Facebook claims an astonishing 300 million active users worldwide, which roughly equals the population of the United States. Web monitoring company Pingdom uses its blog to show with a series of maps how this growth has played out since 2004. It's an interesting way to look at it.
The University of Florida, Cornell University and a handful of other schools have been awarded $12.2 million to build a social/collaborative network for scientists and researchers. The idea is to make it easier to find research and like-minded researchers in an effort to speed new discoveries.
The project, funded via the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, will initially take of the form of networks within each of the 7 founding schools but within two years could expand across the country. Eventually, the network will go worldwide, grant recipients hope. Read more
Fraudsters are targeting social networking sites with increased frequency and users need to take precautions, the FBI warned. Read more
The potential of social networking web sites is truly awesome. Venues such as Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter (and dozens more), allow us to connect with, and form, social units for all manner of activities. Keeping in touch with friends and colleagues has never been easier, and people are taking advantage of these new tools to organize everything from hikes and art discussions to wholesale political revolutions. The popularity of these internet-based social networking venues is astounding, with many social networking web sites are seeing extraordinary growth in membership and usage. Read more
Numbers, simple numbers. While Twitter attracts all the media and celebrity attention, Facebook continues to dwarf its 140-character counterpart. The Pingdom blog goes over some of those numbers.
Okay, I am as sick of the hype around cloud computing as anyone else but I also belive that cloud computing architecture is a very exciting future technology with a few existing proofpoints like Amazon, Google, DISA, Microsoft, IBM System z, etc.
One of the underpinnings of cloud computing is a technology called Apache Hadoop. The Apache Hadoop website describes the technology as follows:
"The Apache Hadoop project develops open-source software for reliable, scalable, distributed computing."
After countless hours of lost productivity to Facebook at work, the developers made up for it by offering the Cloud computing community something to build upon. Read more
Victimized last Thursday by a denial-of-service attack that left the site dark for more than three hours, Twitter this afternoon experienced another 27 minutes of downtime that the company blamed on an attack of unknown origin. Read more
In one of my June Web Applications newsletters I wrote about a new service called OpenAmplify that had impressed me. In case you didn't catch that issue, let me summarize what OpenAmplify is all about.
OpenAmplify is a linguistic engine that you present a block of text to analyze through a RESTful API. The service returns the content's semantic indications (called "signals") divided into topics, actions, styles and demographics.
Read more
Variety is reporting that David Fincher ("The Curious Case of Benjamin Button") may be roped in to direct "The Social Network," a movie about the formation of Facebook. Aaron Sorkin wrote the script.
But really, could the movie be any better than the Web site?
Variety says production is slated to begin later this year.
More here.
Readers with neck problems are advised to skip this post because it is sure to have your head shaking.
Officials who run the city of Bozeman, Montana -- perhaps setting a new standard for privacy invasion in the name of public safety -- are insisting that job applicants cough up their usernames and passwords for any social networking sites or online forums in which they participate. Reason: background checks.
From a report on Montana's News Station:
The requirement is included on a waiver statement applicants must sign, giving the City permission to conduct an investigation into the person's "background, references, character, past employment, education, credit history, criminal or police records." Read more
At the very bottom of last week's item bemoaning the coronation of "Web 2.0" as the 1 millionth "word or phrase" in the English language, I posed this question and comment: "What, no 'tweet'? Shocking."
After all, as cloyingly ubiquitous as Web 2.0 has become, it's a lexicon wannabee when pitted alongside the verb formulation of "to Twitter": namely, tweet.
What gives? Read more
Silicon Valley is in shock over the drowning death of Rajeev Motwani, a Stanford professor who mentored the co-founders of Google and was an icon for a generation of computer scientists. Atherton police said they are investigating the death, which occured on Sunday but appears to be an accident.
According to the San Jose Mercury News: Read more
In the course of my research, I'm running across some VERY large data warehouses. Several of them, especially in the web log/network event area, are in the multi-petabyte range. Perhaps most surprisingly, they're run on a broad range of data management software -- not just Teradata, but also Greenplum, Hadoop/Hive (which isn't even a DBMS!), Greenplum, and others.
My current golly-gee-that's-really-big list goes something like this:
Read more
Posted by Microsoft Subnet editor Julie Bort (and here's my offtopic warning. This post is not particularly about Microsoft): I'm at the Colorado IT Symposium in Denver today where I will be moderating an afternoon session composed of a panel of CIOs. In attendance is about 200 technology professionals gathering together to discuss such diverse topics as security threats, "virtualizing" your IT staff and the best way to manage consultants. Read more
Google's lawyers are good. Not only can they argue rings around newspapers using the fair use doctrine, but they have yet to lose a StreetView privacy battle. Their latest win? The U.K.'s privacy watchdog group rejected a complaint against StreetView, ruling that the service is no more privacy-invasive than Twitter or Facebook. Read more
When we last looked in on the Facebook terms-of-service kerfuffle in February, company founder Mark Zuckerberg had taken a Mulligan on the matter and promised to get things right next time. Read more
Google's come up with a way to entice more people to use its Profiles social networking feature -- it's adding Profiles info to searches for people's names, letting them control just what info makes it to Google's top result page. And while some say it's a good way to preserve your online reputation, others say it's just Google's way of leapfrogging its competition in social networking. Read more
The scoop: chi.mp, free account.
What it is: Like many social networks, a chi.mp account gives you your own "Web space", letting you post status updates and photos, and link to other social networks or Web feeds. Chi.mp gives users a unique domain name (mine is http://keithshaw.mp, for example), an OpenID and Web site. The chi.mp service also has a contact aggregator, pulling in contacts or "friends" from all of your other networks and contact databases, creating an "ultimate black book" for users.
Read more
Google is reportedly in serious talks with Twitter, the upshot of which could be either an outright purchase of the microblogging site or a partnership in a real-time search engine, TechCrunch reports. Either way, it's good news for Google, which has struggled to spread its wings in social networking. Read more
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