Amazon just announced CloudFront, a content delivery network that relies upon their amazing S3 storage product. S3 is used as the origin server and Amazon will then elastically distribute content to edge servers that are located in your user’s locale. Plans are in place for the US, Europe, Hong Kong and Japan.
Another amazing product from Amazon that is likely to shake up a number of markets.
Ever wonder how the social media gurus got to know so much? By making mistakes just like the rest of us. But thanks to a revealing guest article by David Sparks on Mashable.com the rest of us can spare ourselves some embarrassment.
The Biggest Mistakes Made by Social Media Gurus airs the confessions of mavens like Deb Schultz, social media strategist for P&G, who admits to using too many bells and whistles on her site without finding out from customers what they really wanted.
Schultz admitted she should have spent more time talking with customers instead of adding more content to the site.
David Sparks and Dana Gardner, blogger for ZDNet, both own up to spending way too much time answering all the negative comments posted on their blog sites until they each realized they were wasting their time fighting a war that couldn’t be won against geeks drinking espresso all day and angrily chattering on all night.
“Going to the lowest emotional common denominator to me is an ineffective way of reaching that audience. I’d rather come up with valuable insightful fresh innovative content than appeal to angry white men sitting around computers that don’t have anything else to do,” Gardner said.
However, ignoring negative posts and annoying people can be a mistake, too, as Ross Mayfield, founder of SocialText, found out.
“You really want to engage with every conversation that relates with your brand,” Mayfield advised, “Even if you don’t want to necessarily draw attention to the existence of a competitor.”
It’s a balancing act, really, staying engaged with readers without the conversation degenerating into an on-line (and very public) argument. There is a debate among experts on the value of even allowing commenting on company blogs, but that’s a discussion for another post. One mistake I have made is not reading the post carefully before commenting. I didn’t bother to notice that the post was a month old and the topic had digressed into something else and long since died. So my comment just made me look late for the meeting and off-topic. All I could do at that point was hope no one cared enough anymore to read the post—but I would never count on that. Darn permalinks.
There are some mistakes pretty much everyone would agree should never, ever, be repeated. At least two of them Sparks mentions are Stalking women on Facebook–one of the top ten signs you could be a loser (though Stuart Alsop mentioned in the article seems okay)–and Accepting friend requests from people you barely know. Sometimes even perfectly nice people have way too much time to spend online and if you don’t know that before you become friends, there’s no way to “de-friend” them nicely later.
You can read more mistakes from the experts at Mashable.com. And feel free to share some of your own with us–just don’t forget about the permalinks.
This is a great conference. It’s great to be back in NYC. There is no place like NYC. The sights. The smells. Seeing my family. All great. Here is a sample of today’s sessions …
Keynotes:
Tim O’Reilly: Web 2.0 is a data operating system; Work on stuff that matters; Create more value than you capture; Great potential in big problems; Vote: don’t let those who don’t participate pick our leadership.
Clay Shirkey: Information OVERLOAD. New problem? Not really. Soon after Gutenberg revolutionized printing there were too many books in print for most people to read in a lifetime. This problem has been with us for about 500 years. We need a new perspective on data flow. We need better filters.
Cloud Panel ::
An interesting discussion about what the cloud is. And isn’t. Best bits? Remember to consider scaling down when you are obsessed with scaling up or out. It’s always good to be as close to your end-users as feasible. When cpu’s are sold as a utility, coding practices will change lower utilization costs.
Digg Scaling :: Joe Stump
Stump Dump:
Scaling can cause severe hair loss.
Your mother lied: Share nothing. Share nothing architectures are the key to scaling out.
Decentralize; expect failure; just add boxes.
Cache forever; explicitly expire; develop a chain of responsibility.
Partition your data!
Joe Stump. Awesome.
Sequel to SQL
Whoa. As a (relational) database guy this talk was fascinating and scary. Relational databases don’t work in the cloud. Period. Geir explored plate spinning on EC2, Google’s BigTable, Amazon’s SimpleDB and 10gen’s Mongo data persistence platforms. It’s a different world now. “Eventually consistent” is my new, favorite term. Bottom line is we need to think about this problem from a new perspective and develop new solutions.
Scaling Meebo : Sandy Jen
The only women geek presenter so far. Sandy did a great presentation. Ironically, in my mind she was the geekiest as Meebo is a C/C++ application. She cautioned us to carefully decide when to be synchronous and when to be asynchronous. She confirmed a personal truism for me: Nothing simulates real life like real life. Load testing can provide valuable insights, but you don’t know if it’s going to work until you let your application loose. Also, look at alternative to Apache. lighttpd rocked their world.
Alix Iskold :: Amazon Web Services
They rock. Why?
Google Chrome might seem like old news already, but based upon attendance at a bonus session this morning by Ojan Vafai, a developer from the Google Chrome team, there is a LOT of interest here at the conference. Recall that Chrome was released three short weeks ago!
Ojan described the motivation for Google to develop their own browser. Their developers were frustrated by the current state of browser stability and performance and the difficulty of building good web applications. They wanted and needed a stable application platform to develop and deliver great end-user applications. After surveying the current technologies they determined that the current providers of browsers were not keeping up with the needs of web applications. They decided to build their new browser on top of WebKit, Apple’s open source web browser engine.
Google’s plan for Chrome:
Fraser Kelton gave an interesting talk on some ideas he has developed around some unintended side effects of this Web 2.0 thing. He outlined four trends that have the potential to create big problems for the adoption of new technologies.
Albert Wenger, a VC from Union Square Ventures gave a great talk on <blink>cloud computing</blink>. So what *is* cloud computing? A mere buzzword? The latest trend? Clearly there is something going on here. There was a huge public outcry when Dell attempted to copyright the phrase “cloud computing”.
The concepts behind cloud computing have been around for over 40 years. John McCarthy, a computer scientist and inventor of Lisp stated in 1961:
“If computers of the kind I have advocated become the computers of the future, then computing may someday be organized as a public utility just as the telephone system is a public utility… The computer utility could become the basis of a new and important industry.”
The industry has touted utility computing and grid computing and neither technology was widely adopted. Virtualization may be the technology that will make cloud computing a reality. Tony Chung has a nice write up here.
Wenger defined four principles which define cloud computing for him:
I started out this morning at People Powered Products … but it wasn’t what I thought it was about. A quick permanent redirect across the hall landed me in Knowledge Sharing at Ideo presented by Doug Solomon and Gentry Underwood. Much more interesting for me. This talk outlined a year long project at Ideo to foster collaboration and knowledge sharing across the company. Knowledge workers face ambiguous and dynamic problems on a daily basis and must adapt and be innovative in real time. The goals of the project were to empower teams to learn from one another, connect geographically seperated offices and enable global collaboration. They came up with 7 lessons that are transferrable to other organizations:
Cal Henderson over-delivered on his talk Scalable Web Architectures: Common Patterns and Approaches. My head is still spinning. Cal architected Flickr, a large scale kitten sharing website. You may have heard of it … details coming soon.
I got to the Apple Store on Michigan Ave. around 7:30am on Friday, 11 July, which was only about a half an hour before the store opened. Sure enough, there was a line. It didn’t look that bad, so I walked to the end of it only to be informed that it continued past the hospital and across the other street.
Around 8am the line started moving briskly, and many many more people (700-800 according to Apple’s spotters) lined up behind me.
By 9:30am I’d halved my distance to the Apple store, and by a little after 10am I was leaning up against the wall on the Huron side of the store, figuring I’d soon be on my way with a new iPhone.
The line stayed there for a half an hour, and just as I was about to give up it started moving again (a little) so I waited. Apple brought us bottles of vitamin water and California Pizza Kitchen was taking orders and delivering pizza to the line. By 11am I was in the store (and the air conditioning). The line snaked around the perimeter of the store and up the stairs to the “genius bar” stations that were temporarily phone activation stations. My newfound line friends and I counted people leaving with phones like you’d count thunderclaps - about one person leaving the store with a phone every ten minutes or so. Most of my moving forward in line was due to attrition - people getting out of line and leaving, not people leaving the store with activated iPhones.
When I got to the stairs I figured I was home free, so when the Apple Store manager told us “Great news, folks, activations are speeding up, and there’s only about 300 people in line ahead of you, so it should only be a couple more hours!” I took off, finally getting a cab into work about four hours after first getting in line.
Ugh.
Saturday afternoon I tried again. There was still a line, but it was much, much shorter. I decided to wait, and an hour later, I was able to finally get an iPhone 3G (although Apple couldn’t set up my new 3G phone with the same number as my previous iPhone account, so for now I’m carrying two iPhones - the first-generation with my old phone number and the new 3G with a new temporary number.
When Apple launched the first iPhone last year they revolutionized the mobile phone activation experience by allowing people to buy online or in a store and activate at home. Because of Apple’s new subsidy program with AT&T they’re making sure that people activate in-store to prevent people from unlocking their phones and using them with another carrier. Because of AT&T’s short-sightedness, to prevent the minority from unlocking their phones, they’re making everyone suffer.
Apple used to protect their customers from this sort of thing. Whatever happened to “it just works”?
When the first iPhone launched Apple bragged about how they were able to coerce AT&T into letting people activate at home. The process was painless and people were in and out of the store in mere minutes. By comparison, this year the iPhone purchasing experience was painful and awkward.
Granted, I could have waited a week and avoided most of the unpleasantness, but considering the high-profile of this product launch I would have thought that all involved would be better prepared.
Audience measurement always stirs up a lively debate: Advertisers demand more accurate numbers - they don’t want to pay for eyeballs that aren’t actually watching their ads. TV stations, on the other hand, want numbers that reflect their viewership and justify the amount they charge per CPM (cost per thousand impressions). The audience measurement firms that produce these numbers have their own set of challenges, such as keeping up with our rapidly changing media consumption habits.
According to this NYT article, Nielsen has developed a series of new “three-screen” reports in an attempt to keep up with current video-viewing habits and present a “complete picture of consumers’ media habits.” The report tracks video viewing over the TV, Internet, and mobile devices. Some significant findings include:
Questions about the validity of these findings aside, my main issue is with the problem of simultaneous media consumption. These days, it is not unusual for people to multitask, to watch an online video while the TV is playing in the background, or to watch TV and also watch an online video when ads are playing on TV.
Save a complete invasion of privacy, it will be hard to determine which screen gets the consumer’s attention at any one point of time - and that is what advertisers really want to be paying for. That said, the fact that Nielsen recognizes the need to track these “three screens” is a step in the right direction. At the very least, reports like this will begin to provide TV stations with more information about potential cannibalization.
Nielsen’s “three-screen” report also highlighted the disproportionate relationship between Internet use and online video viewing. “Those under 24 use the Internet less than older users but spend a greater percent of time viewing video,” said Nielsen CMO John Burbank. Not surprisingly, companies have recognized the potential to monetize these eyeballs and have come up with various ways to do so, such as viral videos or overlay ads.
However, a recent New York Post article about YouTube is less enthusiastic: “while 3 billion videos are viewed every month, revenues could total an anemic sub-$200 million this year - a reflection that less than a third of the videos generate income from ads.”
Enter Involver, a new start-up with a new solution. Its platform allows users to add an interactive call-to-action in the last frame of an online video. Viewers can then participate in a range of activities from taking a quiz to placing an order without having to navigate anywhere else, because everything takes place within the framework of the video. Whether people actually want to engage with the videos they watch in this manner remains to be seen. It will probably still be a number of years before working business models are established for online videos.
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