Docs.com: Facebook and Microsoft Go After Google Docs
During today’s F8 keynote, Mark Zuckerberg announced a number of new products and features for Facebook, including a new collaboration with Microsoft. With Docs.com , Microsoft’s FUSE labs just launched an online document editor and viewer that connects directly to Facebook and uses all of the new social features for third-party sites that Facebook announced today. Docs, for example, allows users to share documents with their Facebook friends, edit them collaboratively and discover documents that their friends have uploaded to their profiles. Sponsor Creating Documents in the Cloud and Sharing them With Your Facebook Friends With Docs, you can create new documents right in the web application or upload them from your desktop. Docs gives you the option to share documents privately or you can allow a select group of your Facebook friends to edit the document with you. A button next to every document allows you to add additional editors at any point. In our tests, the editor wasn’t working properly yet (though the document viewer works just fine). We will take a closer look at Docs editing features once it is fully up and running. In addition to being able to create and view documents, Docs.com’s Facebook integration will also allow your friends to discover these documents (if you choose to share them). You can also add a new tab to your profile page that shows all the documents you have shared with your friends. This also means that you can use Facebook to discuss these documents in public, just like you would discuss any other status update on the site. Attacking Google There can be little doubt that this is a direct attack against Google Docs . Even though Google Docs only offers relatively basic editing features, the service’s collaboration tools allow it to stand out from Microsoft’s products. Until now, collaborating on Microsoft Office documents was always a rather difficult task for Office users and generally involved using third-party software. It remains to be seen how many people in an office environment will really want to connect their documents to Facebook. For students and other Facebook users who aren’t using this tool in a corporate environment and just want to share documents with each other, however, this looks like a great solution. Discuss
Live Blog: Mark Zuckerberg’s F8 Keynote
Facebook is hosting its annual f8 developer conference in San Francisco today. We expect quite a few announcements around new features and products today, including more information about the availability of a firehose of user data , geotagging, payments and the rumored off-site “like” button that publishers will soon be able to embed in their pages. Read on to find our live blog of Mark Zuckerberg’s keynote. The keynote is scheduled to start at 10 a.m. PST (GMT -7:00). Sponsor Watch it Live You can also find live video of the keynote here . We will refresh this page regularly during the keynote. Please reload this page to see these updates. 9:45: Audience is getting seated. 10:01: Looks like there is a little delay. Keynote is now scheduled to start at 10:10 a.m. PST. 10:07: Rumor : Facebook and Microsoft will announce a new application partnership. Image credit: Devin Reams . 10:11: Zuckerberg on stage. 10:12: “What we have to show you today will be one of the most transformative things for the Web we’ve ever done.” Open Graph: Puts people at the center of the Web. “The Web can become a semantically meaningful set of connections.” 10:14: Recap of Facebook stats: 400 million users on Facebook, 100 million people use Facebook Connect. “A lot of startups are requiring that their users use Facebook Connect. We want to make it simple to create these personalized experiences.” Policy updates: All permissions are now managed in one permissions dialog. Cache: Developers can now store information for longer than 24 hours. 10:18: Facebook credits: More than 100 developers working with Facebook already. 10:18: Back to Open Graph: “Facebook only maps out the part of the social graph that relates to people.” Others, like Yelp and Pandora map out the social graph around other topics. 10:21: There is no way to bring these different graphs together yet. Right now, developers use the stream metaphor, but the services don’t understand these connections. 10:22: By connecting these graphs, Facebook will be able to show you restaurants your friends like, music your friends like, etc. “By doing this, the Web will get a whole lot better.” 10:23: New Graph API: Makes it simple to read connections on FB. Based on a new standard. New plugins for sites: Make your sites instantly social and personalized. 10:24: Example: See what your friends already liked on CNN. CNN won’t know who you are or who your friends are. On CNN homepage: See all your friends’ activity. 10:25: Bret Taylor (formerly of Friendfeed) on stage. 10:27: How do you get people to feel comfortable with importing their Facebook friends? Experience from Friendfeed: The only signup button that mattered was Facebook Connect, because that was the best way for people to find their friends. 10:28: New products: Social plugins: add social features with just one line of HTML. Universal like button: A like button for the Web that will instantly share your like back to FB. Based on an iframe. 10:31: Activity streams plugin: Transport the FB news feed to your site. 10:31: Recommendations plugin: Show users articles on your site that they are most likely to like. Highly personalized. Login plugin: See which of your friends already signed up for a given service. Social bar: The “kitchen sink” of Facebook’s new plugins. One bar at the bottom of the site will show all of these features. 10:33: Talking about the news feed: Open Graph will make the stream more useful. Allows you to markup your pages to tell Facebook what kind of real-world object your page represents. You can say, for example, that a page is about a band and where this band is from. New section on your profile can now show which movies, songs, etc. you liked. 10:36: Launching with 30 partners today. You can also subscribe by topics. These likes and updates will point to sites outside of Facebook. “My identity is not just defined by Facebook but also by all of the things I do around the Web.” 10:38: Graph API: Our attempt to re-architect the Facebook platform with simplicity and the Graph API in mind. 10:40: You can download all of the connections of a given user from the Graph API. 10:41: Search: You can search through all of the public updates on Facebook. Real-time will be built-in. Facebook will ping developers when a user posts an update. 10:42: Facebook will use oAuth 2.0. “It’s so much more awesome than our current system. Available for the Graph API and all of Facebook’s existing APIs. 10:44: Zuckerberg back on stage. Facebook expects to service a total of 1 billion like buttons today. 10:45: “The Web is at an important turning point today.” Startups require their users to bring their real identity. “The default is now social.” 10:46: What kind of products would be possible if Facebook partners already knew everything about their users? Microsoft Docs.com: Online version of Microsoft’s office suite. Collaborate with friends on documents. All of the power of Microsoft Office – but with a built-in social experience. Second example: Pandora. See what bands your friends like on Pandora. 10:50: Zuckerberg finishes the keynote with an anecdote about his girlfriend. Discuss
Google’s Vint Cerf on Private Clouds v. Public Clouds
The debate about private clouds continue as the traditional heavyweight enterprise software providers make their big and glossy pitches for their vision of a private cloud. So, it may come from Google, but still, it is refreshing to hear the intellectual tone that a scholar like Vint Cerf provides. Cerf is Google’s chief technology evangelist but his reflections give a sound bearing on how private and public clouds do interact. Sponsor He spoke last week at the Google Atmosphere Conference. We came across one of the discussions he had with fellow Google innovators. He repeats what we hear him say a lot. It comes down to interoperability. Private clouds are tools. Google develops tools that are distributed on the Internet. The question is how do clouds interact? It’s a contrast to what we see with Microsoft or Oracle in its quest to sell cloud computing environments into the enterprise. In the meantime Amazon continues its own quest to dispel private cloud computing as a myth, not a reality. In an interview with eWeek , Adam Selipsky, vice president of AWS outlined their views: “….Moreover, Selipsky said what people are calling private clouds come with the following drawbacks, where the customer will: · Still own the capex…and they’re very expensive (big fixed investments) · Not pay for what you use · Not have true elasticity…when groups relinquish their servers, the company still owns the datacenter space and servers…and will also find that managing this supply chain will present a dilemma…will either have to significantly overprovision which is wasteful or become really expert at managing just-in-time supply-chain so there are no long waits for servers…managing a supply chain like this is really hard and takes a lot of effort and refining and keeping the status quo of long time to market is not so appealing either · Still own the headache of managing the undifferentiated heavy lifting” And so, the debate continues. Discuss
Microsoft: Everything Moves Faster in the Cloud
Microsoft revealed a bit more about its container system for data centers, giving us some pause about it as a symbol of the cloud itself. These boxes represent the future of cloud-based infrastructures for both shared and dedicated networks. Microsoft, Amazon, HP and a number of other vendors use these containers to operate cloud networks. They are becoming fully automated systems that physically represent how we are seeing a fundamental shift in how IT services are managed and deployed. Sponsor In his keynote at the Microsoft Management Summit, Executive Bob Muglia featured the company’s container system used at its Chicago data center, illustrating the company’s new datacenter and cloud management capabilities for mass deployment of virtualized technologies. Muglia said the new container system is 10x less expensive than traditional data center infrastructures and 10x faster, too. “Everything moves faster in the cloud,”Muglia said. The container is an independent, high-speed network optimized with virtualization technology. Muglia said every piece of the data center is tightly fit, almost bound to make one network that stores data and provides raw processing power. The news serves to represent Microsoft’s ability to model and deploy applications across platforms. Microsoft owns the management tools, the developer tools, the applications, OS and the cloud platform. That’s Microsoft’s value statement to data center operators and the new generation of IT professionals and developers who will become wizards of sorts in these new environments. It also shows the move to automate IT. Bing, for instance, has a few hundred thousand servers that are manned by a handful of people. Bing servers do not get patched. Instead, IT will deploys an updated OS image with the apps pre-installed. It also highlights some key trends in cloud computing and data center environments. As Mike Kirkwood wrote in his post today about Hitachi , server management is moving from three steps (OS, network and storage) to one system to orchestrate them all. Microsoft is providing both shard and dedicated services. It’s the container model, though, that makes this interesting for us. By offering an automated data network, it opens up in some respects the data center market. It’s an OEM environment that can be plugged in to a data center for offering virtualized and cloud-based services. Companies like Hitachi, Microsoft and Eucalyptus are defining a new container model that binds “compute, storage, network” with templates that can allow resources to move quickly. These types of systems will become predominant as virtualization gains mass acceptance. Discuss
Hitachi’s Unified Compute Platform Goes for the Endzone
Yesterday, Hitachi took the wraps off their Unified Computing Platform by introducing its open data center platform. It is aimed at consolidating the enterprise functions of networking, storage, and compute into an orchestration layer. Virtualization is still guiding the evolution of the data center, in this case all the way to the physical form. If you like consolidating your systems into big iron with lots blinking lights, Hitachi has you covered. And if you like open systems that connect to your existing infrastructure, Hitachi believes that playing nice with others is in the domain of unified computing. Sponsor If you’re interested in this idea, check out the video summary of the platform . The company shares us a deeper view of this product line and the problems it is intending to solve. Many of the opportunities targeted address budgets, for example, how to remove operating expense through the orchestration of resources. Orchestration is the Huddle on Third Down Orchestration merges network, system, and storage resources as a single unit to be managed and reported in. An analogy might be found in football. In the huddle, the quarterback might call “the slant 6″ and all eleven members of the team interpret that play and perform their respective jobs. Orchestration, as Hitachi describes it behaves in a similar way. It will respond to plays like “scale up for product launch”. All the members of the team (disk, server, and network) go to their respective places and do the jobs needed. And, if needed, adjust appropriately to the conditions on the field. Hitachi leverages a partnership with Microsoft’s System Management tools to closely align the plan and reality to bring more intelligence into the equation. The Computing Stack is the Team This product is also about abstracting systems through software. The company is betting that the coordination of the tasks of operating systems, storage and networking within a single framework provides a lot of value to the business. Hitachi takes the point of view that it is best to harmonize existing assets though open standards and looks at computing as a utility to be shared in the organization. Some of the features the product contains make it easier for organizations to achieve scale across functions and environments. It is designed to support this modern data center principles: Multi-tenancy Charge back for resources Distributed physical data centers Public cloud resources through open APIs Hitachi Unified Compute Platform looks like an impressive physical device. It brings together resources normally held in separate racks and hosts them in a single location and reduces a lot of the work of wiring up data centers. As we unfold another chapter in computing, Hitachi is leveraging its strength in consolidation to meet the trend of massive growth of data. At a glance, there are a lot of reasons why IT managers might choose unified computing products: cost, ease, agility. Looking out a few years, it is easy to imagine growth in this category overall. Is Hitachi well positioned for aggregation of data center resources with its Unified Computing products? How will EMC, Cisco, IBM, and HP fare in the movement towards unified computing? Photo credit: idovermani Discuss