Data Centers for Facebook and Google: Juiciness in Alleged Facts
August 16, 2010
Navigate to “Two Data Centers Present a Study in Contrasts.” The information in the write up is germane to search and social networking. A happy qua ck to Theodoric Meyer, who did a very good job on this article for the Dalles (Oregon) Chronicle.
Dalles? Yep, that’s the town in which first Google, then Facebook, decided to set up power sucking data centers. In the olden days, data centers had lots of people. Today’s data centers are designed to be as close to people free as possible. Humans wandering around a data center filled with itty-bitty gizmos crunching lots of data can get screwed up in a heartbeat if a clumsy human does something like pull a plug or punch a button to see what happens.
You will want to read the full write up by Mr. Meyer. Here are the factoids that I noted:
- Google set up shop in scenic and struggling Dalles in 2006. Now Facebook with its Xooglers is on the same path.
- Data center managers have to make nice with city officials, particularly in places like scenic and struggling Dalles.
- Facebook is doing a better job of building bridges that Google’s Math Club crowd did.
- No Oreogon taxes will be paid on the data centers for 15 years. (A big yes to the American market system.) A minimum number of hires and higher pay were the requirements Google and Facebook had to meet.
- Facebook’s facility will have 147,000 square feet or about 2.2 American football fields. That’s almost as big a typical trailer here in Harrod’s Creek, Kentucky.
- Facebook power consumption will be at 30 megawatts with a need to access up to 90 megawatts of power. BGF (before Google and Facebook), the township used 30 megawatts of power.
- Google has done “a lot of good” in Dalles.
The key factoid. The fellow responsible for Google’s Dalles facility has been hired by Facebook. You can take the Xoogler out of Google but you can’t take the Google out of the Xoogler.
And that contrast? Math Club compared to making nice with political officials.
Stephen E Arnold, August 16, 2010
BSB Gets Brainy with Brainware
August 8, 2010
My newsreader delivered to me this Red Orbit news release: “British Sky Broadcasting Group Adopts Brainware Distiller to A/P Automation.” [Link may go dead at any time.] “A/P” is shorthand for accounts payable. The “automation” refers to using Brainware’s content acquisition methods for manipulating accounts payable information. According to the news release:
BSkyB) has selected the company’s Brainware Distiller(TM) solution for the processing of invoices in the United Kingdom and Ireland. BSkyB will also implement the Brainware Distiller Visibility(TM) module for real-time metrics and reporting on the invoice processing cycle, as well as Brainware’s own workflow and exception handling module.
What strikes the addled goose as interesting is that the Brainware trigram method and more traditional content processing have been blended for this niche solution. Brainware, like other search and content processing companies, are working to find market solutions that need a problem solved, not a basic search solution. Does this mean search is dead? If revenues flow, nope. Brainware’s angle seems more creative than search vendors who content themselves with providing a snap in solution to SharePoint in my opinion.
Stephen E Arnold, August 8, 2010
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Amazon and Its New BFF, Facebook
August 4, 2010
Microsoft expressed its love for Facebook with an investment of $240 million in late 2007. That is public information. Less well known is the on-again, off-again relationship between Amazon and Microsoft. Cross town rivals, both companies eye one another’s database innovations, business methods, and products.
Amazon’s interest in Facebook seems to be rising. “Amazon Now Taps Into Facebook for Social Product Recommendations”, if on the money, reported that cloud-computing giant Amazon has added a nifty Facebook feature. Now you can integrate Facebook into your personal Amazon recommendations.
To use the feature, navigate to your Amazon recommendations. Amazon uses Facebook Connect to provide you with social recommendations based on information in your Facebook profile.
After you activate this feature, Amazon will display a dedicated page within the recommendations section of your Amazon account. You will see which of your friends also like the same books, bands, videos, and other media.
Too much big brother? Is Amazon nosing into Microsoft’s territory? Is Amazon working with Microsoft on other social integration services? Something is up. We don’t know what, but the move is interesting.
Stephen E Arnold, August 4, 2010
Facebook Runs Wide Open
July 28, 2010
Open source technology, once relegated to the furthest reaches of computer geekdom, is helping over 500 million people a day share status info, view photos and even poke a friend, they just don’t know it. Facebook, the King Kong of social media, has embraced open source tools, especially Lucene products, on several different levels so it works faster and smarter. A recent interview with Facebook’s senior open programs manager, David Recordon, for Developer.com “Inside Facebook’s Open Source Infrastructure,” revealed a surprising pile of open source applications. According to the piece, “Facebook’s open source Web serving infrastructure has a lot more than just the traditional LAMP (Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP) stack behind it.”
The company taps Apache and Lucene. Cassandra, an Apache database project, is utilized heavily by the site. It is one of three open source databases used for storing information and helping the process run smoother. “While we store the majority of our user data inside of MySQL,” Recordon said. “We have about 150 terabytes of data inside of Cassandra, which we use for inbox search on the site and over 36 petabytes of uncompressed data in Hadoop overall.”
With such a well-planned method for storing data by using open source programs, it only makes sense the data analysis is handled in a similar fashion. Here, Apache Hive technology is utilizedin a major way.
“A large part of our infrastructure is open source and we really think that it’s important in terms of being able to allow developers that are building with the Facebook platform to scale using the same pieces of infrastructure that we use,” Recordan said.
Facebook is arguably one of the most important companies of our time. Few sites have changed the way we spend time at and away from the computer. So its warm embrace of open source technology feels like a sign of big things to come as companies like Lucene gain more recognition. What’s interesting is that Facebook has a number of Googlers pumping their DNA into Facebook. The technical decisions at Facebook are different from those made at Google. Facebook does social pretty well. Google does not, at least yet. Is there a message here? Beyond Search will do an Overflight at some point.
Stephen E Arnold, July 28, 2010
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Social Media Disappoints Some
July 27, 2010
For the very first time, social media has been rated on the ACSI E-business report that scores customer satisfaction in a number of areas including social media sites as well as search engines and portals and the results are a less than favorable. Is the social media apple harboring an ugly worm?
The report from ForeSee Results scores social media low on the scale but notes at the same time that Web sites like Facebook can still enjoy a monopoly with abysmal customer satisfaction ratings. While a score in the report of lower than 70 is considered poor, Facebook only managed to get a 64. It should be no surprise that customers who inked their concerns about Facebook put privacy and security issues at the forefront. (Keep in mind that the goslings at Beyond Search have some concerns about pop up, in your face surveys. We dismiss these as annoying intrusions. Thus, the samples on which the results are based may contain a bias that makes these data as wacky as the addled goose when he goes without sleep.)
The Daily HaHa nailed the goslings reaction to both the pop up data collection method and the findings reported by ForeSee. Source: http://www.dailyhaha.com/_pics/gift_of_disappointment.jpg
On the other side of that fence was Wikipedia that had a score of 77. As far as the news and information sites went there was a constant mean score of 74. It’s also interesting to note that while Google’s overall score stayed high , it suffered an overall decline of seven per cent. (Keep in mind the nature of the sample and the omission of the margins of error.)
Still, the social media scores are the alleged big story since they entered the rating system for the first time. The ForeSee Results Annual E-Business Report with the ACSI had some interesting assertions based on numbers for social media including:
- The ACSI measured 30 online companies and MySpace and Facebook were the lowest scoring sites. (This is interesting since Facebook recently passed 500 million members and MySpace has been either stable or in decline for years.)
- The customer satisfaction issues with Facebook are generally age related. Older people were generally more critical of the site than younger people. (In the absence of demographic anchor data, perhaps older folks are judging Facebook on factors not queried in the survey questions via the pop up? Perhaps those filling in pop ups were biased to be more critical? Hard to tell because the report seems to have an knife to sharpen in our opinion.)
Is Facebook Stalled on the Railroad Tracks?
July 22, 2010
Legal hassles may be escalating. The Google is – slowly, I admit – gearing up for a social push. And according to an article “Are We Reaching Peak Facebook”? in Future Tense, written by Jeff Horwich, we might be seeing the beginning of the decline of Facebook. It seems to be the social media site had a terrible June and only had growth that approached the population size of Minneapolis. That’s 330,000 people that month alone.
If the tone here sounds snide, read on…it’s not necessarily so. Facebook had a May where they logged in almost 8 million new users. The dip seems to be a result of the some users getting disgruntled with some of their policies and some other hash media attention, but to think they are hitting the brick wall is a little fanciful. Bad attention for Facebook only has a temporary effect. They’ve been able to listen for any trains approaching in the past and step away to let problems pass. That could account for the fact they are matching Orkut in India and Brazil.
Rob Starr, July 22, 2010
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Big Surprise Department: Adolescent Attention Spans Ding Facebook
July 20, 2010
In the world of high technology and IT, sometimes the obvious gets overlooked for the sophisticated. According to two sources in an article called Why Many Teens Are Moving On From Facebook in emarketer.com, one fifth of the teenagers on the social networking site have lessened their using habits as of April.
That kind of information doesn’t bode well for a large portion of Facebook customers. Still, the ship might be sinking, but a little more slowly than other social media sites. MySpace has reported that 22% of teens had stopped using the service and Utube and Twitter has a 15% abandonment rate to speak of.
Still, this is more bad news for Facebook who have been hit with a series misfortunes lately that included some bad press. However, the experts don’t think all this has anything to do with the privacy issues that were raised in the spring of 2010.
Stephen E Arnold, July 20, 2010
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The Flux in Free Search
July 16, 2010
I liked the good old days when the azure chip crowd and the data satraps would point out that Google was number one in Web search. For most people, the idea that Google.com was the number one place to go when looking for information was okay. Life was simple and the PageRank method generated useful results for most queries. Something was working if two thirds of the search traffic went to the Mountain View outfit, right?
Now something is changing, and I am not sure I like the shift.
First, I read Fast Company’s article “Twitter Now the World’s Fastest Growing Search Engine.” The key factoid comes from Biz Stone (great name for sure). He suggested that Twitter fields 800 million search questions per day or 24 billion queries per month. Google, according to my addled estimates is in the billions per day. The key point is that Twitter continues to gain search traction. Twitter is an information utility. Each time the addled goose writes a goose-based post like this one, we fire it out to Twitter. Believe it or not, people tweet about our articles. Yesterday our Yahoo story was fired around. I am not sure if that helps or hurts Beyond Search, but it is interesting to me.
Second, I read the New York Times’s “Friending the World” article in my hard copy paper on page B-1 and B 8. You may be able to snag a peak at this url under the article title “Facebook Makes Headway Around the World”. Don’t honk at me if you have to pay. The point of the write up is that Facebook is getting big and fast. In India, where Google’s Orkut was the big dog, Facebook is sniffing at Google’s chicken korma. What happens if Facebook’s search starts gaining traction?
My view is that Google may find itself having to work hard as it did in the 1998 to 2003 period. With free search appearing to be in flux, Google may have to take prompt action to deal with the upstarts Facebook and Twitter. My hunch is that these two services continue to grow because people like the addled goose figured neither had much of a change in a Googley world. As I say on my About page, I am often wrong. Perhaps this is an instance of how the addled goose cannot see the 20 somethings accurately?
Stephen E Arnold, July 16, 2010
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Facebook Now a Springboard
July 14, 2010
Those us in the Internet marketing aren’t surprised, saw it coming, will all now stand in a line and scream ‘I told you so’ to all those who thought that the social media frenzy might have just been a fad.
According to an article in ReadWriteWeb.com, Gigya, a company that provides social optimization platforms for firms that want to take advantage of these new tools, Facebook is the most common jumping off point for people logging in to other sites from social media. The gap that was widening last January is getting bigger too. Presently Facebook accounts for 46 percent of logins from social media.
Strange how the real competition from Google is coming from social media and not Bing. Maybe it’s time real innovators start targeting that site for some competition since Facebook is the preferred starting point for surfing when it comes to social media.
Rob Starr, July 14, 2010
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Germany Dings Facebook
July 11, 2010
Maybe Germany has lost its patience with American companies. First, the country failed to see the innocence of the Googlers who were suck down broadcast Wi Fi data. Now Facebook is in the barrel. “German Officials Launch Legal Action against Facebook” makes clear that German authorities are not amused by Facebook. For me, the key passage in the write up was:
“We consider the saving of data from third parties, in this context, to be against data privacy laws,” said Johannes Caspar, head of Hamburg’s Data Protection Authority. Mr Caspar said he had received a number of complaints from people who had not signed up to Facebook, but whose details had been added to the site by friends. He accused Facebook of saving private data of non-members without their permission, to be used for marketing purposes.
Fun loving Californians often find their Bay to Breakers enthusiasm inappropriate for some folks. Like Google, Facebook will have to deal with what probably looks like an annoyance from Silicon Valley.
Good Bullenbeisser. Good boy.
In my experience, German officials may demonstrate some of the characteristics of the Bullenbeisser. Under slung jaw. Tenacious grip. Single mindedness. Oh, stubborn. Sometimes mean. Probably indifferent to adults running naked in the California sun.
Stephen E Arnold, July 11, 2010
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