Facebook and Google: Philosophies Collide
September 27, 2010
I listened to the Thursday, Buzz Out Loud podcast. On the show the talent explained that a certain high profile blog (Techcrunch) wrote a story about a rumored Facebook phone. The high profile blog garnered a meeting with the founder of Facebook (Wizard Zuck or Mark Zuckerberg). In that discussion, if I heard correctly as I was peddling my exercise bike at 66 year old goose pace, Mr. Zuckerberg point out something along the lines that social functions could not be added on. The idea I took away was that Facebook is built for social functions. Google was built for search or some other function.
As I thought about this, the comment highlighted what I think of as a “platform” fight.
The idea has surfaced elsewhere. I have started to write about the i2-Palantir tussle. That seems to be about lots of different technical issues, but it is really a platform fight. i2 has been one of the leaders if not the leader in data fusion and analysis for law enforcement and intelligence applications for 20 years. Keep in mind that I have done some work for the i2 folks. The Palantir outfit—stuffed with $90 million in semi-worthless US bucks—is a comparative newcomer. These two outfits are struggling to keep or get, depending on one’s point of view—control of a very esoteric market niche. Most of the azurini and mid-tier consultants steer clear of this sector. The types of baloney generated by the azurinis’ spam plants can harm people, not just get procurement teams reassigned. The i2-Palantir issue interests me because it is a platform tussle.
I think Facebook and Google are in a platform war as well.
Now keep in mind that if you are a Googler, you see the world through Google goggles. If you are a Facebook fan, you see the world through the friend lens. I am in the middle, and here’s my take on Wizard Zuck’s alleged comment about “adding” social instead of building a social platform.
First, I think the shift from Google to Facebook as a go-to resource is an important change. The reason Facebook “works” for 500 million or more people is that the information (good, bad, right, wrong, made up, crazy, or indifferent) comes from humans. If you have some relationship with that human, the information exists within a relationship context. When I run a search on Google, I have to figure out for myself whether the information is right, wrong, made up, crazy, indifferent or an advertisement. I don’t get much human help to figure out what’s what. As a result, the Google algorithmic and “secret sauce” results strike me as somewhat less useful now that there are “contextual” results and what I call “friend cues.” Your mileage may vary, but these friend cues also exist in services like Twitter and its derivatives/applications like Tweetmeme.
Second, Google is definitely in Microsoft Word feature mode. I am impressed with some of Google’s new services such as its new authentication method, which I will write about in one of my October columns. I am not too impressed with other Google innovations such as “Instant”. The ration of Word type features to useful features seems to be tilting toward the Microsoft model. I don’t use Word because it is a program that tries to do everything well and ends up becoming a wild and crazy exercise in getting text on the screen. My goodness: green lines, red lines, auto bullets, disappearing images, weird table behavior. Give me Framemaker 7.2. Facebook is a complicated system, but the basics work reasonably well even though the firm’s immature approach to information reminds me of the last group of 20 somethings I spoke with in Slovenia several months ago. Google is now at risk of letting features get in the way of functional improvements. Facebook is in refinement mode. When it comes to social, Facebook is refining social actions. When it comes to social, Google is still trying to figure it out.
Third, Google is a platform built originally to deliver Web search results in the manner of AltaVista without Hewlett Packard in my opinion. Facebook is a platform built to let those who are young at heart find old and new pals. Google has morphed search into advertising and now faces the challenge of figuring out how to go beyond Orkut, which as I write this is struggling with some crazy virus or malware. Facebook is, according to a rumor I heard, working to provide search that uses the content within the Facebook ecosystem as the spider list. Curation versus search/advertising. Which platform is better to move search forward in the social space? Google is layering on a new approach to people and content and Facebook is simply indexing a subset of content. Curated content at that.
My view is that Facebook and Google are in a platform battle. Who will win? Wizard Zuck and Xooglers who know technically what Google errors to avoid in the Facebook social environment? Googlers who are trying to keep an 11 year old platform tuned for brute force Web indexing and on the fly ad matching run by smart algorithms?
Interesting platform battle. And a big one. This may not be a Socrates-hemlock type of tussle but it is a 21st century philosophical collision.
Stephen E Arnold, September 27, 2010
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TEMIS and Its Luxid Toolbar
September 26, 2010
A reader in Europe alerted us to the new Luxid Toolbar. TEMIS, which assets that it is the leading provider of text analytics solutions for the enterprise, offers a free LuxidBar. You can get the software from www.temis.com. According to Tagline, the TEMIS Web log:
The publicly available LuxidBar connects to a Luxid® Content Enrichment Platform hosted and maintained by TEMIS in the cloud. The platform performs a broad range of business and scientific entities extractions together with their semantic relationships.
The company say that the software “inserts smart links on the fly within the text” and “displays information analytics dynamically.”
The add in reminds us of some of the functionality available to users of the Inxight system before the company was acquired by Business Objects, which in turn was acquired by SAP.
TEMIS says, “This unique Internet browser sidebar accelerates Web page and document reading and connects users to related knowledge.” There is a stampede for this type of value adding in content processing. Other firms in the race include i2 Ltd. (which is not chasing the consumer market after 20 years of labor in this particular vineyard), Palantir (a company involved in what seems to be a tar pit related to its content refining methods technologies), JackBe (a former government centric outfit now probing the enterprise mashup market), and dozens of other companies moving from the intelligence market to the commercial market as funds in war fighting get redirected.
Worth a look.
Stephen E Arnold, September 26, 2010
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Tweets with Pickles: DataSift and Its Real Time Recipe
September 25, 2010
We have used Tweetmeme.com to see what Twitter users are doing right now. The buzz word real time has usurped “right now” but that’s the magic of folks born between 1968 and 1978.
DataSift combines some nifty plumbing with an original scripting language for filtering 800 tweets a second. The system can ingest and filter other types of content, but as a Twitter partner, DataSift is in the Twitterspace at the moment.
Listio describes the service this way:
DataSift gives developers the ability to leverage cloud computing to build very precise streams of data from the millions and millions of tweets sent everyday. Tune tweets through a graphical interface or through its bespoke programming language. Streams consumable through our API and real-time HTTP. Comment upon and rank streams created by the community. Extend one or more existing streams to create super streams.
The idea is that a user will be able to create a filter that plucks content, patterns like Social Security Numbers, and metadata like the handle, geographic data, and the like. With these items, the system generates a tweet stream that matches the parameters of the filter. The language is called “Filtered Stream Definition Language” and you can see an example of its lingo below:
RULE “33e3891a3aebad56f962bb5e7ae4dc94” AND twitter.user.followers_count > 1000
A full explanation of the syntax appears in the story “FSDL”.
You can find an example on the DataSift blog which is more accessible than the videos and third party write ups about a service that is still mostly under wraps.
The wordsmiths never rest. Since I learned about DataSift, the service has morphed into “cloud event processing.” As an phrase for Google indexing, this one is top notch. In terms of obfuscating the filter, storage, and analysis aspect of DataSift, I don’t really like cloud event processing or the acronym CEP. Once again, I am in the minority.
The system’s storage component is called “pickles.” The filters can cope with irrelevant hash tags and deal with such Twitter variables as name, language, location, profiles, and followers, among others. There are geospatial tricks so one can specify a radius around a location or string together multiple locations and get tweets from people close to bankrupt Blockbuster stores in Los Angeles.
The system is what I call a next generation content processing service. Perched in the cloud, DataSift deals with the content flowing through the system. To build an archive, the filtered outputs have to be written to a storage service like Pickles. Once stored, clever users can slice and dice the data to squeeze gems from the tweet stream.
The service seems on track to become available in October or November 2010. A graphical interface is on tap, a step that most next generation content processing systems have to make. No one wants to deal with an end user who can set up his own outputs and make fine decisions based on a statistically-challenged view of his or her handiwork.
For more information point your browser at www.datasift.net.
Stephen E Arnold, September 25, 2010
SAP Gets Agile like an Aging Quarterback
September 24, 2010
A year round exercise program and a grueling pre season warm up can put bounce in an aging athlete’s step. SAP is back, buying companies and making waves in the enterprise software sector. The company’s most recent announcement caught the attention of Computerworld. The story “SAP Rolls Out Wave of ‘Rapid Deployment’ Apps” explains that “relationship management modules” can be up and running in as little as three months. Yep, the 40 yard time for an aging athlete is about that when racing against a 23 year old.
One of the more interesting comments in the story was, in my opinion, this passage:
SAP’s announcement is the latest effort by the vendor to shed its image as a provider of monolithic, difficult-to-maintain ERP systems. In recent years it has rolled out a series of “enhancement packs” that help customers of its flagship Business Suite add significant new features without the pain of a full-blown upgrade.
To me, this means that the future rapid deployment customer already has SAP up and running. That process can, in my experience, consume more than three months.
What we are learning is that our clients expect changes to be made quickly. For example, we are building one of our news filtering systems. The entire project had to be designed, implemented, and made operational in four days. We hit the target.
I don’t have too many clients who think in terms of a minimum of 12 weeks for a solution. SAP has and I envy the time windows in which their work may be viewed. I look out the window of a jet plane, so my window is open only briefly. That seems to be a trend here in Harrod’s Creek.
The write up strikes me as wishful marketing type thinking packaged as an announcement. To an aging athlete, leisurely agility is as good as real agility I suppose. Just my opinion. Honk.
Stephen E Arnold, September 24, 2010
Freebie
Free File Conversions
September 23, 2010
Connectors are tough to code. If you license them, you may require one of the hefty Ford F 250s with four rear wheels to move the money from your bank to the vendor’s office. Oracle, for example, has connectors for sale, and we have used them. They work as advertised, but some clients find the license fee interesting.
We have found a service that may warrant some testing, gentle reader.
Online-Convert.com provides the facility that can “convert media files online from one format into another.” You can now convert instantly and freely, all your audio, video, image, document, eBook into many different formats online, without installing any software.
The procedure for conversion is quite simple. The user uploads the file in the original file format, which is stored on a server, where it converts into the specified new file format, and then is provided to the user as a unique download link. There is a file size limit of 100 Megabyte to upload a file for free conversion, and the link for downloading the converted file is valid for 24 hours or up to 10 downloads. Using the facility of QR codes, one can also access the download links on the mobile phone as well. Definitely, a useful service worth bookmarking that might come handy anytime.
Harleena Singh, September 23, 2010
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Exclusive Interview: Quentin Gallivan, Aster Data
September 22, 2010
In the last year or two, a new type of data management opportunity has blossomed. I describe this sector as “big data analytics”, although the azure chip consultants will craft more euphonious jargon. One of the most prominent companies in the big data market is Aster Data. The company leverages BigTable technology (closely associated with Google) and moves it into the enterprise. The company has the backing of some of the most prestigious venture firms; for example, Sequoia Capital and Institutional Venture Partners, among others.
Aster Data, therefore, is one of the flagships in big data management and big data analysis for data-driven applications. Aster Data’s nCluster is the first MPP data warehouse architecture that allows applications to be fully embedded within the database engine to enable fast, deep analysis of massive data sets.
The company offers what it calls an “applications-within” approach. The idea is to allow application logic to exist and execute with the data itself. Termed a “Data-Analytics Server,” Aster Data’s solution effectively utilizes Aster Data’s patent-pending SQL-MapReduce together with parallelized data processing and applications to address the big data challenge. Companies using Aster Data include Coremetrics, MySpace, comScore, Akamai, Full Tilt Poker, and ShareThis. Aster Data is headquartered in San Carlos, California.
I spoke with Quentin Gallivan, the company’s new chief executive officer on Tuesday, September 22. Mr. Gallivan made a number of interesting points. He told me that data within the enterprise is “growing at a rate of 60% a year.” What was even more interesting was that data growth within Internet-centric organizations was growing at “100% a year.”
I asked Mr. Gallivan about the key differentiator for Aster Data. Data management and chatter about “big data” peppers the information that flows to me from vendors each day. He said:
Aster Data’s solution is unique in that it allows complete processing of analytic applications ‘inside’ the Aster Data MPP database. This means you can now store all your data inside of Aster Data’s MPP database that runs on commodity hardware and deliver richer analytic applications that are core to improving business insights and providing more intelligence on your business. To enable richer analytic applications we offer both SQL and MapReduce. I think you know that MapReduce was first created by Google and provides a rich parallel processing framework. We run MapReduce in-database but expose it to analysts via a SQL-MapReduce interface. The combination of our MPP DBMS and in-database MapReduce makes it possible to analyze and process massive volumes of data very fast.
In the interview he describes an interesting use case for Barnes & Noble, one of Aster Data’s high profile clients. You can read the full text of the interview in the ArnoldIT.com Search Wizards Speak service by clicking this link. For a complete list of interviews with experts in search and content processing click here. Most of the azure chip consultants recycle what is one of the largest collection of free information about information retrieval in interview form available at this time.
Stephen E Arnold, September 22, 2010
Freebie. Maybe another Jamba juice someday?
BA-Insight Lands $6 Million
September 22, 2010
According to CMS Wire, a Microsoft partner—no, fix that—“a key Microsoft partner”—has received a cash injection of $6.0 million. You will get the content management write up in the story “BA-Insight Secures US$6M Funding for Enterprise Search”. The PR Newswire story “BA-Insight’s Strong Growth in Enterprise Search Space Secures $6 Million in Series A Funding” provides a bit more detail. Note: links to PR stories often go dead, so you may have to resort to some poking around via Bing.com which usually indexes Microsoft centric stories reasonably well.
The news release said:
BA-Insight, Inc., an enterprise search software company specializing in Microsoft-based information access technology, announced today that it has secured $6 million in private equity funding led by New York-based Milestone Venture Partners. Paladin Capital Group and Osage Venture Partners also invested in the round. The New York State Common Retirement Fund participated in the financing through funds managed by Milestone Venture Partners and Paladin Capital Group.
What’s the money for? The release said:
BA-Insight will deploy the capital raised to further develop and extend its suite of enterprise search products for SharePoint Search, expand its marketing efforts and grow its sales and support services organizations. “The market for BA-Insight technologies is expanding rapidly,” explained Guy Mounier, CEO and co-founder of BA-Insight. “We have huge growth potential in U.S. government, professional services, energy and other sectors. This investment will allow us to build the organization needed to support our growth in those markets.”
BA-Insight is a vendor committed to the enterprise search market. This “sector” has been under significant pressure from lower cost Microsoft solutions such as dtSearch (Bethesda, Maryland) and open source solutions like Lucene/Solr. In fact, enterprise search is becoming commoditized.
What’s the BA-Insight difference? According to the news release:
BA-Insight’s flagship product Longitude optimizes Microsoft’s SharePoint Search, and FAST Search for SharePoint platforms. Users can find, analyze, and act on relevant information regardless of the format or where the data resides. Longitude offers out-of-the-box SharePoint Connectors to more than 20 business applications including ERP, CRM, Messaging, and ECM. Longitude also provides a state-of-the-art user experience via a rich Silverlight SharePoint document viewer.
My observations are:
- The BA-Insight play is that Microsoft will continue to encourage its top paying certified partners an opportunity to sell into the SharePoint ecosystem. With more than 100 million SharePoint licenses in the wild, that’s a big ecosystem. The risk is that Microsoft could poach the juicy accounts. If BA-Insight gets traction, Microsoft might buy BA-Insight in order to fatten up its offerings. IBM has followed this strategy for several years. The key difference, in my opinion, is that IBM is using Lucene/Solr and buying value-adding technologies to boost the IBM services business. The Microsoft approach will have a unique fingerprint.
- I think that BA-Insight is “glue play”. What I mean by “glue” is that Microsoft leaves it to licensees to hook together various components to solve a problem. BA-Insight and a handful of other Microsoft centric players provide a “snap in” solution to reduce the time, cost, and hassles of getting basic functions to work as required. Fast Search is a complex beastie, and BA-Insight’s approach is to deliver a solution without the Fast cartwheels that can lead to staff turnover.
- The challenge in the market will be one of time. The recession is allegedly “over.” For organizations strapped for cash, economies will be of significant interest. In the “search and SharePoint” niche, there are quite a few competitors. These range from other Microsoft partners such as SurfRay and Fabasoft to integrators who can hook together existing pieces and parts. Companies in this consulting approach to the search business include New Idea Engineering, with whom I have worked in the past, and my son’s company, Adhere Solutions. Note: my son did not pay me to reference him. I think I bought lunch yesterday which is how the family thing works, right?
- The shift in the enterprise market that I will talk about at the ISS conference in October 2010 is that “search” is not what most users require. The need is for low latency processing of mission critical data delivered in what I call a data fusion system. Few companies offer a “platform” that ingests and makes actionable a range of data. The key players in this space include 20 year veterans like i2 in Cambridge, England, Kroll (now a unit of Altegrity), the Palantir organization (now allegedly involved in a confusing legal matter), and the lesser known but up and coming Digital Reasoning, among others. The name “BA Insight” suggests a capability in the data fusion space, but the new release’s emphasis on “enterprise search” suggests that BA-Insight is anchored in the traditional search market. Perhaps this is just a positioning issue specifically for the news release?
The big challenge is use of the money. Increasing “marketing” sometimes works and sometimes does not. In the “search space”, there is a great deal of noise, smoke, and confusion. The strong interest in open source search so far has not spilled over into the SharePoint sector. I think that will happen. When it does, there will be some interest in Microsoft-centric shops. That interest will probably come from new hires and the chief financial officer’s staff. The traditional Microsoft certified professionals like their counterpart Oracle certified database professionals want to preserve the status quo.
The status quo is not such a comfortable place. Big outfits like Oracle are resorting to legal eagles to cope with open source. Microsoft has a mixed record with regard to open source. My hunch is that BA Insight will have to find a way to go viral within the SharePoint community. That will take keen mastery of social media, the sales ability of Autonomy, and the technical savvy of some serious wizards like Exalead, the repositioning touch of Vivisimo, and the market focus of Coveo. BA Insight has the opportunity to be the break out enterprise search vendor in 2010.
Will $6.0 million be enough? I don’t know the answer. The investors’ smart money thinks BA Insight has what it takes to succeed. From the grandstand in Harrod’s Creek, this race will be fun and entertaining to watch.
Stephen E Arnold, September 22, 2010
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Facebook: Makes Noise without Trying
September 20, 2010
Americans like to post photos, update status messages, and scroll through news from friends on Facebook, more than any other activity when online. This is concluded from a comScore research revealed in the USAToday.com article, “Facebook Inches Past Google for Web Users’ Minutes.” Moreover, what startles us more is the fact stated that, “U.S. Web surfers are spending more time socializing on Facebook than searching with Google.”
My view is that Google wants to make sure usage for its service sticks in the 50 to 60 percent range. At these levels, Google is not really a monopoly in my view.
But this Facebook surge probably rings a bell for Google, as well as Yahoo, both of which were well ahead of Facebook ,in terms of percentage of Web surfers who spent time on their sites. In just a matter of three years, Facebook’s share of U.S. surfers’ total minutes per month has risen from 2 percent to 9.9 percent, whereas Google lags behind at 9.6 percent, even after including its sites like YouTube, Gmail and others. This could well be a wakeup call for the giant Google, with a challenge to regain the top spot.
But the real story is that a post in a popular Web log and the follow up story “Anatomy Of A PR Spin (AKA How To Lie Like A Pro)” has escalated into a major media incident in the blogosphere. The idea that Facebook, a mere social network, would create a mobile device is little more than one of those Silicon Valley rumors. What is important is that a Silicon Valley rumor like Oracle wanting to buy a search vendor (how boring) becomes when Facebook is involved. Not boring. A huge issue.
That’s the story for me.
Facebook right now is one of the outfits with the power to disrupt. Forget the Facebook phone or whatever the rumor says the device is.
Facebook has arrived and it will be no easy task to put a damper on the Facebook noise. Honk.
Stephen E Arnold, September 20, 2010
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AOL and Its Google Tie Up
September 20, 2010
Remembering the heydays bring about feelings of gaiety, but would the same old associations be able to produce the extraordinary magic again? Well, at least AOL is trying to make it happen. We read about “AOL Renews Search Ad Deal With Google” on WebProNews, and the deal that “Google will provide search services to AOL’s content network and properties, in exchange for a revenue-sharing arrangement between the two companies.”
AOL is all-upbeat about this new development and plans to expand the deal in the coming future, with hopes that this alliance “will provide improved experiences to AOL’s world wide audience,” says the article. It adds further that both the companies will work together and cover mobile search, and bring AOL’s video content to YouTube. We think Google has nailed the former superstar’s business, but do you think that Google and its Xoogler can make AOL a powerhouse once again? We doubt it. Yahoo is trying to make its service grow, and both AOL and Yahoo seem to be competing in a very similar business manner. One is Googley. The other is Microsofty.
Harleena Singh, September 19, 2010
Fujitsu and Libraries: A Bit of a Surprise
September 20, 2010
Fujitsu has taken the charge on the cloud. It recently started its software-as-a-service (SaaS)-based solution for library administration for Japan’s municipal public libraries, as part of its global cloud strategy. The JapanToday’s article, “Fujitsu to Start Services for Libraries Using Cloud Computing,” further states that, “the services will enable libraries to manage information on lending books to users without their own computer systems.”
Fujitsu estimates that deploying the ICT system environment for the libraries, with the help of Fujitsu’s datacenters can save the libraries about 30 percent on their ICT costs over a period of five years. The article says that since the library employees are relieved from “the responsibilities for maintaining and operating the ICT system, the library can operate more efficiently.” As Fujitsu plans to create regional library centers, and its rival NEC Corp too plans to begin similar services, it appears to us as a different and potentially predatory move against the beleaguered library vendors.
Harleena Singh, September 20, 2010
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