Yahoo!’s Smart Investment: The Hadoop Community
More than 250 people attended a Hadoop developer event at Yahoo! this week, demonstrating again the level of interest the company has in open-source big data initiatives. Yahoo! says it is the world’s biggest Hadoop supporter. We say that’s undoubtedly correct. Yahoo! supports community developer events throughout the world. In February it supported the first Hadoop! event in India. In June, it will host the Hadoop Summit. Sponsor Yahoo! is not always recognized for its cloud computing efforts but its deep commitment to Hadoop shows how the company views the ways that big data can be used to solve major technology issues such as spam. Hadoop, according to Wikipedia , “is a Java software framework that supports data-intensive distributed applications under a free license. It enables applications to work with thousands of nodes and petabytes of data.” The developer conference featured discussions from the Hadoop community, including a presentation about using it to fight spam lead and a discussion led by a lead engineer from Facebook. Vishwanath Ramarao is director of anti-spam engineering for Yahoo! Mail. According to the Yahoo! developer blog, Vish described the intricate cat-and-mouse games played with spammers, and how Yahoo! uses Hadoop to abstract away the complexity of large scale data analysis and provide deep insight into spammer campaigns. Yahoo! Mail antispam – Bay area Hadoop user group Johhn Sichi, lead engineer for Facebook’s data infrastructure team provided an overview of Facebook’s work using Hadoop to manage data that is growing 8x annually, In March, 2008 traffic volume hit 200 GB per day. By the end of last year, traffic bumped to 12 terabytes per day. Hadoop, Hbase and Hive- Bay area Hadoop User Group Companies like Yahoo! and Facebook use Hadoop to organize data and process it from multiple sources. For instance, Facebook might use it to organize how it deploys its ad network. Yahoo! may be on to the most powerful use for cloud computing or at least the most interesting. And it shows how the company is thinking about cloud computing and the ways it applies to its overall strategy. Discuss
Hands-On With Microsoft Docs.com
Earlier this week, Microsoft launched its Facebook connected online office suite Docs.com . Docs offers online versions of Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Users can also choose to share these documents with their Facebook friends. Overall, Docs falls somewhat short of being a replacement for a desktop office suite. Even though it offers a better interface than Google Docs and Zoho , its functionality often feels deliberately crippled in order to push users to use (and buy) Microsoft Office. Sponsor Word Web App Among the three tools in Docs, the Word web app comes the closest to fulfilling its promises. While it isn’t ready for managing highly complex documents, it’s more than sufficient for editing standard text documents collaboratively. The Word web app includes all the basic editing features one would expect from a stripped-down version of Word, but you can’t add footnotes, for example, or insert tables from your Excel files. Thankfully, though, Word will not strip any of these features out of the file. Once you download the file or open it up in Word, your footnotes and will reappear. This ability of Word to keep a document’s formatting shows that Microsoft deliberately chose not to support these features in the web app. Excel Web App Among all of the apps, the Excel app is the most basic of the three apps included in the suite. It can only read documents in Microsoft’s Office 2007 format, for example, while all the other tools also support older formats. That, by itself, could be a show-stopper for some users, but the most egregious omission here is that there is no graphical interface for entering a formula. Instead, you have to type every formula by hand, which is a slow and error-prone process. The good news, though, is that the Excel web app can read all the formulas in imported files. It’s clear, though, that the app is only really meant for editing existing documents and not for creating new ones. PowerPoint Web App The PowerPoint web app did a nice job at opening every PowerPoint file we threw at it. When it comes to editing, however, the app is also very stripped down. You can use it to create a basic outline of your presentation or change the order of your slieds, for example, but you can’t add floating images, backgrounds and resize text and image fields. You can, however, add and edit SmartArt clips. Bugs While the whole office suite ran very well in all the browsers we tested (except for Safari on the iPad, which displayed the documents just fine but crashed when we tried to edit), Microsoft still has to fix before Docs can become a run-away hit. While Docs has no issues importing most Microsoft Office documents, editing uploaded documents can be tricky. If you set Microsoft Office on the desktop to track the changes you make to a document, for example, the web apps will refuse to let you edit the document. We also ran unto issues with image uploads, which, at times, didn’t finish. Docs also often complained that the images we tried to upload were not compatible with Docs, even though they were just standard JPEGs. Verdict Microsoft clearly wants users to see Docs as an addition to the traditional Microsoft Office desktop suite and not as a replacement for Office. After using Docs for a while it quickly becomes obvious that a lot of the limitations Microsoft imposed are not due to the fact that Docs runs in the browser, but simply due to the fact that Microsoft didn’t want to include them. While Microsoft is partnering with Facebook on this project, Docs feels like it is stuck between two worlds: the new reality of how people collaborate and share content online – and Microsoft’s intent to preserve its old revenue streams for as long as possible. To some degree, Docs feels similar to Apple’s office suite for the iPad . While Pages, Numbers and Keynote on the iPad are sufficient for most basic tasks and hold a lot of promise, users with more than the most basic needs will come away frustrated. Discuss
Mozilla Contacts Releases Facebook-Integrated Version with New "Person URLs"
Mozilla Contacts , the experimental project from the organization behind the Firefox web browser, has released a new version of their Contacts add-on which introduces Facebook integration. Previously , Mozilla Contacts allowed you to import your various address books spread out across the web (think: multiple email accounts, Twitter friends, LinkedIn colleagues, Plaxo contacts, Mac OS X address book, etc.) into the web browser itself – in this case, obviously, Firefox. Once there, the combined address book information could be used in form autocompletion everywhere across the web and more. Now, an updated version of Mozilla Contacts (download link) introduces a number of new features, most notably integration with Facebook Contacts and something called a “person URL.” Sponsor Import Facebook Contacts into Firefox Mozilla Contacts’ ability to sync with your Facebook Contacts come via the brand-new Facebook Graph API (application programming interface), which allows the Firefox add-on to import all your Facebook friends into the web browser itself as it does with the other services supported. However, this integration is still a little iffy, warns Michael Hansson, an engineer in Mozilla Labs , on a blog post about the release. “You may need to Refresh your connection to Facebook on occasion to make it work properly,” he says. Person URLs Also new in Mozilla Contacts 0.3 is experimental support for “person:” URLs. This intriguing feature lets you look up anyone in your various contact lists or anyone on the web just by typing a URL in your address bar. After doing so, Firefox will combine the locally-stored information in the web browser with web-based information retrieved from the Internet to return a profile page about that person. You can try it now by typing person:mhanson@gmail.com or person:http://facebook.com/btaylor , for example, into your Firefox browser that has the updated Contacts add-on installed. Also New in 0.3 Other additions in version 0.3 include support for Yahoo! contacts, autocompletion of HTML5 input fields (with “email” and “tel”), enhanced search capabilities (including new discovery modules for Webfinger, HCard import, Google Social Graph, Facebook, Gravatar, Yelp, Amazon and Flickr), automatic combination of data discovered on sites that support standard automatic discovery mechanisms like HCard, RSS and ActivityStreams and finally, support for non-contact people in the AwesomeBar. Discuss
The Facebook Backlash Has Begun…
The knee-jerk reaction has begun. Friend after friend after friend is posting the same chain-letter like status update with simple directions on how to opt out from Facebook’s new sharing capabilities. It’s spreading like wild fire, but we have to ask – has anyone considered the up side to any of these changes? Sponsor The status we’re seeing, along with a number of variations thereof, reads as follows: As of today, FB has a new privacy setting called “Instant Personalization” that shares data with non-facebook websites and it is automatically set to “Allow.” Go to Account > Privacy Settings > Applications and Websites and uncheck “Allow”, then repost this to your profile. Is each and every one of these people going and reading the terms of service or the privacy policy to find out what exactly they’re blocking out? We quite doubt it. And while the sharing of your data sounds quite scary, we have to wonder if this reactionary unchecking is causing some who would otherwise benefit to miss out. After all, are we really all that concerned about Pandora knowing, from the moment we load the site, that we’re huge Weezer fans? The setting in question actually pertains to three partner sites – Docs.com , Pandora and Yelp . From Facebook on the experience it is proposing: We’re working closely with these partners so you can quickly connect with your friends and see relevant content on their sites. These sites personalize your experience using your public Facebook information. When you arrive on these sites, you’ll see a notification from Facebook at the top of the page. You can easily opt-out of experiencing this on these sites by “No Thanks” on the blue Facebook notification on the top of partner sites. The particular setting in question reads “Allow select partners to instantly personalize their features with my public information when I first arrive on their websites.” Caution is good, but the cautionary tales of people losing their jobs, wives, husbands, whatever, because of Facebook have potentially gone a bit too far. We are a generation constantly terrified by the idea of someone, somewhere, effectively advertising to us by way of glancing at our “data” and knowing whether or not we like country music or alternative 90s rock. But is it really so terrifying to have annoying banner ads offering deals on some product you might actually enjoy? We wear t-shirts declaring our fandom of certain bands; we paste bumper stickers on our cars professing our ideals; heck, we tell Pandora night and day what type of music we like and don’t, but the second we hear about Facebook sharing info (such as our list of musical interests) we run in fear. Now, after going and looking at the terms of service, privacy policy, or even just the simple text in the settings page, you may very well decide that you do not want your information to be shared. That’s fine and valid. But at least consider the options first. Facebook has offered a copy of the new privacy policy, with all of the changes highlighted , that you might want to take a look at before deciding. Privacy is, after all, a personal preference and something that ought to be finely tuned according to your own reservations and judgements, not something that should be determined by a viral tidbit that everyone “copies and pastes” to their profile. For an in-depth look at how (and why) you should delete applications from your Facebook account, take a look at Sarah Perez’s take on the subject . Discuss
How to "Like" Anything on the Web (Safely)
Worried about Facebook “like” fraud? You should be. Thanks to Facebook’s overly simple implementation of the new Facebook Like Button , anyone can post a “Like This” button on their website pointing to any URL of their choosing. In other words, users can be tricked into liking websites they’re not even on . You can bet that enterprising spammers have already figured out how to use this technology for their own nefarious purposes. If you want a safer solution, there’s a new Facebook “like” bookmarklet you can use instead. Sponsor The bookmarklet was created by Kyle Bragger , formerly the CTO of Cork’d , a social networking site for wine lovers, and now working on his own project, Forrst , an invite-only community for developers and designers. Not only does using the bookmarklet he created protect you from “like fraud” as described here , it’s also a handy way to like anything on the Internet – even if there’s no “like” button available on that page. How to Use the Facebook Like Bookmarklet To use the bookmarklet, just drag this link to your bookmarks bar in your web browser: Like-o-matic . Once there, you can click it anytime you’re on a page or website you like. Like ReadWriteWeb , for example? Click the button. Although there’s no “Facebook Like Button” for the website as a whole (you can, however, find us on Facebook ), you’ll be given the opportunity to “like” ReadWriteWeb. After clicking the bookmarklet once, you’ll see a message appear at the top of the screen: “Be the first of your friends to like this.” Click the button with the thumbs up on it and it will register your like on Facebook and post it to your News Feed. That’s all there is to it. By using the bookmarklet instead of the like buttons on the websites themselves, you can be sure that your Facebook “like” will be pointing to the real thing. Plus, it allows you to “like” anything you want – even a site that isn’t using Facebook buttons. Nice! Discuss