “YouTube IT Video of the Week” series are subjectively selected by ITKnowledgeExchange.com’s community manager

Bradley Horowitz and Vic Gondutra, the masterminds behind Google Buzz, have come together again with Google+. Despite the familiar names on the ticket, the project aspires to be the phoenix out of Buzz’s ash. The two told the NY Times that Buzz “chastened” them and they’ve since learned the value users place on their privacy.

In limited field trial for now, Google+ advertises that it’s expected to change and evolve with each user’s feedback. The tool aims to mimick real-life relationships and discard the potentially awkward aspects of other social networks (ahem, poking, ahem). Perhaps the most refreshing update to this take on social networking is the ability to receive others’ updates without sharing your own. Google plans to spread the reach of Google+’s features across mobile platforms and websites.

What do you think? Is there room for more takes on the same idea?

Melanie Yarbrough is the assistant community editor at ITKnowledgeExchange.com. Follow her on Twitteror send her an email at Melanie@ITKnowledgeExchange.com.

Videos such as this one spark a certain amount of nostalgia, not only for the clunky monster of a PC on Roger Fiddler’s desk but for the days before the Internet made everything so much easier and, well, so much harder. While Knight-Ridder had a little too much faith in man’s continuing loyalty to the newspaper, they pinpointed the crossroads where many vendors find themselves: “We may still use computers to create information but we’ll use the tablet to interact with information.”

This might account for the changing numbers as outlined by Tom Nolle at the Uncommon Wisdom blog:

PCs are not seeing the growth they once did…Some of the slowing is due to tablet encroachment, but most is likely due to people just not upgrading as often.

But the fruition of visions such as Knight-Ridder’s 1994 prediction about tablets marks another change, not only within the tech industry, but in the way the rest of the world interacts with the IT department. Interactions aren’t lassoed solely within a company’s in-house messaging or email system. Despite social networking services aimed at the enterprise such as Salesforce.com’s Chatter, users are still all over sites such as Facebook and Twitter, and not always for strictly business purposes. Sure, you could throw some policies at it and even make examples out of a few repeat offenders, but what happens when you’re the President or, more realistically, you work in a high-profile government office where quips on Facebook can have serious and reverberating effects?

Tuesday’s hearing on how the Presidential Records Act of 1978 applies to presidential record keeping of digital communications on the web brought up some of the gray areas facing enterprise IT departments everywhere. Philip Klein reports for the Washington Examiner:

Back in 1978, in the post-Watergate era, Congress passed the Presidential Records Act to preserve White House communications. But a lot has changed in the past 33 years, and on Tuesday the committee held a hearing about updating the law in an era of texting, instant messaging and social networking.

As House Oversight and Government Reform committee chairman Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., noted that legislation did not foresee Facebook and Twitter. There are currently no restrictions on the personal items White House employees are allowed to bring into work, including tablets that would presumably allow them to send communication via personal accounts on outside cellular networks. While White House policy mandates that employees who conduct official business on personal email accounts forward those interactions to their work accounts, there are no firm policies on social networks such as Twitter, Facebook, IM, and mobile text messaging.

Updates to the law were suggested, but as David Ferriero, archivist of the U.S. at the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), stated, “Ultimately, responsibility for records management will always rest to some degree with individual federal employees, no matter what systems are in place. That was true in an era of exclusively paper records, no matter what systems are in place.”

Sadly, this seems to be the fallback of most enterprise IT security programs as well.

Melanie Yarbrough is the assistant community editor at ITKnowledgeExchange.com. Follow her on Twitter or send her an email at Melanie@ITKnowledgeExchange.com.

In many respects, Facebook is open sourcing its data center and server designs. Jonathan Heiliger, vice president of technical operations, said the Open Compute Project is a way of giving back. It’s also a way to get vendors with more scale to incorporate Facebook’s designs to meet its needs with cheaper systems.

Despite what it means to vendors who may be scrambling to replicate Facebook’s designs and solutions, the Prineville data center’s PUE rating speaks volumes: 1.07 PUE versus the 1.5 PUE average, and the 1.4 – 1.6 PUE of Facebook’s leased data center.

Some specs:

• Vanity-free packaging with little-to-no screws, which resulted in 22% fewer materials, and 6 lbs less in weight.
• No duct work and no air cooling system in the data center.
• Dual AMD Opteron® 6100 Series socket motherboard with 24 DIMM slots.
• Intel Xeon® 5500 or Intel Xeon® 5600 socket motherboard with 18 DIMM slots.
• Localized uninterruptable power supplies serving six server racks.

How do you see this changing industry standards or vendor offerings, if at all? Share your feedback in the comments section or send me an email at Melanie@ITKnowledgeExchange.com.

Melanie Yarbrough is the assistant community editor at ITKnowledgeExchange.com. Follow her on Twitter or send her an email at Melanie@ITKnowledgeExchange.com.

Phishing for fame and friends

Today, most attacks on corporate infrastructure are driven by monetary gain: Long gone are the days where embarrassing defacements dumped a company’s dirty laundry and embarrassing taunts onto its domain. Instead, the criminals are largely organized, stealthily going in and making off with the valuable digital loot without being noticed until it’s far too late. Facebook still sees its share of these types of criminals. However, its high-profile nature, and mixed track record on privacy, has made it a favored target for the type of attacker who still likes to put on a show. Nicolas Sarkozy’s account was recently hacked, posting a message stating the president would not seek office again (he has made no official statement on his plans). Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg then had his fan page hacked, pleading for the company to become a ‘social business.’

Not just for social networks anymore

While the vulnerabilities that were exploited in these attacks were eventually disclosed to be a rather mundane and limited API bug, researchers (perhaps speculating wildly to get their 15 minutes) fingered a few prominent exploits, and they’re ones that could be used against your very own corporate network just as easily. One possibility was the fact that much of Facebook’s communications are unencrypted (except for the login process). After a simple utility called Firesheep was released, hijacking someone’s session over unencrypted Wi-Fi became as easy as installing a browser extension.

While Firesheep, built as a research tool, largely targets social networks in order to raise awareness, many corporate software applications could be vulnerable to similar attacks, particularly if they don’t force a user to join a VPN first or rely exclusively on SSL for all communications.

Another possible method being floated was that Zuckerberg fell victim to a phishing attack, where another site, masquerading as Facebook, sent him an e-mail and convinced him to login. These attacks are quite common on the social networking giant. In Zuckerberg’s case, I think it’s highly unlikely, but what’s not unlikely is a major corporation coming under a hand-tailored phishing attack seeded among its users. Though many phishing attempts are almost laughably executed and largely focused on banks and PayPal, more and more crime is financially motivated and highly organized. I’ve seen even small companies fall victim to very customized attacks that almost wiped out their finances overnight.

Finally, the speculation was that Zuckerberg (or one of his fan page handlers) used a weak password. While I’d be shocked if the founder was using something along the lines of “12345,” the fact that the fan page responsibility is likely doled out to another lower-level employee makes this attack much more feasible. Always remember the weak links of shared administration in your own processes.

Fighting back, the Facebook way

Of course, Facebook isn’t taking all of this without a fight, and your policies should be learning from their mistakes before you find your own company a victim. For one thing, they’ve rolled out two new security features, as highlighted by CIO:

• SSL Encryption for all traffic … sort of. It’s an optional feature, and a little bit hidden, but users can now choose to have all their Facebook traffic encrypted. For businesses, this is a no-brainer: Yes, SSL is computationally more expensive, but getting successfully attacked is much more so.
• Two-factor authentication. If the site thinks your login is a little suspicious, it prompts for a second authentication by making you name a few pictured friends. Ok, this might not be a great idea for your own Intranet, but there are enough two-factor authentication options out there to make this feasible.

When we asked our members what their top considerations were when building a new data center, Technochic said that cooling methods and costs are definitely forerunners: “Being as ‘green’ and cost-efficient as possible plays a big role in this day and age.” Facebook and North Carolina’s governor, Bev Perdue, are taking this into consideration as well, “touting the data center’s environment friendliness and energy efficiency,” according to Mashable. Just what “innovative cooling and power management technologies” they plan to employ aren’t clear yet, though they are said to be “Facebook-developed.” Let’s just hope they won’t have to double the size of the data center amidst construction like the last time.

But Facebook isn’t the only company making headlines with their data center plans worthy of an episode of MTV’s Cribs, Apple’s $1B data center, also in North Carolina, made news in May 2009. This particular server farm also doubled in size during construction, making it about five times the size of Apple’s largest server facility, in California.

Lease to Own: Not just for TVs anymore

It’s always more fun to just get a new toy, but most companies don’t have a billion dollar data center budget at their disposal. In a market that grew 35% from 2006 to 2009, though, there is obviously something to owning your own data center versus leasing.

For one, building from the ground up means customization. Even two years ago – light years in technology time – building an energy efficient data center was at the forefront of people’s concerns. With data growth serving as the top concern for admins, data center power and cooling is a close second. Factors such as the increase of chip density, power consumption and heat dissipation, contribute to the changing standard for watts-per-square-foot usage in today’s data centers. Whereas in the later half of the 1980s 30 to 40 watts per square foot was acceptable, today’s accepted minimum hovers more around 150 watts per square foot, but reaching as much as 500 watts per square foot. It’s no longer a matter of if power usage should be lassoed, but when. As the Daily Journal of Commerce projects:

For many years, the data center world has been under the radar in terms of power usage, but as the demand for facilities continues to rise, the awareness of energy consumption also rises. In 2007, an EPA report to Congress demonstrated the data center market consumed approximately 61 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity — 1.5 percent of the total energy produced in the United States — and it projected consumption to reach 100 billion kilowatt-hours by 2011.

For most of us, exploring options such as DC over AC power, under-floor cooling, and solutions for more responsible data management could make all the difference for efficiency and eco-friendliness. Taking into consideration factors such as threats of natural disaster common in the area of the data center allows you to get creative with solutions. Anticipating future obstacles is probably one of the biggest money-savers in IT.

Melanie Yarbrough is the assistant community editor at ITKnowledgeExchange.com. Follow her on Twitter or send her an email at Melanie@ITKnowledgeExchange.com.

But talking with a lot of companies, it seemed the movement was towards a more liberal policy – Freedom with responsibility, as it were – when it came to social networking. Generally, IT departments were at least allowing it during non-peak hours, or for certain departments that could justify the benefits.

Now Mashable brings word that fully 50 percent of companies are blocking social media access, but buried in there was the truly startling statistic: “8% of companies in the US have fired staff over social media misuse.”

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/JIKaIriiK8w" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

With those kind of numbers, you’d think that it was Facebook that was single handedly driving all the unemployment as those who still had jobs frittered away their productivity by posting cute animal videos and eBaying. I’m skeptical about what those numbers mean, to say the least: Were some of those 50% of companies limiting social networking during peak hours to conserve bandwidth, for example? Almost none (with a few exceptions) of the companies I’ve spoken to over the year have a black-and-white policy on this stuff, and while nuance doesn’t make eye-grabbing survey data, it often maeks a lot of sense.

Although IT departments rarely have the final word on these policies, I’d love to hear your advice on developing and implementing social media guidelines, from both a technical and policy perspective, since it’s something that almost every enterprise has started confronting. I’ll try and write up some of the best ideas later this week, so feel free to leave your thoughts in the comments or e-mail me directly at Michael@ITKnowledgeExchange.com.