Did you know that Twitter understands (at least) 10 commands? I did not know you can use “nudge” or “whois” in a tweet. Luckily I found a full cheat sheet, which is available for download on BOX.NET (thx to Matthew Tommasi). The sheet also includes action words for searches and a full (clickable) list of Twitter resources.
Cloud
Office Web Apps, LinkedIn and Facebook all become one happy family
Image via CrunchBase
Microsoft has rolled out numerous updates to its web services (see below for the news-links).
1.
Office Web Apps is updated with new features such as embedding public documents in blogs and websites. You can expect automatic updates across the web of these publications, when the original file gets updated.
Think about this, I update my original document(s) and all of its ‘clones’, everywhere on the internet are updated automatically.
Example:
2.
Windows Live announced an integration with LinkedIn, the social networking site for business profiles and connections. Contacts in Windows Live can be integrated with contacts in LinkedIn and properties of the contacts can be merged to create a “more complete” profile of your contacts. Also status updates will propagate into Live Messenger. Full federation will be rolled out over the next weeks.
Think about this; from a cultural point of view, all your business partners now will become your buddies, with instant updates on their status.
3.
Facebook chatting will be integrated with Live Messenger. Not only for the desktop software (that was already a big success: Windows Live Messenger already ranks fourth in daily active users who connect to Facebook worldwide (source)), but now also for the web version of Live Messenger.
Think about this; Live Messenger is the worlds largest chat network and Facebook is the worlds largest social networking site.
My observations:
- Will the internet be resilient enough to support all this integration overhead, after all it was not build to act as an enterprise service bus (aaah, you SOA lovers, think about that for a while….).
- Anybody that now discards the importance of cloud orchestration, really has no clue about what is going on (more on this later).
Hooray, another new cloud: Oracle announces Exalogic
Image via CrunchBase
At the yearly Oracle Openworld, Larry Ellison announced that Oracle will deliver a (private) cloud solution called Exalogic:
“Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud is the world’s first and only integrated middleware machine—a combined hardware and software offering designed to revolutionize data center consolidation. Enterprises can bring together tens, hundreds, or even thousands of disparate, mission-critical, performance-sensitive workloads on Oracle Exalogic with maximum reliability, availability, and security. Oracle Exalogic’s unique high-bandwidth, low-latency interconnect fabric means that complex, distributed applications can run with a responsiveness simply not achievable with typical servers used in data centers today.” (source)
Well you read it correctly. It is a machine and it sounds like IBM trying to sell you a mainframe. I think this is what we typically call “cloud washing”. You take a product, put “cloud-“ before it and presto, you have joined the hype.
Apart from that it is an impressive machine capable of running applications faster and utilizing the very awesome Exadata technology. Too bad it is running Oracle’s own version of Linux with a Oracle dedicated kernel, a true open source OS would have shown Oracle’s embrace of the community much more.
But elastic or scalable? This remains unclear to me, I expect only in one direction; “buy more, not less”.