MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--For almost all of its existence, Mozilla Messaging has been known for Thunderbird--e-mail software with the traditional view that a person's PC is the center of their computing existence.
Now, though, the Mozilla Foundation subsidiary's scope is expanding beyond the confines of the computer under your desk or on your lap. In the near term, the new Thunderbird 3 is becoming more integrated with the Web. And in the longer term, the Raindrop project has the potential to lift your inbox all the way to the cloud.
"For us it's really important to have Thunderbird. It's also important to not stay in the blinders of that scenario," Mozilla Messaging CEO David Ascher said in an interview at the company's headquarters here. With Raindrop, "We're focusing on best experience for messaging in a Web application."
Mozilla Messaging CEO David Ascher
(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET)The change reflects the changing nature of computing. Where Thunderbird's chief competition once was now software such as Microsoft's Outlook, it's now also got to reckon with Google's Web-based Gmail service and its ilk, Ascher said.
Thunderbird is still a priority. Thunderbird 3 is set to arrive next week in near-final form--though nearly a year later than had been planned--but Mozilla Messaging has high hopes the new version will be faster, easier to use, and more versatile through the addition of third-party extensions.
Universal inbox
Raindrop is something of an ultimate inbox in the company's vision, a Web application that draws not just from e-mail but from other communication conduits such as Twitter, Facebook mail, and instant messaging. Its goal isn't just to consolidate today's overabundance of communications channels, it's to help prioritize what's important and put off what's optional until a more convenient time.
"We're breaking the notion of one list coming in, in chronological order," he said. What just arrived isn't necessarily the most important thing to do, though human minds are prone to thinking it is.
Some aspects of Raindrop's future are more certain than others. It's way to early to say when the company might release its first version of the actual software, but one thing that's settled is that Raindrop won't be a service Mozilla offers. Instead, the software will run on others' servers--at Internet service providers, for example.
"Hosting a messaging system for the world is not something we can afford right now," Ascher said. Still, it's revealing that the company chose to create Raindrop as a server-based technology accessible through a Web browser rather than as PC-based software.
Will Raindrop rule the roost?
In the longer term--say 2015--might Raindrop replace Thunderbird as people's messaging interface of choice? Perhaps.
"I suspect some people will and some people won't," he said. "I think desktop software still has a bunch of user benefits that will last for quite awhile."
Persuading everybody to freely cooperate with Raindrop could be tough. Sites like Facebook like their central positions in people's electronic lives and like to serve ads next to their content. In time, though, Ascher believes they'll come aboard.
"I think in the long term, openness wins," he said.
Even without Raindrop, Thunderbird 3 will integrate with the Web. It's got Firefox's engine built in for displaying Web pages, a fact that means the software can display Web content.
That ability means Thunderbird can, for example, show Yahoo and Google calendars in separate tabs. There's little in the way of integration with those services today, but it can be added, Ascher said. He expects plenty more add-ons will bring it closer to the cloud, too. He didn't mention it, but even Raindrop could be added in its own compartment.
Mozilla Messaging smells money
Mozilla Messaging is part of a peculiar organizational structure. In the beginning the non-profit Mozilla Foundation oversaw the open-source software that was the core of Netscape Communicator. Eventually, that software split into two main components: the Firefox browser and the Thunderbird e-mail software.
The foundation set up two subsidiaries to oversee the two projects, first Mozilla Corp. for Firefox in 2005 and second Mozilla Messaging for Thunderbird in 2007. Ascher has since 2007 led the latter, which employs six engineers and nine others.
It also draws on the expertise of many volunteers in the open-source world who translate the software, write add-ons, and help debug it. Because of this help, Mozilla Messaging gets by with only one quality assurance employee and one marketing employee, and Thunderbird 3 will arrive in more than 40 languages.
The subsidiary today gets its funding from its nonprofit Mozilla Foundation parent, which in turn receives the lion's share of revenue from search advertising revenue that results from searches Firefox sends Google's way. Ultimately, Ascher wants Mozilla Messaging to be financially self-sustaining. But how?
"I'm not sure yet. I think what we're looking for are rev models like Firefox--revenue models where the user benefits and doesn't have to pay anything, and somehow enough money flows into Mozilla Messaging to fund development long-term," Ascher said.
That may sound like a lot of hand-waving, but Ascher points out he has no investors looking for a big and quick return on the money they invested, so Mozilla Messaging is a relatively cheap operation to run.
Ads? No thanks
One route the company won't take is advertising, the approach that's vital to Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo Mail, as well as to Firefox.
"I don't think people benefit from advertising in mail," he said. "One reason it works for search engines is people often are searching to buy. They're happy to see ads. It helps them. I don't think that works in e-mail."
Today, there are probably somewhere between 10 million and 20 million Thunderbird users, said Rafael Ebron, Mozilla Messaging's director of marketing. That's a far cry from Firefox, whose users total more than 300 million, Mozilla says.
But both projects can punch above their weight. Just being a freely available alternative--whether with Thunderbird or with Raindrop--can steer other products and services, Ascher believes.
"Firefox had an influence over people greater than its market share," Ascher said. "I don't think we'd need to manage everybody's e-mail servers for us to have an influence over the e-mail landscape and make sure everybody has a better experience."
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.
(Credit:
IBM)
IBM on Wednesday announced a program designed to help educators and students pursue cloud-computing initiatives and better take advantage of collaboration technology in their studies.
The IBM Cloud Academy, announced at the Educause annual conference, includes a global roster of educational institutions as initial participants. Educause is a nonprofit association whose mission is to advance higher education by promoting the intelligent use of information technology.
IBM will provide the cloud-based infrastructure for the program, with some basic collaboration tools available at the outset. IBM's LotusLive service provides the basis for the new offering. Participants will immediately be able to do some very basic tactical functions on the new system:
- Create working groups on areas of interest to the education industry
- "Jam" on new innovations for clouds in education-related areas with IBM developers
- Work jointly on technical projects across institutions
- Share research findings and exchange new research ideas
Shared research across universities and other higher-learning institutions remains a vital part of technological innovation, but many programs don't have formal tool sets in place. Cloud services are a logical place to run these types of programs, especially as international groups need immediate access to data from their partners.
... Read more
Amazon Associates is the partner program the company uses as part of its affiliate advertising programs, allowing customers to make money advertising Amazon products.
Associates can now simply click a link in the toolbar to send a link (replete with sales-y text) to Twitter as part of their shopping and selling experience. Amazon gets a sale, Twitter gets traffic, and the associate gets revenue share. What could possibly go wrong?
Linking to Amazon or other online retailers is obviously nothing new, though Amazon has been particularly successful in using its link networks for both sales and to garner higher Google rankings for organic advertising.
This new program does introduce an issue related to link fraud, where spammers and scammers leverage URL-shortening services for spam links. Currently there is no way to verify that the link you click actually goes to Amazon. It's a bit surprising that it decided to use an URL-shortener that it doesn't own, though I suppose the network effect of the URLs helps perpetuate the life of the links.
There is also a risk of nondisclosure wherein in Twitter users attempt to push products that offer some kind of gain to them that they don't clearly state to you. While I understand the argument for disclosure on blogs and media in general, Twitter remains a playground for people to post whatever they want. I highly doubt all the celebrities with accounts would bother wasting their precious time if they weren't posting for their own gain.
Interestingly, there is no mention of whether Twitter is an Amazon Associate, suggesting that Twitter won't see any of the revenue share. I'd like to think that they cut a deal that gives them a piece of the pie, but to date we haven't seen Twitter monetize itself too effectively.
Twitter is quickly becoming the flash news vehicle for everything from news alerts to product placement. And based on a very quick review of my Bitly account, Twitter users just love to click on links. But, I still have to wonder if Twitter will ever get beyond its current role as a marketing tool?
Betting that the benefits of the move will outweigh the risks, Yahoo has released the source code underlying in-house software called Traffic Server that can speed up Web site operations.
The software works by moving some data and operations closer on the Internet to the people trying using those services. Yahoo released it as an "incubator" project under the auspices of the Apache Software Foundation, a seasoned organization for managing open-source projects and also the site that houses the Hadoop open-source project Yahoo favors for large-scale data-processing challenges.
Shelton Shugar, Yahoo's senior vice president of cloud computing, plans to announce the move at the Cloud Computing Expo in Santa Clara, Calif., on Tuesday in a keynote speech, but the software actually arrived at Apache last week.
Shelton Shugar, Yahoo's senior vice president of cloud computing
(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)"We've donated Traffic Server to Apache because we think it's a great piece of code, and we want to build a community around that in the same manner we built a community out of Hadoop," Shugar said in an interview.
Traffic Server is a battle-hardened package with more than 200,000 lines of C++ code. Yahoo originally got the software through its acquisition of Inktomi earlier this decade, and it's been using it ever since. Today, the software delivers 30 billion Web objects and 400 terabytes of data each day.
And Yahoo can rightly be proud of Traffic Server's performance: that comes from a surprisingly small number of Yahoo servers--between 100 and 150, said Chuck Neerdaels, vice president of data services at Yahoo. The software is set up particularly to run multiple tasks at the same time, a design well-suited to today's servers with multicore, multithreaded processors.
Source code is what humans write in a higher-level programming language; only after it's been translated into binary machine code can a computer actually run that program. When associated with an open-source project, this software is available for anyone to see, modify, and distribute, in contrast to the locked-down world of proprietary software such as Microsoft Windows. So in effect, Yahoo is allowing others not only to use Traffic Server for their own ends, but also to modify it--for example, by taking advantage of its ability at to accept plug-ins that can adapt it for different tasks.
Giving away the farm?
So isn't there a risk that Yahoo is giving away some pretty important technology that's central to its business? Plenty of start-ups today are trying to grow to Yahoo's scale, and many of them are competitors.
Some Yahoo rival might very well gain as a result, but on balance, the company thinks that it'll come out ahead. For one thing, Traffic Server in isolation is not as powerful as Traffic Server woven into Yahoo's computing fabric, the company argues.
"What we're giving up is a generic building block. What makes it really interesting at Yahoo is how we've connected it with other things to make a bigger service," Neerdaels said. As for Yahoo's major rivals: "We suspect our larger competitors already have some solution they're happy with."
Yahoo expects a number of benefits from broader development and use of Traffic Server.
"We think a lot of folks can benefit from this, and by raising the tide, we think we can benefit as well," Shugar said.
For one thing, making Traffic Server open-source software will mean that people will grow familiar in its use, making it easier for Yahoo to hire engineers who already are up to speed.
"By virtue of basing services on open-source software, we attract people who want to work on open source. They like it, and they like the idea of it. It's a skill they can take with them from one place to another," Shugar added.
For another, Yahoo can benefit from others adapting the software to a broader range of uses, he said.
Gaining influence among developers
There are intangible benefits, as well, when it comes to recognition among programmers, whose influence in some ways makes them the digital elite. Microsoft long ago learned that much of its power comes from developer allies, and Google is trying to put that lesson to good use as well by releasing many open-source projects--Google Chrome being one recent example.
Yahoo isn't in the business of selling technology to others in the manner of Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, or Google App Engine. But having solid technology is essential to Yahoo. While it's willing to sell its search business and engineering skills to Microsoft, it still needs in-house expertise to power its many Web properties and to reduce its operating costs.
Here, Traffic Server is important. For example, one area where Yahoo uses Traffic Server was at Yahoo Sports for handling scores. A regular Web server sends out the Web page to a person's browser, but Traffic Server handles the JavaScript technology that periodically refreshes the contents of a scoreboard element on that page.
It's only a "trickle" of data, but at Yahoo's scale, that can be some pretty heavy work. "When they moved to using the Traffic Server front end, they shaved something like 200 machines off their back end because session management was more efficient," Neerdaels said.
Another part of Yahoo operations retrofitted with the software is Yahoo Mail, he said. Traffic Server can be used to process the cookie text files on a person's browser to figure out whether that person can be logged in automatically or the person needs to authenticate anew. It also can route traffic appropriately when, for example, a person who is "homed" to Yahoo's servers in India visits the site while in the United States.
Traffic Server also manages a lot of more nuts-and-bolts tasks. For example, it can cache Web data closer to browsers so the original Web servers that house the data aren't as overtaxed. And it can store a Web address stored in the Domain Name System to speed up network speeds.
What's it good for?
Some of these chores can be handled by existing software, such as Squid, which is already open source. But Yahoo is on a roll with its open-source work, as the company seeks to advance its internal cloud-computing infrastructure. Expect more to come.
"As various pieces of our cloud get to a point of maturity, we will open-source specific pieces," Shugar said. Future candidates include Yahoo's foundation for hosting its Web applications on a virtualized, more flexible foundation, and its Sherpa and Mobstor services for storing data.
Winning open-source allies can be difficult, and Neerdaels said it takes an engineer a good six months to fully comprehend all Traffic Server's code, so immediate gains beyond fostering goodwill are unlikely.
But in the long run, Yahoo's program could pay significant dividends. Building a series of significant open-source packages could lead to a Yahoo infrastructure that's high-power but more standard than custom-made.
It's not every day that large, significant software packages arrive on the Net in open-source form--much less a series of them that are increasingly relevant to a competitive market of large-scale Web sites.
In this case, Yahoo's gift may indeed become Yahoo's gain.
Expanding its cloud-computing storage services to a higher level, Amazon.com unveiled a new option called Amazon RDS for companies that want to store information in a database on the other side of the Internet.
The suite of Amazon Web Services (AWS) already included a database option called SimpleDB, a basic database with its own interface standard for storing data and retrieving it. The Amazon Relational Database Service, in contrast, uses a more standard database interface, embodied in this case in an online implementation of the open-source MySQL software, the company said Monday.
"With Amazon RDS, you get full native access to a MySQL database," specifically, version 5.1 of the Sun Microsystems technology, the company said on its Amazon RDS site. "This means Amazon RDS works with your existing tools, applications, and drivers. You can port an existing database to Amazon RDS without changing a line of code--just point your tools or applications at your Amazon RDS DB instance, and you are ready to go."
Amazon raised minimized hassle and increased flexibility as reasons to use the service, which is currently in beta testing.
"Every hour that you don't spend fiddling with hardware, tracing cables, installing operating systems, or managing databases is an hour that you can spend on the unique and value-added aspects of your application," Jeff Barr, the company's Web services evangelist, said in a blog post. "I should point out that RDS enables a lot of really enticing development and test scenarios. You can set up a separate database instance for each developer on a project without making a big investment in hardware."
With its years-long effort, the Net retailer has built Amazon Web Services into a formidable presence in the information technology world. Competitors include Google App Engine, a computing foundation that can run Java or Python programs on Google's own BigTable database technology, and Microsoft's Azure, which is set to offer access to Windows servers in the cloud when it formally launches in November.
One potentially interesting rival is Oracle, already a giant in the database market and, if it can overcome European regulatory concerns, the future owner of MySQL assets. Because MySQL is open-source software, though, anyone may use and modify it, even without its copyright holders' permission.
The biggest competitor to this model is doing things the old way, with companies running their own computing infrastructure. Cloud computing poses security and trust issues for many companies considering whether to put their data and business applications on somebody else's computer systems. But researchers such as Gartner, an influential but not radical analyst firm, now recommend that companies look seriously at cloud computing.
Amazon is working on greater robustness for Amazon RDS. It offers automated backup, and it later plans to offer a "high-availability" option at no extra charge, with which customers can create a separate instance of a database in a different geographic region.
As with all services on AWS, Amazon RDS is priced on an as-used basis--with per-hour charges according to the server memory requirements of the database: 11 cents per hour for a small database of 1.7GB of RAM; 44 cents for large, or 7.5GB; 88 cents for extra-large, or 15GB; $1.55 for double extra-large, or 34GB; and $3.10 for quadruple extra-large, or 68GB. There also are charges for the size of data stored, the number of input-output requests, the amount of data written to the database, and the amount of data read from the database.
With all the hubbub about Snow Leopard and Windows 7, there's another operating system out there you may not have noticed that's getting a significant update: Ubuntu Linux.
Ubuntu backer Canonical plans to release its "Karmic Koala" version on Thursday, and both the desktop and server versions of the open-source operating system take significant steps toward cloud computing. The concept of moving work away from the computer in front of you and into the network does have some merit, but cloud computing is today's fashionable buzzword, and Canonical Chief Executive Mark Shuttleworth is sensitive to its overuse.
Canonical CEO Mark Shuttleworth speaking at the Intel Developer Forum
(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET)"What frustrates me is the term 'cloud' has come to mean anything with an Internet connection, including some stuff that really looks familiar like internal IT," said Shuttleworth in an interview. It's fair to say that in Ubuntu's case, though, it's not a stretch.
Built into the server version of Ubuntu 9.10 is Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud, technology built atop the Eucalyptus software package. Amazon Web Services (AWS), a collection of computing infrastructure accessible over the Net on a pay-as-you-go basis, is among today's most significant cloud-computing efforts, and Eucalyptus implements many of its functions so companies can build their own "private clouds" using the same services.
And in the desktop version of Ubuntu, the cloud connection is a service called Ubuntu One, which lets Ubuntu users synchronize files stored on different machines and back them up on the central service. Storage space of 2GB is free, and 50GB costs $10 per month.
The Ubuntu software itself is free; Canonical sells Ubuntu support services.
... Read moreThis week we are covering the dangers of cloud computing. Get it? With the major loss of consumer data for the Sidekick smartphone users--the Sidekick is made by Danger, a Microsoft company--the whole idea of "cloud" safety has been brought front and center for consumers.
Businesses, likewise, are wondering if they are exposed to similar risks when they put their apps and data in the cloud.
Can we trust the cloud?
Our guests to discuss this topic are CNET senior writer Stephen Shankland and Christofer Hoff, author of the Rational Survivability blog, which is about this very topic. Hoff is director of cloud and emerging solutions at Cisco System and thus has a vested interest in keeping the cloud safe and profitable.
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Reporters' Roundtable #7: The dangers of the cloud ... Read more
ORLANDO, Fla.--OK, IT managers, it's time to loosen up.
That's how analysts advised Gartner Symposium attendees here Monday, arguing that corporate computing departments shouldn't block social networking and that security shouldn't completely lock down communications with the outside world. And even if information technology authorities want to shut down such activity, they can't.
Carol Rozwell, a Gartner vice president
(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET)"Banning access to social media from the corporate network is futile," said Carol Rozwell, a Gartner vice president. "The world we live in is digitally enabled and socially connected."
The advice reflects the transformation of the information technology world as the Internet steadily pervades more and more corners of everybody's life. Although the Gartner event historically has concerned itself with matters such as justifying the expense of a new enterprise resource management computing system, the broadening show reflects the growing scope of work that IT managers face.
Overall, companies must acknowledge that not everything is under control of their own top-down administration, said Peter Sondergaard, senior vice president of research at Gartner.
"We're moving from control to greater autonomy," Sondergaard said. Managers also must find an appropriate place on the spectrums of in here vs. out there and owned vs. shared.
... Read more
Iron Mountain, a longtime provider of physical- and digital-records management, on Wednesday announced a cloud storage API that enables developers to take advantage of Iron Mountain's off-site storage facilities.
Despite the recent issues related to T-Mobile/Danger/Microsoft's data loss, cloud-based storage is not only here to stay, it's a good use case for organizations that don't have the internal processes or means to deal with off-site data management.
And while you can never know all of the things that can go wrong with your data (meaning that no one would have expected Danger to lose the T-Mobile data), established vendors like Iron Mountain have not only the customer base to support their abilities but also the processes to support customers effectively.
Iron Mountain's cloud storage application programming interface is the next evolutionary step beyond a cloud NAS (network-attached storage) that we've seen from providers like Mozy and others. The cloud storage API is similar in function to Amazon's Simple Storage Service interfaces, enabling developers to access data using restful interactions.
... Read more
