Silicon Valley

Sep 2 2008   5:21PM GMT

Chrome: A shiny Web browser from Google may just be the next global platform for running Web applications

Posted by: Alexander Howard
Google, Microsoft, business, Mobile, applications, Web 2.0, operating systems, Apple, software, Technology, Web services, AJAX, video, YouTube, Internet, search engine, innovation, cool, social bookmarking, social publishing, reviews, Silicon Valley, downloads, collaboration, freeware, advertising, desktop, Office, geotargeting, social networking, blogging, buzz, communications, Web applications, buzzword, cloud computing, the cloud, Windows, SEM, demonstration, SEO

Techies and geeks returned from one last weekend of sun, sand and summer to find news of a disruptive change sweeping the online business world. Meet Chrome, Google’s new Web browser.

News of the announcement was leaked yesterday when Philipp Lenssen, an avid blogger of all-things-Google, received the comic book Google put together for the release and posted it, along with his first impressions. My director, ahead of the curve as usual , picked up on it right away and added it to WhatIs.com’s Buzzword Alert.

Google has since put up a high resolution of the Google Chrome comic book. I highly recommend going over and reading through the comic. Google put considerable time into clearly explaining the challenges faced by the designers of modern Web browsers with respect to memory bloat, rendering engines, Javascript threading errors and much more.

Since Lenssen broke the news, the tech blogosphere has of course been awash with reviews, opinions and speculation about what, exactly, Chrome will mean. Walt Mossberg posted a comprehensive review of Chrome in the Wall Street Journal, including speed and feature comparisons with Safari, IE 8 and Firefox. Rafe Needleman liveblogged the press conference introducing Chrome over at Webware. John Furrier colorfully blogged that the search wars just turned into the operating system wars. That’s true — except (as he notes) that Chrome goes far beyond search. SEO/SEM hounds and search engine watchers, however, will find Danny Sullivan’s thorough evaluation of Chrome’s search functionality quite useful.

Following below is own my two cents, both with respect to the browser itself and the significance of its introduction. First, however, I’ll let the video embedded below provide a quick introduction:

Obviously, Chrome has a lean, clean interface. This is Google, after all. Menus, dropdowns, extra bars and dialogs are largely stripped away. So what’s left?

The Web pages themselves. What a concept! I downloaded and installed the browser this afternoon without a hitch, imported my bookmarks and search history from Firefox and was off to the races. Chrome is quite speedy.

The address bar has been merged with the search field you’d see on the right in IE or FF. Firefox 3 includes a predictive search in this field already, so this isn’t ground breaking, but it is a clear recognitiion that search has become the default navigation method for most Web users. Enter your desired search terms and away you go.

Google is calling the new address field the “Omnibox,” a nod to its ability to incorporate “everything” you might need to explore. The Omnibox’s utility is another sample of Google’s secret sauce, in this case combining a record of your search and browsing history with Google’s own PageRank for given terms. The Omnibox is eerily good. With only a little use, it could predict precisely which page I was looking for after only a few characters were entered.

Chrome also features tabbed browsing, a key improvement introduced by iBrowse in ‘99 and then popularized by Opera in 2000. Once Mozilla included it in Firefox, the feature took off and is now a default feature in Internet Explorer and Safari. Chrome expands the tabbed interface in a number of innovative ways, including grouping related tabs and designing each tab so that it acts as an independent browser. Bookmarks, the Omnibox, menubar icons and menus are all inside of the browser, which again frees up more space for displaying rendering Web pages.

The pop-up blocker and phishing or malware alerts also included in Chrome may not be innovative at this point but they’re certainly effective and useful. The private browsing mode, aptly called “Incognito.” (This clever feature name was perhaps made in hopes that it will avoid the “Porn Mode” moniker that has dogged a similar feature of IE 8, InPrivate.)

There’s another key development: Chrome may not be the fastest Web browser currently available but Google hopes that it will be the most stable for pages loaded with Javascript. In a Web 2.0 world ruled by AJAX, that’s no small thing. And anyone that’s used one of Google’s many online applications knows that a stable, reliable environment for this kind of scripting is crucial.

This hints at perhaps the most important detail of all, and one that I tipped my hat to in the title of this post. Microsoft made an early bid for Internet dominance in the infamous browser wars of the 1990s by including Internet Explorer in each copy of Windows. Despite the Justice Department’s successful antitrust suit, IE continues to have upwards of 75% of the world’s browser share. Firefox has made inroads on this market share, to be sure, and the most recent version of Mozilla’s browser has been the best option around for speed, privacy, safety and usability since its introduction this summer, following close upon the success of Firefox 2.

Now it’s Google’s turn.

Google’s introduction of its own browser has the potential to upset the market in a way that no other company can, simply because of Google’s ability to promote the download and use through its various Web properties. As Google’s various Web applications and cloud computing architecture continue to mature, the Web itself can develop into an operating system. If this sounds familiar, that’s because Sun’s vision of network computing in the 90s using Java popularized such a concept long ago. Vastly improved broadband connectivity, viable Web-based apps and an Internet technology giant flush with revenue from the world’s best advertising platform change the dynamic a bit, of course. Google built its own Javascript engine to improve performance and, crucially, integrated Google Gears with Chrome to allow true offline access to its various Web applications. That adds up to something that distinctly resembles a fully-fledged desktop operating system and productivity suite.

While it’s true that consumer and enterprises haven’t been making a run on thin clients running on Linux quite yet, the potential to further erode Microsoft’s dominance of the operating and desktop productivity software markets is embedded within Chrome. I’m far from the only writer prognosticating on this count, of course. Michael Arrington thinks Chrome is Google’s Windows Killer. As Michael points out, this clears the way for “millions of web devices, even desktop web devices, in the coming years that completely strip out the Windows layer and use the browser as the only operating system the user needs.” Given that both the enterprise and consumer markets haven’t exactly been hot about Vista, I suspect Microsoft may be somewhat concerned about this development. Henry Blodgett over at the Silicon Valley Insider sees the development from precisely this angle, blogging that Google has launched a cloud operating system and called it a ‘browser.’

Who else should be concerned? Maybe Mozilla, though judging by this interview with its CEO, they’re putting a good face on the development for the moment. What’s next? Harry McCracken asked 10 questions about Google Chrome over at Technologizer that address Mozilla’s future relationship (and relevance). Jeremiah Owyang has added a few more questions in thinking about what Chrome could mean long term. Both ask for response and speculation in their comment sections, so have at ‘em.

Microsoft hasn’t been standing still, of course. They’ve been chasing search revenue for years, as evidenced by the failed Yahoo! acquisition. As the folks over at the Google Subnet blog at NetworkWorld point out, IE 8’s InPrivate mode thwarts Google’s targeted advertising. Unless the world upgrades to IE 8 and begins to browse InPrivate en masse, however, I’m guessing that GOOG’s 3+ billion of revenue per quarter is gonna be safe for the moment.

That’s especially true when you consider another critical element of Chrome: its future relevance to mobile search. Google’s Eric Schmidt has been quite bullish in this area, estimating that mobile search revenue will likely surpass desktop search in the not-so-distant future. The iPhone has shown what a data connection and full Web browser can do to mobile search (Try 50 times as many searches originating from iPhones vs. a normal cellphone). Here’s a prediction you can take to the bank: Just as the iPhone features a stripped down version of Safari, Google’s Android OS will have a similarly light version of Chrome optimized for a mobile device and poised to fully take advantage of the possibilities for geotargeted advertising based upon a user’s demographics, Web history and location.

Louis Gray is dead-on when he points out that Web browsers are now about the hooks. Apple’s Safari will be increasingly optimized for the iPhone and working with the private cloud that is MobileMe. Microsoft has built IE to be integrated with Windows and Office, though because of the bundling issues presented by antitrust has always had to walk a fine line. Flock, the social media-optimized version of Firefox, carves out a niche because of its tie-ins with the various networks and services. Chrome is no different, as I pointed out above. If you are already a power user of Gmail, gDocs, gTalk, gReader or g-Anything, Chrome may make more sense. Chrome is, I should note, only available for Windows Vista or XP at the moment. Guess they figure Safari will do the trick for a Webkit-based browser for Mac users and that the Linux crowd will be satisfied with Firefox and Opera for the moment.

To poorly paraphrase Lando Calrissian, Google’s Chrome is likely to allow all mobile users to truly surf with them amongst the clouds.

Aug 19 2008   12:42AM GMT

Bizzwords: Business lingo describes the state and style of the information age

Posted by: Alexander Howard
Google, Web 2.0, Technology, fun, Internet, commentary, cool, culture, college, crowdsourcing, futurism, exploration, WhatIs.com, creativity, Silicon Valley, wiki, conversation, widgets, social networking, blogging, humor, history, communications, buzzword, word meanings, languages, geek

Isn’t it amazing how the business lingo of the times reflects the technologies, anxieties and energies of a period? My local NPR station, WBUR, featured a terrific episode of On Point this past June, hosted by one Tom Ashbrook, that was all precisely this topic, discussing and poking gentle fun at business lingo. You can listen to it on Odeo or head over to the New Business Lingo at OnPointRadio.org.

[Image Credit: Despotes]

There are some wonderful “bizzwords” in the show, along with some historical perspective. As the show description notes:

Every walk of life has its lingo. Its buzzwords and catchphrases. American business has its own colorful menagerie of slang, and always has — from bulls and bears, to bootstraps, and 800-pound gorillas, and fish in a barrel.

But buzzwords and catchphrases change. They turn over and make way for newcomers.

And when they do, in American business, they may tell us something about where we and our economy are headed.

If you lived through the business world of the 80s, you no doubt encountered a consultant or executive who talked about “re-engineering business processes” or finding “synergies” between different products.

Cube farmers could be depended upon to be seen “prairie dogging” when something happened around the office. Networking at cocktail parties was hot.  Blamestormers might be Dilberted. Seagull managers might fly in to observe their microserfs, make a lot of noise, poop over everything and then leave.

If you worked in technology, you probably had a PC. As a hacker, you might have laughed about clueless users needed treeware. Everyone worried about career-limiting moves (CLMs) that might result from a bad click or command, propagating in an ohnosecond.

And of course, like, ya know, everything was, like, totally rad, dude.

In the 90s, couch potatoes turned to mouse potatoes as office workers all jumped on the Information Superhighway. Wired happily documented it all in its Jargon Watch column. By the end of the decade, i-everything and e-anything created one of the great tech bubbles.

Everyone wanted to go IPO. A few years later so one of the great crashes. Dotcommers became dotgoners and dotbombers. The 80/20 rule defined actionable moments after careful cost-benefit analyses. If something could be outsourced, it was. Viral marketing zipped off into email distribution lists, moving through word of mouse.

In the late ’00s (naughts), the Web 2.0 bubble has replaced the Internet bubble, as social networkers expand their social graphs, exposed to infotisements and advertorials as they blog, edit wikis and surf the blogosphere with RSS readers on iPhones. Online marketers are accountable for the ROI of every campaign. We’ve crowdsourced many actions and processes, whereever feasible, bending to the wisdom of the crowd and selling to the long tail.

Google is both a verb and a noun, along with nearly every conceivable form in between. Despite the company’s best efforts, google has even escaped proper noun status in many communities. The President calls it “the Google.”  The senior senator from Arizona talks about “a google.” The junior senator  from Illinois (and his search committee) Googled potential vice-presidential candidates. As billions of revenue from search adverstising each quarter streaming in to the Internet giant, it’s clear we’re a culture of Googlers googling each other, egosurfing away.

We’re also frazzing, dangerously close to overload by switching from email to cell phone to IM to text messages to meetings to Twitter and the Web.

Steeped in media from satellite and cable news networks, DVRs, DVD-players, on-demand programming and Web video, there’s even a danger of what sociologist Emile Durkheim might have identified as a kind of digital anomie, colorfully described as “Dorito Syndrome” — a persistent feeling of dissatisfaction and emptiness, regardless of consumption.

No matter how much screensucking you do, there’s always more. Lisa Belkin wrote about a number of these in the New York Times in 2006 in Overly Wired.

Widgets are everywhere now, of course, and may be anything from a small gadget to an embeddable module in an iGoogle page to a downloadable desktop application or even (gasp) an esoteric mechanical device. (Guinness drinkers have their own version, of course.)

The green computing wave spurred by skyrocketing energy costs from power-hungry data centers has spawned many biologically-themed terms.

Greenwashing, astroturfing and blacksurfing have all entered the lexicon. Every product seems to live in its own ecosystem.

Freemium business models now may promote coopetition between fierce competitors, perhaps using telepresence rooms that are far too expensive for standard percussive maintenance.

Under such conditions, “matadors” (people skilled at dodging assignments or responsibility) have little chance of scraping by, as the presence technologies, pervasive computing and “status message culture” adopted by the millenials puts “slacking” firmly into the lexicon of decades-past.

And, of course, we’re all increasingly computing in the cloud now.

As we near the end of this decade, the buzzwords of the ’10s have yet to be coined and collectively sampled, savored and entered into the lexicons maintained by Merriam-Webster, the Oxford Englsh Dictionary and, of course, the best online IT encyclopedia online. (Shameless plug).

Some will end up as sniglets, humorous oddities of cultures past. Other words will always remind the culture at large of a certain time and place.

Here’s hoping we can improve on vlog, blook and webinar.

If you have an idea of what lingo might define the next decade of business, let me know at ahoward@techtarget.com or leave a comment.

Aug 1 2008   10:29AM GMT

Video: Jimmy Wales on Google’s Knol

Posted by: Alexander Howard
Google, business, Web 2.0, video, YouTube, Internet, search engine, search, innovation, commentary, learning, free, academics, public domain, social publishing, Silicon Valley, collaboration, wiki, conversation, community, tool, blogging, buzz, communications, Web applications

Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia, talked to WNYC’s Brian Lehrer about Google Knol, a new competitor to the world’s largest online encyclopedia.

Jul 25 2008   3:46PM GMT

Company names that are Populr

Posted by: Dennis Shiao
business, Web 2.0, new media, Silicon Valley, startup, trend

Hold your horses, blog editor — that was not a typo in the title!

So I was reading about a new magazine the other day - it’s called ELDR (http://www.eldr.com/) and its target readers are elderly and affluent. I’m sure the editors of ELDR dropped the trailing “e” as a means for conveying a new and hip title. And that got me thinking. I like to read a lot about start-ups and emerging technologies and I’ve noticed a pattern, whereby lots of new companies are dropping that trailing “e” from their name.

I guess the early adopters on this front were the Motorola RAZR phone and the photo sharing site flickr, which is now a part of Yahoo. Who else is out there? Well, with some digging into my memory bank and a large assist TechCrunch, I found the following:

• Dopplr, which lets you share your travel plans with friends, family and colleagues
• graspr, a site that contains a wealth of instructional videos
• jaxtr, a service that allows you to link your phone to the web
• Frappr, a web-based community mapper (acquired by Platial in 2007) [side note: when my friend goes to Starbucks and gets a poorly made drink, he calls it a frappr ;-)]
• YouCastr, which allows anyone to become a sports broadcaster
• Zapr, which allows you to take files on your PC and share them with friends

I’m sure there are others out there. If you know of one that I haven’t listed, drop a comment below to let us know!

I’m not crazy about this “populr” trend (I guess I’m “old school”). So let me give a shout out to a company who did it right: Revver!

Jul 8 2008   11:32AM GMT

A digital nursery rhyme for online gurus and clever children of the Internet

Posted by: Alexander Howard
Apple, Technology, Web services, fun, YouTube, Internet, social bookmarking, creativity, Silicon Valley, songs, tag, social networking, Vista, humor, Web applications, Windows, word meanings, geek

Amit Agarwal posted the clever, useful graphic below over at his Digital Inspiration blog. The graphic has been making the rounds online; if anyone knows who originally created and uploaded it, please let me know so that I can properly credit him or her.

If you’re a geeky parent, this might be an upgrade on “A is for Apple.” Oh, wait. That part doesn’t change.

Most of these should be familiar to most netizens but, just in case you’re mystified, here’s a digital nursery rhyme to help you remember:

A is for Apple, user-friendly as can be

B is for Bluetooth, which connects printers to me

C is for Core Duo, a faster computer chip

D is del.icio.us, a social bookmarking trip

E is eMule, a file sharing client

F is for Facebook, a social networking giant

G is for Google, which searches most knowledge

H is for Holon, an Israeli college

I is for iPhone, a touchscreen smartphone

J is for Java, a language well-honed

K is Kazaa, another file sharing service

L is for Linux, an open source OS

M is for MSN, Microsoft’s portal

N is for Napster, which made record companies mortal

O is for Office, for presenting and writing

P is for Playstation, for gaming that’s exciting

Q is for Quicktime, used for videos large and small

R is for RSS, syndicating to us all

S is for Second Life, the 3D metaverse

T is tagging, creating folksonomies of verse

U is for USB, the universal connection

V is for Vista,  Microsoft’s OS correction

W is for Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia

X is for XP, the standard OS selection

Y is for YouTube, of online video fame

Z is for Zuma, a free silly game.

Now that you’ve relearned your ABCs,  next time won’t you sing with me?

Happy naptimes, future digerati.

Jun 15 2008   11:27AM GMT

What is Twitter? Is this distributed microblogging platform ready for the enterprise?

Posted by: Alexander Howard
messaging, Networking, wireless, small business, business, Mobile, applications, news, Web 2.0, enterprise, software, IT marketing, media, Technology, Web services, fun, video, new media, Internet, innovation, useful, aggregator, cool, culture, free, interesting, exploration, reviews, Silicon Valley, resource, collaboration, forum, wiki, conversation, community, social, interactive media, Web analytics, widgets, tool, tutorial, howto, trend, social networking, blogging, service, buzz, communications, Web applications, buzzword, word meanings, geek, conference, enterprise 2.0

Given that I’ve become an avid user of Twitter, I’m frequently asked what, exactly, Twitter is and what in the world it’s useful for.

Isn’t it just it a presence messaging on steroids? What about a free global SMS addressbook? Or a hyperlink-enabled persistent chatroom? To be fair, I don’t hear that last often, but summing up what Twitter is and what it does is challenging — especially in 140 characters or less. Twitter’s own “social messaging utility where people can communicate in real-time” comes close. Twitter’s creators know better than most what they’ve created and how it works.

Other takes on Twitter range far and wide:

• Caroline Middlebrook described Twitter as “an incredibly powerful marketing & community building tool.”
• In a long post that describes how he discovered Twitter and how SocialText is using it, Ross Mayfield called Twitter “mobile social software that lets you broadcast and receive short messages with your social network” aka, “Continuous partial presence.”
• Wendy Boswell writes that Twitter is a “mini-blogging platform that you can use to send messages of 140 characters or less to family, friends, or just the general Web community.”
• Dave Winer explains Twitter as a network of users on a microblogging platform with its own open-identity system and ecosystem.
• Ed Kohler posted that Twitter is “a social networking site based around text messaging.”

WhatIsTwitter.com is addressing the question by hosting a contest that asks you to explain Twitter in 140 seconds. (It runs through 6/23/08, if you’d like to enter.)

When I tweeted the question to the Twitter community, Robbert replied that Twitter was “a great way to get in touch and ‘meet’ very interesting people!” and Liz tweeted back that “Twitter is a window into other people’s worlds. Scholars can get insulated so it is nice to hear the ups & downs in other fields.”

In the end, however, I think a shade on Wikipedia’s current definition comes closest: a free distributed social networking and microblogging service that may be updated from the Web, IM, cellphone or a desktop client.

The question of what, exactly, you can DO with Twitter is something else altogether. The session at Enterprise 2.0 devoted to microblogging addressed exactly that question. The discussion was lively, both in person and on Twitter itself, as we could all see on the screen as Laura Fitton (@pistachio) Twittered about the event.

Even though at least one member in the audience questioned the etiquette of such an embedded distraction, with respect to her engagement with the rest of the panel, the bulk of the conversation between the other Twitterers in the audience and those present was inquisitive, supportive and engaged. You can see the various streams of conversation around the session and the conference in general at Twemes.com by using the hashtags #e20, #en20 and #ent20.

With the notable exception of Loren Feldman from 1938Media, the panelists supported the idea of Twitter or something like it (call it “X enterprise microblogging platform”) being both useful and present within an enterprise in the near future.

So what’s the story? Have I lost you yet? Do many of the terms above need further explanation? A colleague looked at me recently with a quirked eyebrow and asked me if I seriously expected her to ask conference-going IT professionals to “Tag their tweets on Twitter” and all I could do was grin.

Like so many emergent services and ecosystems on the Web, Twitter has evolved its own lingo. I’ve blogged about Twitter for WhatIs.com before, of course, but it’s worth reviewing the basics. Here’s a quick guide to get you started and give you some of your own”Twitter-fu.”

The Basics: For the novice Twitter user

By now, the story of how Twitter came to be has been extensively documented, so I’ll leave it to others to tell the tale. Check out this great video from Common Craft, Twitter in Plain English:



You can update Twitter from Twitter.com, which is how the majority of users access the service, from instant messenger or by texting to “40404″ with a cellphone registered with the service. If you do use a cellphone, remember that there may be associated charges for text messages of .10 or .15 per message. Early adopters of the Twitter and the iPhone discovered to their chagrin that thousands of texts got quite expensive. If you’re planning on using your cellphone to tweet, seriously consider investing in an unlimited text messaging plan.

No matter what, you’ll need to register first. Choose the username that fits you, your brand, your company, service, product or simply your whim. Try to make it as short as possible; you want to reserve as much space as possible for others to use in replies, since they’ll need to include your username in a reply.

Here’s where one of the conventions that Twitter has introduced into the Web comes into play. Instead of remembering both a username and a domain name ( johndoe at yahoo.com), all you have to do is remember a username (@johndoe). Just type in go to twitter.com, add the user name to the url and click “follow.”

If you want to publicly reply to a tweet from another user, just include @johndoe in your message and he or she will automatically see it. Just click “replies” on your Twitter page to see how has responded to you. You can also direct message another user by typing “d johndoe” — but only if they are following you. This is quite useful for conversation you don’t want the entire Web to be involved in.

There are other etiquette concerns, paralleling netiquette on the rest of the Web; read Chris Brogan’s post Considering Social Media Etiquette and Grammer Girl’s Twitter Style Guide to get a flavor of the conventions at play.

Ready to go? Start at the Twitter homepage, which includes a useful Twitter FAQ TwitterFeed. Each time you post to Twitter, it’s called a “tweet.” Each tweet has its own URL, just like a “normal” blog post has a permalink. Twitter’s 140 character limit means that brevity is crucial, so using URL shorteners like TinyURL.com is a must. You can make your first update just like a blog post on Blogger or Wordpress. “Hello World” would work, if you’re stuck for inspiration.

Twitter isn’t much fun, however, if you’re just twittering into the ether. To get the most from the service, you’ll need to find some friends or find interesting feeds to follow, like @MarsPhoenix or @BarackObama. MC Hammer is out there too, by the way. You can always just search for people you know on Twitter or go to a user’s profile page if you already know someone you want to “follow.” Once you get rolling, you can use a service like WhoShouldIFollow.com to find more friends.

Following means that you’ll get all of that person’s updates, so choose carefully. If you choose to follow top Twitterers, expect to see a lot of messages. This is a great way to discover interesting new people, however, so even if you don’t follow @Scobleizer, @LeoLaporte , @JasonCalacanis, @KevinRose or other A-list bloggers or “cewebrities,” make sure to check their profiles to see who they’ve discovered. You can always unsubscribe if someone posts content or links you don’t want to see in your feed.

The other symbol you’ll see often is the hashtag, which is the Twitter version of a social bookmark. Think of them as a way to add your tweets to niche conversations, specific events or around products or services. Learn more at hashtags.org. I mentioned them earlier when I listed the various hashtags for the Enterprise 2.0 Conference. By adding a # sign and then a series of numbers and letters afterwards (try #beatLA, for Celtics-lovers) your tweets will be aggregated into the great conversation.

Twitter has opened its application programming interface (API) to the development community , which has responded by creating many desktop clients that you can use to update the service, manage your messages and friends.

To use my favorite client, Twirl, you’ll need to download Adobe AIR and install Twirl as a desktop client. Twirl includes a URL shortener and many other features that, in my humble opinion, richly enhance your Twitter experience. Twirl can also be configured to post automatically to Pownce and Jaiku, two other popular microblogging services. If you use a Mac, Twitterific might be a good fit, too.

Rafe Needleman has posted a terrific “Newbie’s Guide to Twitter” over at Webware.com, which I highly recommend if you’re still having trouble getting started.

Getting into the conversation: For the intermediate Twitter user

Now that you’ve gotten your feet wet, here are some more services to expand your horizons.

You can monitor whatever keyword you choose, like your name or your company’s brandname, at Tweetscan. Even if you don’t choose to use Twitter actively, this is an important component of brand and reputation management.

You can see threaded conversations with Quotably. This is a useful tool if you want to see an entire back and forth between users in one place.

Similarly, Summize helps you track Twitter conversations in real-time.

Use Mobile Twitter if you have a BlackBerry, Treo or other smartphone with a browser or try out Hahlo.com if you have an iPhone.

There’s a dedicated BlackBerry client called TwitterBerry too, which is worth looking into if you’re a “CrackBerry Addict.”

Quakk, Tiny Twitter, TwitToday and Twobile all work as clients for Windows Mobile 5.

Facebook has a Twitter application that embeds your tweets in your profile and allows you to tweet from within the social networking environment.

You can display your latest tweets automatically on your blog with an embedded widget, like this Twitter widget for Wordpress or the Twitter Widget for Blogger.

Or, if you want to hook up your blog’s feed to Twitter, Twitterfeed will be helpful.

Watch Twittervision to see a mashup of a global Google Map and location-specific tweets.

Use TwitPic to share photos on Twitter.

For the Advanced Twitter User

If you’ve gotten this far and have been nodding your head all the time, waiting for something new, congratulations: Your Twitter-Fu is strong. The Twitter Fan Wiki should be your resource of choice, where new applications, services and software is aggregated and vetted by a strong user community. If you’re an alpha geek, make sure to check out the scripts page, which is chock full of geeky goodness.

I’m far from the first to try to explain what Twitter is an how it works, of course. Make sure to check out Tweeternet.com for an excellent explanation and outstanding list of Twitter tools.

If you’ve mastered the basic and intermediate tools and technologies, consider the following ways that Twitter has been put to good use:

• As a social justice tool, where people in critical situations can get the news out quickly
• As a crisis response and management tool (check out @RedCross)
• As a presence tool for emergency workers or individuals in a natural disaster zone

If you have questions, thoughts, additional resources, uses or any other response to this post, please use the comments. And, of course, Twitter about it. Do you think Twitter — or a client like it — is right for your business or enterprise? Let us know!

Mar 3 2008   4:37PM GMT

What is due diligence?

Posted by: Alexander Howard
small business, business, compliance, data, Silicon Valley, entrepeneurship, startup, marketplace, predictive, backup, buzzword, word meanings, law

Simply put, it’s doing in your homework. Just look at this sample M&A due diligence checklist.

In IT and the law, of course, the term “due diligence” has considerably more precise meanings. WhatIs.com’s definition for due diligence states it as:

…the process of systematically researching and verifying the accuracy of a statement. In everyday language, due diligence is synonymous with “the degree of effort required by law or industry standard.”

The term originated in the business world, where due diligence is required to validate financial statements. The goal of the process is to ensure that all stakeholders associated with a financial endeavor have the information they need to assess risk accurately.

When due diligence involves the offering of securities for purchase, as in an IPO (initial public offering), specific corporate officers are responsible for the proper completion of the process…

As is the case with so many other things in life, context matters. In general, due diligence includes the careful identification and evaluation of data sources, identification of potential risks and any other issues relevant to the statement or scenario in question.
Civil litigation and real estate law are even more specific, as you’ll read in our definition.

IT, as ever, is its own beast.

[Cartoon Credit: ScienceCartoonsPlus.com]

In the context of information technology, due diligence could mean determining whether a new operating system would be incompatible with important existing legacy applications, if a new developer understands the difference between Javascript and Java or whether new servers will fit on existing racks in a data center.

Due diligence can also be applied to careful testing of data or network security, disaster recovery preparedness, or any other critical infrastructure asset.

Failure to meet proper due diligence in these areas could leave the organization or client in question open to data breaches or malware infections.

In this sense, completing due diligence can be taken to be completing the steps that are “industry standard” in a particular area, like penetration testing or other code validation. Software companies that do not meet these goals may be liable for zero-day attacks, customer data breaches or other losses of mission-critical functions that could have been prevented with more stringent preparation.

It’s might be fair to say, for instance, that if TJX had had a better IT audit that mandated a switch to WAP instead of WEP security, one of the biggest data breaches in history might have prevented.

Or maybe not. Either way, the relevant IT guys probably should have done better due diligence before transmitting customer information over a wireless network protected only by weak encryption.

Any DB that doesn’t do due diligence testing to ensure that a database is recoverable from a major hardware of instance failure is similarly negligent.

There are plenty of examples out there. AstuteDiligence.com hosts a list of more general due diligence horror stories, with specific company and individual names redacted. There are some classic scenarios listed — the acquisition of a software company based upon a flashy demo, good PR and a well-designed website that turns out to be a maker of vaporware.

CFO Magazine ran a feature story back in ‘04 about companies that installed safeguards against merger surprises after due diligence failures.

In many circumstances, of course, due diligence works quite well, as Jan Stafford reported in a story about how a bank’s senior systems architect, sought and found a virtualization technology to help facilitate hardware consolidation and operating expenses low during system upgrades.

As Joseph Bankoff, a partner in the intellectual property and technology practice at law firm King & Spalding in Atlanta put it in a 2006 Infoworld article on the topic, “Due diligence is going in and digging a hole in the ground and seeing if there’s oil, instead of taking someone’s word on it.”

After all, you wouldn’t like it if someone else drank your milkshake.

Sep 17 2007   1:49PM GMT

Andreesen on the three kinds of platforms, the cloud and the future of the Internet

Posted by: Alexander Howard
Microsoft, interoperability, programming, operating systems, Web services, Internet, innovation, blog, learning, interesting, futurism, Silicon Valley, entrepeneurship, code, social networking, buzzword, cloud computing, Amazon, the cloud

One of my favorite discoveries of the past year has definitely been Marc Andreessen’s blog. From the moment he first started posting long, chewy, thoughtful discussions of his thoughts on technology, business and startups (along with wonderful digressions into great new sci-fi writers, Web 2.0, and essential online cheat sheets), Marc has been on the must-read list for most of the techie blogosphere.

Now, the famous co-founder of Netscape and co-author of the Mosaic browser has moved on to Ning, a social networking startup that’s jostling with Microsoft, Amazon, Sun, Facebook and others to provide a platform for all manner of distributed applications, all within “the cloud.” Amazon even calls their platform the Elastic Compute Cloud, or EC2.

Therein lies the rub. The word platform has become overused to the point of losing any precise meaning. WhatIs.com has long provided two definitions for platform:

1) In computers, a platform is an underlying computer system on which application programs can run. On personal computers, Windows 2000 and the Mac OS X are examples of two different platforms. On enterprise servers or mainframes, IBM’s S/390 is an example of a platform.

A platform consists of an operating system, the computer system’s coordinating program, which in turn is built on the instruction set for a processor or microprocessor, the hardware that performs logic operations and manages data movement in the computer. The operating system must be designed to work with the particular processor’s set of instructions. As an example, Microsoft’s Windows 2000 is built to work with a series of microprocessors from the Intel Corporation that share the same or similar sets of instructions. There are usually other implied parts in any computer platform such as a motherboard and a data bus, but these parts have increasingly become modularized and standardized.

Historically, most application programs have had to be written to run on a particular platform. Each platform provided a different application program interface for different system services. Thus, a PC program would have to be written to run on the Windows 2000 platform and then again to run on the Mac OS X platform. Although these platform differences continue to exist and there will probably always be proprietary differences between them, new open or standards-conforming interfaces now allow many programs to run on different platforms or to interoperate with different platforms through mediating or “broker” programs.

2) A platform is any base of technologies on which other technologies or processes are built.

Fortunately, in this mammoth post, Andreessen both modifies and adds to these definitions, putting the term in the context of the Internet and then exploring three different levels of online platform: the “Access API,” the “Plug-in API,” and the “Runtime environment.”

As a rather famous online pundit often writes,  read the whole thing (RTWT). If you’re at all interested in programming, online business strategy and the concept of the cloud, you’ll be glad you did.

Aug 27 2007   12:26PM GMT

Facebook: A social network evolves into a social utility

Posted by: Alexander Howard
Security, business, applications, Web 2.0, programming, data, new media, Internet, innovation, culture, education, college, public domain, portal, social publishing, interesting, creativity, Silicon Valley, entrepeneurship, startup, collaboration, community, social, discussion board, mashup, trend, social networking, directory, buzz, privacy, Web applications, buzzword, recruiting

What can I say about Facebook that hasn’t been said? Newsweek has placed Mort Zuckerberg, the founder of the social networking giant on its cover. And the press has been hyperventilating about Facebook for months.

So what is Facebook? It’s a simple idea, done well: move the “facebooks” of incoming college undergraduates online, with headshots and interests constituting a basic profile, and then create the tools for nodes on the network to interact and browse each other’s profiles.

It’s also my “latest discovery,” as I joined earlier this spring, egged on by a neighbor. Back when I went to college, we had such a thing, printed on “paper,” bound and distributed to the freshman class (and just as quickly appropriated by upperclassmen frequently interested in more than discovering who else was into rock climbing or Pearl Jam). Facebook was, at its inception, a social network for college students, with access limited to only students in the same institution. Now, Facebook has laid claim to being a “social utility,” bidding to become the platform or framework we use to organize our online lives.

Audacious, perhaps, but not unprecedented. Friendster had the early start in filling that role but never recovered from an inability of its original technical architecture to scale to massive traffic demands or challenges from MySpace and other networks.

To be fair, over the past spring and summer, the social networking phenomenon has continued to explode in popularity and innovation, but Facebook has grown much faster and pulled in the digerati like no other.

Why? There’s no single reason. While the decision to open the formerly closed network to the Internet at large is an obvious place to begin, instead of limiting membership to isolated pools of collegians, other factors are in play. Making APIs available to developers resulted in a tsunami of applications that help to further interconnect nodes within each social network has attracted enormous amounts of energy (and, increasingly) venture capital to the platform.

Choosing to keep a clean, easily navigated interface has mattered as well. While MySpace is still the biggest social network — and by most measurements, the most popular site on the Internet, the contrast between the two services couldn’t be much larger, aesthetically, as Facebook (by comparison) radically limits the visual control a user has over a profile. It doesn’t hurt that all of the young college graduates enter the workforce with profiles, either.

If you need a sense of how bound into the tech community Facebook has become, consider how Silicon Valley reacted to a recent Facebook outage.

There’s plenty of evidence too that spending time on Facebook has also evolved into a significant productivity drain (though some disagree) and security risk. (If you’re wondering which companies lead in embracing Facebook, along with the most risk, just read Elisa’s post). The trouble is that sysadmins with itchy trigger fingers may not be able to quickly shut off the flow of bandwidth by firewalling Facebook. Unlike other more informal networks, many professionals have been using to “friend” their coworkers, clients and collaborators, along with former college roommates and dorm buddies. While LinkedIn has long been the social network of choice for many professionals, Facebook has begun eating into that market. In the online social media world, the gaps between online and offline networks are continuing to close, along with whatever space remained between work and personal lives.

Netizens my age (proud members of the “XY generation” that bridges the gap between Gen X (children of the 80s) and Gen Y (folks who don’t remember life before CDs and email or who said “trust but verify“) and older may find some elements of Facebook surprising, though perhaps not more so than MySpace. Older users are joining, however, and finding a place. While privacy options for profiles exist, unlike MySpace, there’s significant potential for embarrassment and even calamity for college or career prospects for those who aren’t wary about posting photos or blog entries that don’t put them in a good light, to put it mildly. PR professionals and marketers would do well to consider the advice of social media gurus. And, as neighborhood applications crop up, there are also alarming security concerns regarding personal safety and property, given that clever criminals can posit where and when individuals are away.

While much of the value of joining these networks can be found in keeping touch with friends and alumni — and making new ones from within that social network — the amount of information that many people are adding to their profiles has also been identified as a valid phishing risk, with significant potential for social engineering hacks that allow access to corporate networks.

What to do? As is the case with the rest of the Web-based applications that have made their way into enterprise and personal desktops alike (users keep outwitting IT when installing consumer apps, apparently), the key is likely to be adaptive security policies that both recognize the increasingly blurred boundaries between work and personal life while respecting both the bandwidth limitations high usage may inflict upon a network and the need to limit the leak or theft of potentially damaging proprietary or personal data. No one is suggesting that developing, implementing or enforcing such a policy is easy, but the consequences of failing to try may extend well beyond a public relations disaster to the organization or individual who doesn’t consider Facebook to be a risk.

There are also no shortages of critics who view the closed nature of Facebook with some distaste — “yet another profile to populate” is a new form of fatigue in the digital age. Personal data portability may become a online movement. It’s certainly been the inspiration for a business plan or two. The founder of LiveJournal, for instance, has published a mini-manifesto for portable, open social networking, according to Mashable. (It may help that Google appears to be backing him). Other observers have noted that Facebook hasn’t been proven to be a rewarding platform for advertisers yet either, though the model is still evolving, as described in this excellent article from Business.com, the Facebook Economy.

In the meantime, I’ll enjoy watching classmates and friends pop up on Facebook; lest you wonder, you can find me there as well. Be warned: I’m sticking with adding friends, coworkers and neighbors, lest I develop social networking fatigue myself.

Aug 20 2007   6:06PM GMT

WikiScanner: How Googlebombing Virgil led to radical transparency for Wikipedia editing everywhere

Posted by: Alexander Howard
applications, programming, Internet, search engine, innovation, useful, cool, hacks, free, academics, interesting, Silicon Valley, collaboration, wiki, community, tracking, tool, humor, Web applications, controversy

Sometime this past summer, future CalTech grad student (and self-styled”disruptive technologist”) Virgil Griffith decided that he wanted to see if he could elevate his personal home page to the top of search results for “Virgil.”

While that dream may or may not come true, there’s no doubt that the “quotes” should now be removed from disruptive technologist, (along with my self-styling). Virgil hasn’t written an epic quite yet but he’s clearly provided a useful tool to journalists and inquisitive netizens alike. Meet WikiScanner.

In two weeks, Griffith created a Web site that matches the IP addresses attached to edits of Wikipedia pages with the IP addresses listed in the publicly accessible whois database for companies and media organizations worldwide.

Using a simple, minimally designed interface consisting of a form, text, dropdowns and hyperlinks, Griffith’s site allows users to first determine what the IP address of an organization is and then plug it into to discover what edits have been made from that IP range.

By providing the means to cross reference who is editing what, Virgil’s code nearly approaches poetry, at least judging by Jimmy Wales, who told the AP that “It is fabulous and I strongly support it.”

It’s not quite fair to say that the effort is all about the Virgil Google bomb, either. According to this Wired article, Griffiths was inspired by the discovery that many Congressional offices were editing their own entries. Wondering what corporations were doing the same thing, he created WikiScanner.

As Griffiths notes wryly in his WikiScanner FAQ, the reaction to the tool’s discoveries has been more or less as expected. The CIA and FBI, Disney, Diebold, Exxon and a rapidly expanding universe of other entitities, large and small, have been editing away. Take a look at Wired’s “list of salacious edits” to see how far the count of “minor public relations disasters” that WikiScanner has enabled — and be aware that any edits that you make to Wikipedia may not be as anonymous as you might think.