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Twitter business models in the fast and the long

Although this post is nominally about ways that Twitter could potentially make money, that's really just the springboard to discuss a pair of trends that will lead--and, indeed, are already leading--to markets for many products and companies.

The first of these is real-time--the increasing velocity of information if you would. Twitter as we know it today both reflects and reinforces this trend. For a lot of people, Twitter has already become the go-to source for breaking news. The accuracy and the depth of that news may be a matter of debate, but it's hard to dispute Twitter's more

Yahoo's Delicious adds a little Twitter

Delicious, the social-bookmarking service owned by Yahoo, has unveiled home page changes that are intended to do a better job of showcasing links that are currently popular. Although Delicious isn't sharing the exact details of its algorithm, it apparently includes using the number of Twitter messages related to a given item.

Writing on the Delicious blog, Vik Singh, an architect at Yahoo, writes that "For this new Fresh homepage, our system displays recently bookmarked links and tweeted messages focused mostly on technology, web, politics, and media. Underneath the hood, Fresh factors several features into the ranking like related bookmark more

HP takes its Nehalem server message up a level

This is a big week for Intel processor-based server announcements. Intel is rolling out its new "Nehalem" Xeon 5500 processor for dual-socket servers, far and away the biggest chunk of the server market by volume.

As Brooke Crothers notes on this CNET Blog Network post, "Nehalem offers some important firsts for Intel, including an integrated memory controller for better performance, hyper-threading for up to 16 virtual cores (which improves multitasking), and Turbo Boost Technology, which dynamically increases the processor's frequency (speed), as needed."

Just about any new Intel Xeon processor is paired with a spate of server announcements--after all, more

LaCie merges with online-storage start-up Wuala

LaCie, known in the United States for its external-storage products such as the LaCie Biggest, announced on Thursday its merger with Caleido, the Swiss creator of an online storage service called Wuala.

The move is a sign that LaCie intends to enter the cloud storage service market.

Unlike the established LaCie, which was founded in France in 1989, Wuala is still a relatively new start-up. Before the merger, the company's personnel included just 11 people, including two part-timers. Nonetheless, Wuala has gained substantial traction with tens of thousands of users, mostly Europeans.

Wuala's service include innovative online storage more

Commercializing social media: Yes or no?

Last week, CNET News' Stephen Shankland related the story of how the Scion public-relations team added me as a contact in Flickr. As he noted, "I thought it might be a marketing move, given that the Detroit auto show was under way, and indeed, a little digging showed that to be the case."

I likewise contacted the Flickr user, and here's the reply that I received (via the Yahoo.com address in their profile):

We saw you were on Flickr and, as a technology/online aficionado, we thought you might be interested in the new car. The new release more

Bigness in the cloud

In his post, "

But Nick argues that network effects don't underpin Google's success. Google determines the best search results using algorithms, not the "

However, network effects aren't the only reason why a given industry may end up with just a few--or even one--large players. Nick lists a few that may well be relevant to Google and other "cloud computing" suppliers:

1. Capital intensity. Building a large utility computing system requires lots of capital, which itself presents a big barrier to entry.

2. Scale advantages. As O'Reilly himself notes, big players reap important scale economies in equipment,

The identity 2.0 conundrum

A bunch of us were debating over Twitter yesterday whether it's desirable to have separate personal and professional identities on the service. The consensus seemed to be: "it depends." It depends on your professional situation. It depends on how personal and workplace-safe you want your posts. And so forth.

I find this whole question of what I call "identity 2.0" fascinating. Increasingly, there's a blurring line between personal and professional identities--and even between multiple compartments within those buckets.

This is a trend that we're all going to be wrestling with for years to come. Although

Five riffs on EmTech08

I spent the past couple of days attending Technology Review's

EmTech08 gave me lots to mull--and I'll roll that mulling into more in-depth pieces down the road. For today, though, I'm just going to expand a bit on a few statements and thoughts I ran across in the course of the two days that particularly caught my attention.

The state of the market for tools in parallel computing is abysmal. (Marc Snir, University of Illinois)

There seems to be a default assumption around the IT industry today that, as processors evolve to more cores and more heterogeneous

Latency (still) matters

Over five years ago, I wrote a research note titled "

What's the best way to estimate travel time? Would you rely on an estimate based solely on the number of lanes in the road and the sound of the engine? Nope. You need to know, at minimum, how far you have to travel, the condition of the road, and how fast you'll likely be able to go. Obvious, right?

You'd think so. But system and networking specs rate computer performance according to bandwidth and clock speed, the IT equivalents of just measuring the width of the

Do Flickr's APIs protect its users enough?

Over at

I would have thought the answer was obvious. No.

Or, perhaps more accurately,

Speaking personally,

So, while the criticism seems valid enough, it's also part and parcel of Flickr's emphasis on sharing and community over tight user control of their creative product. When picking Flickr or any other photo site, it's important to understand not just its pricing scheme, reliability, and how well their user interface works but, as importantly, the underlying priorities that drive all sorts of design choices.