“i am a drop. i am a stream. i am a river. i am an ocean. i will be mist.” – Sull, Aug 30, 2010
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i am a drop. i am a stream. i am a river. i am an ocean. i will be mist.
sull
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Facebook Web Hosting Service
sull
When people talk about owning your data, your social graph… becoming your own data silo on your own domain using your own hosting provider and having full control of everything without corporate interference and dependence… I am all for it. The DIY Federated Open Social Media and Messaging Sphere. I’ll join and march and evangelize and tinker tinker tinker.
But in order to have a presence on the vast Interwebs, we need to rely on some corporate power. Our ISP. and most likely, a Web Hosting Service too. Sure, you can host your stuff directly from your home/office using just your ISP (if they allow it). But typically, you will have an account with one of many Web Hosting companies. I’ve used many over the years but have stuck with Drreamhost for my little projects and tinkerings. We pay for this. For our web space, email, databases, shell accounts and even domain registration/management.
That being said…. What would happen if Facebook or Twitter got into this business? What if they purchased Dreamhost? Or another well-respected Web Hosting Company? Facebook would be the host of my efforts to become dependent of Facebook? How strange. And at this point, Facebook can either acquire or become their own traditional Interweb Hosting platform and circumvent the whole issue of being the evil data silo. They would just offer paid services (or even free) to those who want to have that deeper level of ownership and control. And they would know that the magority of their 500+million users would not even bother… yet they would appease the vocal evangelists of Open Federated Interoperable Networks.
And besides, Facebook is already planning to launch its own Gmail competing product. Expect to see Fmail (Facebook Mail) at some point soon.This applies to Twitter, Google and any other behomoth that wants to be host to your social profile, activities and graph.
The downside is…. They would have to provide adequate customer service… call centers… and quality service with proper uptime etc. This is a new game from the free service arena with mostly non-existent customer support. But this type of move would entail call centers to be setup or part of the acquisition(s). Truth is, most of it would be outsourced and out of mind.
If I were Facebook, I’d get this going just to have all my bases covered towards continued world dominance
Yeah so… anyway… just was an interesting mind wandering thought process. figured i would log it here for a told ya so moment in 6-12 months. heh.
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Datasift – Realtime Twitter Query & Curation for Developers
sull
Datasift is getting more exposure this week. Here is Scoble’s interview with Nick Halstead (founder of Datasift, Tweetmeme) – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X7aiKaCi8O8
Datasift seems to be a great accomplishment that tackles an enormous challenge in Realtime content flow. Right now, the focus is specifically the Twitter “Firehose” but I imagine that as they scale to handle Twitter they will also try to handle and connect other pipelines (Facebook, Google Buzz, PuSH Feeds etc). Datasift is like a FaaS – Firehose as a Service or more appropriately…. RaaS – Realtime as a Service. Developers/Companies can leverage the Datasift tool (currently a web interface) to power their own services/products (e.g. build a new custom tweetmeme). Certain terms and licensing costs are applicable depending on how Datasift is used.
Datasift is essentially a service that you’d expect Twitter itself to offer but since Twitter is focused on scaling and dealing with scope creeping more fundamental public functionality, Datasift has been able to step in and step up the game of Realtime Data Management. Twitter will settle for the ease of just charging for usage of the raw Firehose like Google and other companies already pay for. I am not sure what deal Datasift has in place with Twitter or other partners. I imagine their being a deal in place that keeps alive potential acquisition offers, maybe after Datasift has proven itself by investing in the necessary hardware and staff to keep such an ambitious project up and running for the hundreds or thousands of services that will surely be lined up to use it.
Datasift has its own API Query Language. It looks like this (taken from Scoble’s video):
twitter.user IN ("scobleizer", "nickhalstead", "whoever")
AND
twitter.text contains "google"
AND
rule "noswearing"
As you can imagine, the flexible query language will allow for a wide array (unlimited?) of data set results as long as that data is a part of a tweet’s object metadata. A tweet of course has a bunch of metadata beyond the “message” content. Datasift was built to leverage this valuable data. It will be even more interesting once Twitter Annotations is officially supported.
Datasift being an API means that developers could also choose to create their own UI for a tool with custom functionality instead of using the official Datasift.net version. Very flexible and open and that’s what happens when you begin by creating an API to provide a Service as opposed to building just the “app” alone.
I’m reminded of a few posts here on vocal.ly that I wrote last year that reflected on Realtime streams and the concepts of Stocks and Flows:
http://vocal.ly/2009/09/18/stocks-and-flows-and-the-real-time-web/
http://vocal.ly/2009/09/03/pondering-the-realtime-web-and-rapid-intelligence-collecting-thoughts/
I believe i signed up a few weeks ago for Datasift so I hope I can at some point gain access to this service for experimentation, research and possibly for use with my own projects. We’ll see how all this evolves over time but I commend the vision and willingness to spearhead this issue like Nick and his team have done. Very cool!
Update:
A good summary of DataSift can also be found here:http://www.skepticgeek.com/socialweb/datasift-curation-engine-aims-for-relevance-in-real-time/
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“Astounding and excellent”
sull
Seriously cool compliment from the awesome Amber Case! Thnx.
Some who know me well know that I am a sucker for cool domain names.
Not a typical domain squatter though. Usually, I have an idea and if I want to move on that idea I tend to make it more real by having an actual domain to house it. The benefit is a form of motivation and a nudge to keep moving that idea forward and present it. Or maybe that’s just a well-formed excuse for being a domain junkie
It does work sometimes so theirs something to it.I also let many domains expire when the idea or project is no longer applicable or front and center in my mind. I recently had very few domains but then I started thinking about expressing social gestures virtually but doing it with open standards and protocols instead of just some app on facebook or whatever. Semantic URLs are core to this thinking. It’s not a new or entirely original idea to use domain hacks in interesting ways but commendable efforts seem non-existent. I work with people who once envisioned this stuff with me. But focus shifted away from that long ago. For me, I have had a rejuvenated interest in making something work and have chosen to focus mainly on common human social gestures as shareable digital data objects. Also some gaming concepts that are less “gesturely”. Like anything I do…. it’s a side side project done in my spare spare time. But a simple nod of approval from a brilliant mind like Amber Case certainly helps to carve out more of that precious time to tinker.
Stay tuned, always.
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smtp micro-messaging – circa July 2009
sull
In July 2009, I was tinkering with a project that at the time was called “nudges”. It simply used email (smtp) to create RSS feeds filled with micro-messages and attachments. The messages consisted of the text added as the email message Subject. The Body was ignored. Small attachments were supported and added as RSS Enclosures. XSLT was used to make the RSS Feed presentable in a web browser. The project was a challenge to the then struggling Twitter and the chatter around having an open distributed version of Twitter. I mainly was pointing out that Email works fine and to make Email more social, just email micro-messages to a script. The added benefit of having all Sent Messages saved automatically for archival and permanence was important. This is a topic I have been seeing creep back into the spotlight. Are social messages going into a void and a loop file effect? Again, using Email to cross-post to all your favorite social services saves you from this. Just filter and export your ‘Sent’ folder and you will have an archive of messages with dates, times and possibly other useful info.
I’m not going to go on about this. But it is interesting (ironic?) that the distributed nature of email is the holy grail of achievements in the federated micro-messaging and social networking space. I do agree and support these new efforts. Salmon, Webfinger, RSSCloud/PuSH and in general, DiSo. But I cannot let go of Email and how using it intelligently makes it so much more useful. So that is why I point out simple uses like this year old example of mine.