Twitter as Plumbing
Cue the jokes.
So, Chet (@oraclenerd) floated this notion, originally proposed in the NYT, and it’s completely true. Check the evidence: $25 million from Google and Microsoft to pump the firehose of tweets into search results, a full ecosystem built around the Twitter API, even an apps marketplace, Oneforty, built around the ecosystem.
Incidentally, Oneforty, the brainchild of Laura Fitton (@Pistachio), who covered OraTweet back in the day, recently raised some venture money and will be debuting its premium service next week.
So yeah, Twitter has become plumbing. I like the analogy because if Twitter gets clogged, then a lot of parties get, ahem, downstream, problems.
This is fun.
But check out “How Much Are Twitter’s Tweets Really Worth?” in BusinessWeek today for an interesting perspective.
Last year, Twitter’s 50 million users posted 8 billion tweets, according to research firm Synopsos, which means Google and Microsoft are paying roughly 3¢ for every 1,000 tweets. That’s a pittance in the world of online advertising. Top media sites often get $10 or $20 per thousand page views; even remnant inventory, leftover Web pages that get sold through ad networks, goes for 50¢ to $1 per thousand. The deals put “almost no value” on Twitter’s data, says Donnovan Andrews, vice-president of strategic development for the digital marketing agency Tribal Fusion.
OK, that really does add perspective. Read more
Checkin to Foursquare by Taking a Picture
I know I predicted that geo would be left at the altar 2010, but I think there’s huge potential in geo services.
Dissecting my prediction, I’m forecasting gang-busting growth for the “where-am-I” use case. Along those lines, I give you Photocheck.in (h/t TechCrunch), which hits two of my favorite things: geo and APIs.
In very simple terms, Photocheck.in lets you checkin to foursquare simply by taking a picture with your mobile phone.
You read that right. Sounds a bit like magic. Magic made possible by APIs and open data formats.
Here’s how it works:
- Go to Photocheck.in, sign in with your foursquare credentials and authorize it to use your foursquare data.
- Collect the email address to which you’ll send your photos.
- Next time you’re out, take a photo of the location and email it to that @photocheck.in address.
- Watch the magic happen.
The app was built by Jon Steinberg, and it uses the EXIF metadata that smartphones like the iPhone and Android devices apply to photos to approximate your location. It then checks you into foursquare using that approximate address.
Using the address rather than a venue to checkin excludes your checkin from the game aspects of foursquare like mayorship and badges (not sure about checkin points), but the concept is very cool. Read more
The Best Enterprise 2.0 Use Cases Haven’t Been Discovered, Yet
Original image by ttarasiuk on Flickr used under Creative Commons
I noticed a comment came on Connect this week from a skeptic. Someone had posted this video of Seth Godin, and among the positive comments was one skeptic.
The skeptic correctly identified Seth’s bent toward consumer use cases and the general lack of enterprise use cases when talking about Enterprise 2.0 or Social Media or whatever you want to call it.
I agree. Beyond the low-hanging fruit, i.e. collaboration, empowerment, networking, information access, etc. there aren’t a lot of examples that would cause a CIO to whip out the proverbial checkbook.
It’s not for lack of trying either. Lots of smart people have been noodling on this for several years, back when Facebook was a niche site for college students and twttr was an internal Odeo project.
Does this mean there aren’t any good use cases for the enterprise? Absolutely not.
It means we haven’t found them yet, and we might never, unless two things happen. First, data need to be freed by APIs, and second, domain experts need to touch and feel what is possible. Read more
Who Owns Your Online Identity?
Tired of social media? Maybe you’re like Rich, and you want to delete your Facebook account.
Well, there’s an app for that, the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine (h/t TechCrunch). Yeah, it’s a web app, but work with me here. Somehow I doubt this one would make it past Apple’s censors.
The Web 2.0 Suicide Machine can permanently and irrevocably nuke your digital identity from Twitter, LinkedIn and MySpace. They were also nuking Facebook identities, but apparently, Facebook put a quick stop to that by blocking the service’s IP.
Not a surprise really, since last month, Facebook also blocked Seppukoo (h/t Mashable), another site dedicated to removing identities from Facebook.
What’s the big deal, you ask? Can’t I do this manually?
Yes and no. The app works with your credentials to kill off your profile and postings and terminates your relationships. It doesn’t delete your account, but instead, changes your password so you can’t log back in easily. The automated scripts work much more quickly than completing the process manually would, and you can watch the process work.
Fun! I especially like the unfriending and tweet removal counters and the list of recent digital suicides.
There are some interesting issues lurking here. Read more
Unexpected Innovation
Designed by Damjan Stanković
Channeling Seinfeld a bit, what’s up with stop lights lately?
I don’t know much about stop lights, aside from using them, and I wouldn’t immediately think of them as a hotbed for innovation.
Well, it’s a good thing that’s not my business because I’ve seen two separate innovations related to stop lights in the last month.
The first was a story about stop lights in the Midwest with new, energy-efficient, LED bulbs. These bulbs are also low-heat, which means they haven’t been very good at melting snow that collects inside their housings, making the light difficult to see.
Not knowing what color the light is causes accidents.
Some might view this as a fail, but I see it as an area ripe for innovation. The cost savings of LED bulbs over traditional bulbs, estimated by Wisconsin to be $750,000 annually, will ensure that this problem is solved, and someone (or more likely, some company) is going to get rich on the solution.
I’d love to see this spun off as an inventor’s challenge. That would be fun to follow. Read more
Join the EBS Challenge
About a month ago, I mentioned John P’s install EBS posts over at ORACLENERD. A few other people have decided to follow along for giggles, prompting Chet (@oraclenerd) to declare a formal “EBS Challenge“.
So far, here’s who’s participating:
Interested in joining? Feel free, and let Chet and Twitter know by retweeting. Even if you’re not, you can help spread by retweeting Chet’s challenge.
I like this effort a lot. It’s great experience, much like my WebCenter VM effort, and thanks to Google, the collected experiences of the participants will leave a detailed documentation set for anyone who ventures down this path in the future.
And not just documentation, but also contact information for questions.
I would join myself, but I’m resource-constrained like Chet. I may follow his lead and go with EC2 for my WebCenter install, after which, maybe I’ll install EBS too.
2010 Predictions
Photo by Irargerich from Flickr used under Creative Commons
I’m stuck in this yearly cycle of wrap-up, prediction review and new predictions.
John B. made an interesting point about predictions yesterday:
Regarding tech predictions, the fascinating part isn’t WHETHER the predictions were right or wrong, but WHY they were right or wrong.
I agree, especially since my track record is spotty. I guess the whys keep us interesting beyond the binary win-fail.
Anyway, every year I do this, I have one or two trends I *really* believe in, and then I rack my brain to come up with some filler to make it seem like I have a wide perspective. Or something.
If you read here, you probably already know what I think is trending, since I talk about it all the time to sound intelligent, but I’ll try to spice the usual suspects up a bit to make it interesting.
I’ll also try to apply some dimensions to make the predictions easier to analyze in a year.
Here goes. Read more
Assessing 2009 Predictions
Photo by Nelson D. from Flickr used under Creative Commons
Not entirely sure why I decided to predict events for 2009, probably because I did for 2008, which isn’t really an answer. I don’t recall why I ever decided to do predictions, but now it seems like a tradition.
Anyway, since I did, why not dissect them and see how I fared in 2009?
To recap, I predicted:
- Twitter will finally announce its business model.
- Microsoft will acquire Facebook.
- Yahoo will open source itself.
- Businesses will get open. Consumers will not.
I also dumped some random thoughts:
- IE 6 will still be the top Microsoft browser by percentage in 2009, even after Windows 7 launches with IE 8 installed.
- All flavors of IE will lose market share primarily to Google Chrome, not Firefox.
- Chrome will top 10% as it becomes Dell’s de facto browser.
- Linux will take more of the the O/S market from Windows than Mac will.
- Windows 7 will be better and more expensive than expected.
Like any good prognosticator, I chose a lot of statements that cannot be quantified and therefore, cannot be declared incorrect.
Goodbye 2009
Photo by doug88888 on Flickr used under Creative Commons
With 2009 winding down quickly, I’m pleased to present you with that good old blogging tradition–the year-end wrap post.
2009 was an eventful year for us. Mostly noteworthy: we joined the WebCenter development team to work on the internal rollout of WebCenter 11g, validating our work on Connect and Mix and minting us as a bona-fide product team.
W00t!
It’s a bit weird to me that we’ve gone from innovation team to product team in just under three years. A lot has happened since we started on this path, and if you’d like some perspective, check out my wrap posts for 2007 and 2008.
Fun with Numbers
In 2009, this blog had 123,000 pageviews (down from 131,000 in 2008) and about 80,000 visits (also down from 83,000 in 2008). Feedburner subscriptions rose from around 900 in January to about 1,600 in December, but if you discount the addition of FriendFeed to the number, it’s remained pretty static, about 900.
Not much to brag about there. Frankly, I’ve no good ideas on how to raise those numbers, and I’m not willing to promote this blog heavily enough to bump them. I guess the only benefit to raising them is to improve measurements of our reputation.
Anyway, thanks for sticking with us. Tell your friends 
Read more
Epilogue: Create a WebCenter VM
So, after failing to bring this project home before Christmas, I picked it up again yesterday, unfortunately with the same results.
I reached out to some people on the WebCenter team who could help, and the consensus was that I don’t have enough system resources to run the full stack on a single VM. Further examination tells me I’m not even close.
A developer in the UK has graciously offered to look at my WebLogic logs and vnc into my VM if necessary, but at this point, I’m pretty sure I’m not going to get there with my current configuration. I’ll update this post with any late-breaking developments.
This has been a great learning experience for me, since I came into it with no previous experience installing this stack.
I had a few goals when I started:
- Learn how to install and configure the whole stack.
- Document the entire process, including failures and gotchas for posterity and Google.
- Produce a working WebCenter installation with a running instance of Spaces as the finish line.
- Package the VM for Rich and Anthony to use if they wanted.
I’ve successfully met the first two, although the process took about three times longer than I anticipated, and failed at the final two.
A 50% success rate sounds pretty bad, but I guess it’s relative.
Facebook Should Be Better at Search
I don’t use Facebook much anymore. It’s become polluted with spam and annoying social games, not really my cup of tea.
Even so, as far as I know, Facebook is the de facto way to connect with people you’ve lost touch with over the years. While attempting to do this for a few people from the days of wayback whom I assumed *must* have made it onto Facebook by now, I came to a realization:
Facebook fails at people search, but it really should rock.
Try searching for a name that’s relatively common, i.e. not as common as Frank Jones, but more common than say, Jake Kuramoto. You’ll get a dump of names, probably more than 200 and less than 5,000. Not a very easy list to scan for that long-lost pal, and without a picture, you have no idea if you know the person or not.
Facebook knows a lot about me from my profile, so why aren’t they applying that demographic information to my search? Read more
Foursquare for the Holidays
Happy holidays everyone. I got you a heat map. Do you like it?
I’m technically on vacation this week, but I cannot take a vacation from the Interwebs. While browsing feeds yesterday, I saw this post from Gizmodo titled “Foursquare, As Seen by the Predator”.
My crush on foursquare is well-documented, and I’ve always liked “The Predator“, the original one, not all the sequels. So, I was intrigued.
Turns out Steven Lehrburger (@lehrblogger) built a mashup of foursquare checkins displayed as a heat map overlaid on a Google Map. He calls it the Where Do You Go project, and he put it together for NYU’s ITP Winter Show.
He offers a couple different visualizations, several of which look like the Predator’s thermal vision. I guess that makes sense for a heat map. My heat map for Portland is above, and here’s the one from my visit to San Francisco for Open World. Read more
Geeky Project Part 10: Create a WebCenter VM
I really, really, really wanted to bring this whole project home with a triumphant ending today, erm late last night.
It started out as a lark and has been a great learning experience, but it’s been hanging over my head since before Thanksgiving. I’ve got other, more important work to do, and I’m sure you’re sick of reading my episodic opus on WebCenter.
Alas, it was not to be. My original finish line was to open WebCenter Spaces, the reference implementation of WebCenter, to show that the installation was successful.
With that in mind, I struck out around 4 PM yesterday afternoon to finish the last steps. You’ll recall I had finished the WebCenter install and was pondering why I needed Web Tier and WebLogic.
At about 12 AM, I threw in the towel, but I got agonizingly close, only to run out of gas right before the finish.
Bounce to the end if you’re curious where I got hung up, or read on for the scary details. Read more
Geeky Project Part 9: Create a WebCenter VM
So, I’m in the home stretch installing WebCenter.
Here’s the installation guide, if you’re following along at home. Yesterday, I got through the “Preparing to Install” steps, which consist mostly of running RCU to create the WebCenter schemas.
I’m skipping the installation of JDeveloper for the time being. If I were using the VM in the future, I’d probably connect to it from the host, OS X, rather than run it all on the VM.
Next, I completed the steps in “Installing on DHCP Hosts”, which certainly isn’t ideal, but at this point, I’ll finish up first and go back to assign a static IP if needed. I’m sure there will be plenty of Googling involved with that, i.e. assigning a static IP to a VM which is using NAT.
Sounds like a fun project.
Skimming over the next few sections, which don’t apply, I’m ready to run the installer and get this party started. Read more
Geeky Project Part 8: Create a WebCenter VM
Icon from Iconspedia used under Creative Commons
So, I’m back on track after yesterday’s detour to configure 11g and get it ready for the WebCenter schemas.
I’m working off the WebCenter installation guide, by the way, Section 2.1.3 Create Schemas for Oracle WebCenter.
Next step is to download and run Repository Creation Utility (RCU) which handily creates all the Fusion Middleware schemas for you, no fuss, no mess.
After executing John’s script with all my Oracle environment variables, I need to fire up the listener, then start the database. Read more
Geeky Project Part 7: Create a WebCenter VM
First, let me start off with a hearty thanks to John (@jpiwowar) for his help with my n00bism, a.k.a. Part 6 in this series.
Also, thanks to those of you with DBA skills out there for not flaming me for my lack thereof. Part 6 was a bit of a disaster, but thanks to John and Time Machine, I can travel back in time and remedy all the harm I did last week.
Frankly, this part should really be rolled into Part 3 as the final step, i.e. setting up your brand new database, and apologies that this is turning into an opus.
I suppose I could have done it in fewer posts, but I wanted to chronicle the entire process start to finish in consumable pieces (vs. mondo posts), even the parts where I went off the tracks. Anyway, when it’s finally over, I’ll highlight the important parts.
So, first things first, I rolled back to the last Time Machine backup before I hosed everything up, which was right after I finished installing WebLogic in Part 5.
Geeky Project Part 6: Create a WebCenter VM
Today, I hit a roadblock in my ongoing project to create a WebCenter VM.
I was all ready to get started with the WebCenter install. I found the installation guide and ran the installer.
Then, I hit the prerequisites.
Looks like I need to create the schemas first with the Repository Creation Utility (RCU), available for download here. No problem, download, unzip and off we go into another wizard.
Then, I hit this step.
Uh-oh. It’s asking for database information that I don’t think I have. Hostname (or IP), I have. Port I assume is 1521, since I don’t recall changing it. Service name, oracle? Username with SYSDBA privileges? Oy, now I’m hosed. Read more
Chrome Reaches Beta for Mac, Linux
Shortly after Chrome was released about 15 months ago, I remember Rich saying he had switched his wife over to it and was using it exclusively on Windows.
I was skeptical. After all, I love Firefox and have used it happily for years, but Rich was also a Firefox guy. So, something must have sold him on Chrome.
I used it bit on VMs, but not enough to convince me to switch. Plus, Chrome was Windows only, and as you probably know by now, I don’t do Windows anymore.
The Chromium open source project ramped up right after Chrome was released, but the early Linux builds were lacking core browser functionality, making them unusable for everyday browsing. Mac users were, oddly, out in the cold.
That is until, the Chrome developer release builds came out earlier this year for Mac and Linux. Like many, I was curious (because I like shiny objects) to give them a whirl, and I’ve been amazed at how stable and functional they have been and how quickly they have advanced.
Earlier in the week, Chrome officially went into beta on for Mac and Linux. The official version for the beta is 4.0.249.30, in case, like me, you’ve been running the developer releases. Read more
Install the E-Business Suite with Your Pals
My latest kick is to catalog useful information for reference purposes, which is one reason why I embarked on a quest to create a WebCenter VM.
Blogs are extremely good at SEO out of the box. So, it’s very likely that anyone searching for information on a technical topic will find a wealth of information from geeky blogs. Plus, it also helps that most blogs are started by geeks to discuss geekery.
Many of Chet’s (@oraclenerd) posts over at ORACLENERD touch on similar informational, how-to topics, and he, or rather John (@jpiwowar), just started a series on how to install the E-Business Suite on Oracle Enterprise Linux 4.
John is also including companion posts with additional information on his own blog. Be sure to follow both for the complete story. Reading over the companion for Part 1, you definitely don’t want to skip it; there are valuable nuggets in there. Read more
Geeky Project Part 5: Create a WebCenter VM
Ready or not, here comes another installment in my gripping series on how to create a WebCenter 11g R1 Patch Set 1 VM.
In the last part, I went over the last few steps of the 11g install. This part focuses on WebLogic, which is the preferred application server for WebCenter. I don’t know if it works on other apps servers, and I’m not about to experiment, at least not now.
First, I downloaded the latest version, WebLogic 10.3.2, which is part of the Fusion Middleware 11g R1 suite. It’s worth noting that the download is a network install, which is awesome for my purposes, but might not be for yours.
The download is a .bin file, and as previously noted, I am a n00b. So, I asked Google what to do with a .bin file and found a quick answer here.
I used the WebLogic installation guide, which oddly shows screenshots of a Windows install. Maybe that’s not odd, but I thought so.
The rest of the process is pretty straightforward, simply walking through wizards, which I’ve partially documented here. Just find runInstaller and away you go: Read more
