Webware

PALO ALTO, Calif.-- Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg admitted in a talk here on Thursday evening that the company's response to a database outage that knocked out approximately 150,000 user accounts was "too slow."

"It's a very small percentage of our users, but it's a lot of people," Sandberg said of the affected users. "We want them to be able to (access Facebook) every day. We resolved it in about a week and a half. I think that was too slow."

Numerous Facebook users began complaining early this month that they could not access the social network, instead receiving a notice that their accounts were "down for maintenance." Many of them claimed that repeated requests for information from Facebook went unanswered, and clamored for better customer service and communication.

The whole affair was "a little frustrating, but it ended," Sandberg said, and chalked it up to the social network's extremely rapid growth. It now has more than 300 million active users around the world.

"We are, I promise, doing our best to scale," she continued, reiterating that all data (except for some recent updates, a statement from Facebook said last week), "and our growth means we're sometimes a little bit behind."

Band tracker and concert reminder service Songkick is venturing into new territory on Tuesday. The site is launching a feature that lets users chronicle all the shows they've ever been to. Think of it like a virtual shoe box for your old ticket stubs.

Users can either add these shows by hand, or search from a database that includes more than a million concerts. Each show page includes things like set lists, photos, videos, and posters. This information has been aggregated from various Web sources, including blogs, band pages, and event sites. If users have their own videos or photos, they can also be uploaded directly to the service. Not included, however, is a way to link to audio recordings.

Concert pages include set lists, photos, videos, and the option to say whether you were there.

(Credit: CNET)

In a meeting with CNET last week, Songkick CEO and co-founder Ian Hogarth told me the company's information-gathering tool, which finds this show information from around the Web, will continue to improve as users add more gig dates and titles. These same users are also able to submit their own sites, or music blogs they frequent, to help the tool acquire more information for the database.

Hogarth compared Songkick's efforts with IMDB in trying to create a simple database that lets people see all of a band's past work in one place. It also creates a mash of all the other bands they've collaborated with, letting users do a "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon," but with individual band members.

The new "gigography" feature lets you see all of a band's previous performances in one place.

(Credit: CNET)

Along with shows, Songkick is adding festivals. These are just like individual concert pages, except they're for reoccurring music events. This allows for a timeline of all the previous shows in a festival series, so you can go back and see the performers and related news from each of those events.

So what's the incentive for spending the time to add all of these shows to Songkick's database? Hogarth says he hopes people come to the site with the same enthusiasm they have for keeping old concert tickets in a shoe box or scrapbook. "It's a way to relive some of the coolest experiences you've had," he says. "It's an enormous amount of pride for some people, and our system provides a very visible way to have it. More so than your bedroom."

Hogarth says that further down the line, that same information is what will help people be introduced to other Songkick users and discover music they may like. In the meantime, Hogarth hopes it will help jog faded memories and let you rediscover that awesome 15-minute guitar solo you forgot seeing 20 years ago.

(Click on the form to try it for real.)

The spreadsheet in Google Docs now supports independent form entry. That means that if someone wants to use a Google spreadsheet as a database, they can ask others to fill in data by putting information into a nice, compact form, instead of into the spreadsheet itself.

As is typical in Google Docs, this feature is simple, easy to use, but somewhat underpowered. For example, the form cannot be easily embedded in a Web page, and there's no data validation on form entries. I still recommend WuFoo for online data collection, and there are other good online databases allow embed forms (and export data to a spreadsheet for quick processing).

A pretty sweet feature is that users can easily e-mail the Google form, if all they want to do is collect a bit of data from people they know. Also, if the spreadsheet is open on a computer, the data coming in via the form can be monitored in real-time, which is, frankly, bad-ass. Try entering data in a form here.

I do expect this feature to evolve over time. Because of this evolution, I do not give good odds to the long-term survival of the other online databases. In fact, I fully expect Google to release a database application into Google Docs to go along with this bare-bones data-entry function.

Via: Official Google Docs blog.

Blist, launching today at Demo 2008, is a Web-based database with a very slick Flash interface running against a SQL backend. The user interface shields the complexity of the relational database underpinnings from the user, but some intriguing capabilities are exposed that you see neither in most other consumer-focused databases, nor in the quasidatabase that most users default to: Excel.

It's very easy to get started building a table in Blist. You just drag field types onto a spreadsheet-like grid. Data types include names, phones, URLs, and images. Fancy features include the capability to keep an arbitrary number of items in a record. For example, if you have a "phone number" field in your database, you can set it up so you can enter many numbers, or none, in each record. You don't have to create a field for "home" and "work" and "mobile" phone numbers and have a lot of blanks.

You can also create database forms with a nice on-screen designer, and filter your display of your database by using what Blist calls a "lens" of your file.

I didn't yet see a reporting feature. I would also like a way to create an embeddable data entry form widget I could embed elsewhere on the Web.

Of all the types of productivity applications, none are more suited to the Web than databases, since most databases, by nature, are multiuser. With Blist, it's easy to invite others to use the database and to get people working together.

Since Blist is a Flex/Flash Web application, I would expect to see it as a standalone application based on Air very soon.

As of this writing, the application is still in closed beta, but it should be opening up today. Definitely check it out.

Competes with: Filemaker, Access, DabbleDB, and many other database applications.

You won't see a slicker database applicaton online, and might not in ordinary software, either.

I once had a French teacher in high school who--legend has it--purchased about a hundred pairs of the same shoe in the same size after deciding it was the best pair of shoes he had ever worn, and calculating the wear rate combined with his life expectancy. For him, my guess is that picking out what pair of shoes he wanted to wear each day was not an issue, but for everything else, maybe he could have benefited from a service called Closet Assistant, which as the name suggests is a system to help you pick out what clothes to wear based on what you've got sitting in your closet.

Similar to some of the bookshelf sharing services out there (Shelfari, Delicious Library, et al), Closet Assistant requires the user to manually input their inventory of clothing. Users can simply upload a picture, or go the whole nine yards by adding names, descriptions (complete with category and subcategory), price paid, and purchase date. Once added to their virtual closet, these items can be combined with others to make an outfit. You can then share these outfits with others Closet Assistant users (on a MySpace-like profile page), or schedule what you want to wear, and when you want to wear it until the end of time using the calendaring tool. Assumingly, users who set up their outfits for each day can do away with the annoyance of having to decide on what to cover up with each morning.

Is this useful? From an insurance standpoint I suppose it is (each user profile shows an approximate total wardrobe value), but what's interesting here is the social angle. How easily this can translate into a clothes swap or auction service, and integrate with other existing social networking sites is the next step. I'm just waiting for the inevitable Facebook app.

[found on SimpleSpark via KillerStartups]

Related: Shopcasting can flaunt your style, but the wardrobes need help

Closet Assistant helps you organize your clothing to help make outfits easier to make and choose. No we're not joking.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Got OpenOffice 2.3 or prior versions? Be prepared to download a security patch.

The OpenOffice.org community has issued a patch for a "highly critical" security vulnerability in OpenOffice 2.3 and prior versions, according to a security advisory issued by Secunia on Wednesday.

A security flaw in a third party default database engine module, HSQLDB, shipped with OpenOffice 2.3 and prior versions, could allow malicious attackers to launch arbitrary code. The vulnerabilities could be exploited by manipulating the database documents processing, according to a security advisory issued by OpenOffice.org

OpenOffice.org is asking users to download OpenOffice version 2.3.1. (Download OpenOffice.org 2.3.1 for Windows from CNET Download.com.)

OpenOffice 2.3 was released last September, shortly before security researchers reported vulnerabilities in OpenOffice 2.0.4 and earlier versions. The security flaws could allow attackers to gain control of users' systems via maliciously crafted TIFF files.

The OpenOffice productivity suite is gaining in popularity with its OpenDocument file format as an alternative to Microsoft Office.

Ismael Ghalimi, the organizer of the Office 2.0 conference (more) is serious about living the Web 2.0 dream: Aside from a browser, he has no applications installed on his laptop, except for iWork, which he says he uses to remind himself what old-style software is like. (Even I use traditional software for writing and e-mail.)

Check out Ismael's notes on Office 2.0 services that work. And this comprehensive database of Office 2.0 applications that he's put together. Useful tips.

But what if there's no available Internet connection for Ismael when he wants to work? "I just take a break. Which can be a good thing."

I'm hosting a panel about Office 2.0 standards and platforms that will probably start around 9:30 a.m. (although it's scheduled for 9). Tune in to the conference live stream to check it out.

Gleamd, a user-generated "Digg of people," as it has been called, launched this week with new features and a refreshed design from its beta program.

Gleamd ranks people in each category based on the number of user votes, either per day or for all time.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

It's a clever and unusual service--part Digg, part Wikipedia, part Wink. I'm not sure I'll still be using it next week, but I've been enjoying experimenting with the service for the past few days.

The core of Gleamd is a database of people, pictures, and biographies. Registered users can update the data just as they can in a wiki. Nothing revolutionary there; in fact, Gleamd is very basic, and it lacks a solid revision tracker like Wikipedia.

Gleamd also doesn't claim to be an inclusive or automatic people search engine like Wink or Spock. Users need to create records and update them manually.

What makes the site different is its ranking engine. For each person in the database, Gleamd tracks how many people have clicked on their little Digg-like voting buttons. You can also view people by category, although since Gleamd is focused on Internet personalities, the categories are a bit unbalanced--for example, of the 22 categories, there are three related to blogging (podcaster, vlogger, blogger). I imagine this will change when the database grows.

Users can also comment on other people, which is where the service goes from fun to useful. It's potentially valuable to see comments on a person you are considering doing business with, for example. Existing networks such as LinkedIn and RapLeaf also have reputation and recommendation systems. The Gleamd system is a lot simpler and easier to use.

Users can update profile bios by adding a new one. If it gets more votes, it will replace the original.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

At the moment, comments in Gleamd appear to be useful and friendly. But I could see it turning nasty, so there should be a way to bury user comments and hide posts from people whose comments you don't want to read. Perhaps that will come in the future.

I like Gleamd. But I'm not sure it will have an ongoing place on the Net alongside well-funded people databases like LinkedIn, Plaxo, Spock, Wink, Facebook, or even Wikipedia or Freebase. Gleamd's simplicity does set it apart, but the other sites could easily add Gleamd features or build offshoot products to take it on.

When you go to the Coghead site you'll think I'm covering it because the home page says, "Join the Webware revolution." But Coghead is more than just a slogan I can get behind. It's a clean online application builder that takes the complex job of creating an online database and makes it almost simple.

No matter how straightforward the development tool, creating a database application is hard intellectual work. Coghead does a good job of getting out of your way so you can focus on your data structure and entry forms. It will still be intimidating for a database newbie, but if you have a smattering of experience with creating your own databases it should make sense.

Creating a simple database app in Coghead is pretty easy. There's a lot of depth in the system, too.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

The service builds your database as you build your forms, and although it's not a relational database system (like MySQL), it does support a hierarchical structure so you can compartmentalize things (clients and salespeople, for example), and still link them together as appropriate. Forms can easily be embedded in your Web pages.

Coghead allows you to do more than just define a database scheme and build forms, though. It's not a programming system, yet it allows logic and process to be built into its database. This ensures that records in a complex application get routed to the right people, and don't have erroneous data in them.

The application runs in Flash (and was written in Open Laszlo) so you can use it on any Flash-capable desktop. It's not as fast as a desktop application or a lightweight HTML-based system, but for most small business applications it's at least as capable, if not more so, than any existing low-price database solution. One thing I didn't find in the current release, though: a reporting function. Even the single-minded online forms database app WuFoo makes it easy to create and run forms and export your data. I'd look for Coghead to add this capability soon (or make it more obvious if it's in there but buried).

Coghead is playing in an important--and new--market. There are interesting competitors here, including online suite maker Zoho, the pure-play online database DabbleDB, and Intuit's venerable QuickBase. Coghead CEO Paul McNamara also sees SalesForce.com's AppExchange as a competitor. Start-ups are still coming into this space, too: I saw a new online database, MyWebDB, at the Web 2.0 Expo. It looks like Coghead has good technology and the company has solid venture funding, including an investment by enterprise app giant SAP. But in this market it's far too early to call a winner or even pick a top three.

The service just came out of beta and single-user accounts are free. It's worth checking out.