It's been said that information technology is a fashion industry--that we just keep following the latest hype and fads. Oracle CEO Larry Ellison last year referred to cloud computing this way.
Ellison loves this dig, and he uses it least once every technology generation. He's not alone. I, however, disagree with the entire curmudgeon corps' "It's just hype!" attitude.
While it's true that we in IT have our fashions, just like any field of human endeavor, we're generally pretty practical. It's hard to see either IT's executives or its technicians as highly subject to the whims of style or flights of fancy. The truth is closer to the notion that we're an evolving industry--one constantly struggling to find better ways.
It's not easy to grapple with the fantastic, relentless progress afforded by Moore's Law (on the supply side), nor the constant demand for more capacity, capability, and integration (on the demand side).
In a few short decades, IT has undergone a massive shift from an engineering-oriented support role to driving the beating heart of the global economy. IT is now central to large swaths of all human activity.
As new technologies and strategies come online--whether network computing, open source, agile development, service-oriented architecture (SOA), cloud computing, virtualization, or whatever--we seek to employ them to improve our outcomes.
There's always a bit of experimentation and a bit of hype involved in the early days. Indeed, without that willingness to "try it out" and a strong shot of enthusiasm on the side, we wouldn't be advancing as well as we are. That's not just hype you're hearing; it's also the will to progress. And for the most part, the recipe works.
Most of the major new approaches touted over the past few decades have become workaday parts of the IT landscape. Most apps, for example, are now "client-server" in design. Linux and other open-source engines run much of the Internet. SOA is how enterprise IT is designed.
The same Web services that Ellison derided years ago now underpin much of e-commerce, as well as high-interactivity Web 2.0 services such as Google Maps. And virtualization and orchestration--frequently discounted at the top of this decade--are now fundamentally changing how data centers are operated.
Indeed, when one of these previously experimental, previously hyped approaches recede from view, it's usually not because they've failed but because they've succeeded so well that we don't need to talk about them anymore. They've been burned into the way we do IT.
Each wave of technology builds on the last, incorporating its best parts, weeding out what didn't work, and often re-emphasizing themes that had appeared years before but weren't quite workable at that time--though often using different names. The utility computing, grid, and application service providers of years past, for example, have become the software as a service (SaaS, or more generally, ITaaS) and cloud computing of today.
So when something new comes your way--a new approach, a new strategy, a new way of looking at or doing IT--by all means, be skeptical. Try it out in careful, measured ways. But do try it out--and have enthusiasm for those new things. That's how we advance.
Here's a message for all the tech bloggers and reporters freaking out over the alleged Associated Press bombshell that some copy-paste legerdemain led to the revelation that Facebook valued itself at $3.7 billion at the time of the ConnectU vs. Facebook court settlement:
Please, chill out! This is not news!
While it had not yet been reported that the ConnectU settlement was a reported $65 million (though since it was in cash and stock, that value may have dropped with the onset of the recession), the $3.7 billion Facebook valuation has been around since July.
The New York Times' Brad Stone broke the figure--well, $3.75 billion--amid the hullabaloo surrounding the redacted court transcripts. I know we're bloggers and we have the attention spans of goldfish and all, but the hype over this "shocker" is a bit silly.
Earlier this week, the AP had obtained court documents dating back to June, when ConnectU vs. Facebook was settled. The founders of ConnectU, former Harvard classmates of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, had sued the eventual CEO because they alleged he stole their intellectual property when he was employed as a programmer for ConnectU. But the court documents were kept sealed, largely because there was information pertaining to the privately owned Facebook's valuation. Media outlets, among them CNET News, had lobbied to have the redacted documents made public. The AP eventually used a copy-paste function in an electronic version in order to expose the censored content. Oops.
ConnectU, meanwhile, has contested the settlement because its founders, who include identical twins and Olympic rowers Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, claimed they were misled as to how much Facebook was worth.
Facebook's valuation has been the subject of scrutiny ever since Microsoft invested $240 million in the social network at a sky-high $15 billion valuation. But that investment was one of preferred stock, and it soon became clear that Facebook's paper valuation was significantly lower.
The AP story does have one new tidbit: Facebook was appraised at $8.88 per potential share as part of the $3.7 billion valuation. That figure obviously has dropped since then, given the impact of the recession.
Aside from that, this is a story that was reported almost eight months ago. Keep calm and carry on, folks. To my fellow members of the media, I'm sure there's a "cool new use for Twitter" story to be reported. We clearly can't get enough of those.
Let's face it: Video search blows. It's easy to use YouTube's search box to find straightforward Internet video memes like cats playing pianos, skateboard tricks, or Rick Astley remixes; try for anything more intricate and you might be out of luck. There are established companies in the space, like the U.K.-based Blinkx, but none of them has captured the market share that video search potentially could.
Enter VideoSurf, a company launching later on Wednesday at the TechCrunch50 conference that's been getting a choice spot in the tech-blogger limelight thanks to a Los Angeles Times preview.
VideoSurf CEO Lior Delgo told the Times that instead of only being able to search text tags and descriptions, the company's search technology goes frame-by-frame to recognize specific people. Additionally, VideoSurf says it has already indexed multiple video sites, from hubs like YouTube and Hulu to the digital libraries of networks like Comedy Central and ESPN. The company has attracted investment funding from former Vice President Al Gore and Joel Hyatt, the co-founders of Current Media; Hyatt is chairman of VideoSurf's board of directors.
But there's a caveat: nobody in the tech press has actually seen this company in action yet. Search Engine Land was very impressed by a demo, calling the company "genuinely radical," but doesn't appear to have done anything hands-on. The last shadowy video company that was this hyped was arguably Joost, which is still trying to stay afloat after failing to catch on. So don't count the chickens before they hatch, even if we're talking about a grainy cell phone camera video of chickens playing "Never Gonna Give You Up" on a piano.
We swear, there's no reading required to expand your musical horizons these days. Well...aside from this article, at least.
(Credit: Donald Bell/CNET Networks)
When you're young, new music is everywhere: radio, Facebook profiles, borrowed iPods, or even burned CDs. It's not hard to find tunes you love. The music appetites of 13- to 21-year-olds are voracious and the consequences of being musically unhip can be punishing.
Then something happens: you get older; work a full-time job; get married; have a mortgage; have children; adopt a particularly demanding parrot; and so on. You wake up one day and realize your taste in music hasn't budged since your early '20s and the prospect of discovering good, new music now seems like an overwhelming chore, fraught with disappointment. I know, I'm living proof.
We're all familiar with the long, depressing list of activities that seemed easy in youth that now take effort. Fortunately, finding good music isn't as tough as working off that middle-age gut. Since its inception, the Internet has helped us--mostly illegally--discover new music. Finally, tools for legal and efficient online music discovery are hitting their stride.
To help you help yourself, we've collected our favorite techniques to help the lazy, hurried, or unhip (or, face it, aging) connect with good, new music.
... Read more
A look at the tabbed interface that Facebook will be rolling out soon as part of its profile redesign.
(Credit: Facebook)On Wednesday, after months of nothing but ambiguous screenshots, Facebook finally talked about its upcoming site redesign. It'll make it easier for members to see immediate, dynamic updates from their network of friends, a company representative said, and it'll cut down on some of the profile clutter by distributing user information across a set of tabs rather than having it all on one page.
The big question: Will members like it?
"Any user interface changes, large or small, carry with them a certain risk," developer Kyle Bragger told CNET News.com, adding that big decisions can easily create more confusion. "Audience really should always be considered when making user interface decisions."
And considering Facebook has more than 70 million members, many of whom don't consider themselves particularly tech-savvy, a massive overhaul won't go over smoothly with everyone.
One developer who asked to remain anonymous speculated that members might not like the fact that you can no longer view a Facebook profile on a single page. "(It takes away) the user's ability to create a unique profile page that they identify with," he said. "Even your Twitter profile seems to do a better job of representing you these days."
Ultimately, it's hard to tell how the general response will be, especially since no one outside the company has tested the new design yet. Major changes to Facebook have a spotty history: Facebook members freaked out about the News Feed but welcomed the ability to spice up their profiles with developer applications, and while some prominent critics lambasted the Beacon advertising program, members as a whole didn't seem to care.
But none of those situations involved a total redesign that will put some information in different sections of the site and require users to click around in ways the site didn't before. "Completely switching up the profiles on people will be like upgrading Windows (from XP) to Vista," said Nick O'Neill, the blogger behind All Facebook. "I think Vista looks cool but I have no idea how to use any of the tools, (so) I stayed with XP." The problem is that Facebook members won't have a choice: everyone's getting the new design, like it or not.
Then there are the thousands of developers who have created applications for Facebook's platform and who will have a chance to test out the new design several weeks before the greater membership. Although the code for application creation isn't changing, the way that Facebook users interact with apps certainly will: posting to feeds and "walls" is different, and some applications will have their own browser tabs whereas others will be an additional click away. Some developers have already voiced concerns that Facebook's platform is dominated by "corporate" apps and that it's hard for an indie creation to catch on. With applications on separate tabs, it's inevitable that some will say this worsens the situation.
"Not all of the details have been announced for what changes need to be made. What is clear is that applications are going to need to readjust how their content is displayed." O'Neill said. It's true: a lot of information was left unsaid, including how it might tie into the extension of Facebook's API into Friend Connect. He estimated that some developers likely are "going to be forced to make substantial changes to their applications."
At the same time, some developers say they appreciate the fact that Facebook will now be able to convey more immediate information into "news feeds" that are more advanced, and are looking forward to an expanded profile environment that isn't crammed into a single page.
"Much, much better. More dynamic. More room for breathing," a developer who asked to remain anonymous told CNET News.com regarding the new design. "The older design was very constricted."
The team behind the popular browser extension FoxyTunes is hard at work on a new mashup site that integrates the music controls of FoxyTunes with an aggregation tool to give you more information and media about your favorite musical artists and new discoveries.
(Credit:
CNET Networks)
Each FoxyTunes Planet artist page has several customizable widgets. There are Flickr photos, YouTube videos, albums for sale from Amazon, and even various Internet radio stations such as HypeMachine and Last.fm where you can listen to the band's other songs. If you're like me, you might be listening to a Shoutcast feed on iTunes and come across an artist you like but aren't familiar with. If you have FoxyTunes installed, clicking the little Planet button brings up the artist's page on FoxyTunes Planet.
If you want to find out more about a band that you're not currently listening to, the FoxyTunes Planet site uses a simple search interface that returns artist pages, in a system akin to Google's. Results are fast and even obscure artists are likely to return some information. If you want to add more widgets to the results page, there are currently 12 others to choose from. Rearranging them on the artist page is accomplished by simply dragging and dropping.
FoxyTunes Planet is a handy tool for music discovery. You could accomplish something similar using an aggregator like Netvibes, but the seamless integration with FoxyTunes makes sense. FoxyTunes Planet is in private beta; you can sign up here. You can download the original FoxyTunes for Firefox or FoxyTunes for Internet Explorer at CNET Download.com.
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