Social networking is everywhere, and traditional software vendors — like Novell, Cisco, IBM and Oracle — have created products that allow Twitter-like discussions, Facebook “friend” groupings and more behind the corporate firewall. In this story for Techtarget‘s SearchEnterpriseDesktop.com, I write about what some of these products can do and how they can be useful for enterprise discussions and intranets.
I attended a few sessions of this conference here in St. Louis, organized by Alex Miller. Miller has the uncanny ability to find the geekiest person at major organizations and convince them to come to town and talk about some of the really big issues that they are dealing with their code. The conference started off with Hilary Mason, who is a computer scientist and mathematician working for bit.ly. Did you know that you can get all sorts of analytics with any shortened bit.ly URL by just appending a plus sign at the end of it? Yup. She spoke about machine learning, and understanding and predicting behavior from large data set collections. For example, when the World Cup was playing, they observed all sorts of traffic coming from the countries that were in competition during the games. As soon as the game was over, the losing country’s traffic dropped to nothing. Obvious, but interesting. She also gave one of the best illustrations of Bayesian probability analysis that I have seen this side of grad school (and that has been a very long time for me).
I got to hear from Eben Hewitt, who wrote the O’Reilly book on Cassandra, an open source database project that is part of Apache and the current favorite of the large data set folks. He spoke about the really big data guys and how we have to talk in petabytes — WalMart’s customer data base is half a PB, and Google processes 24 PB each day. The data that was assembled to make the movie Avatar was around a PB.
Finally, there was Brian Sletten, an independent consultant based in LA, talking about new Web technologies. He mentioned the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney that is doing some interesting things with Web services — now how cool is that? I can feed my museum addition by going to a geeky conference.
You should put this on your radar for next year. This is very high signal, almost no noise. Some of the speakers could use some polishing, but the raw data is excellent.
We all know the story of Apple’s App Store: a gazillion downloads, more money than anyone has ever collected, and hundreds of apps from the mundane to the essential. But what makes for a great app store experience, and can anyone else come close?
Remember the dawn of the PC era, when all apps came in a slipcase and on five-inch diskettes? When you needed to get corporate approval to buy them and an IT guy to install them? How far we have gone, when a federal government employee for example can go to Apps.gov and with a few mouse clicks have their app of choice on their desktop.
There are lots of app stores and they seem to be cropping up everywhere. There is oneforty.com that keeps track of Twitter apps (what a great domain name). Sendmail’s Sentrion email server has its own place for you to download extensions, Intel has its appup.com where you can download apps for its Atom-based Netbooks, and each major mobile phone platform has its own app store:
I started thinking about this topic with this post from Dion Almaer, who now works at Palm running their developer relations.
Plug-in apps got their start in the browser world, which seems appropriate since the app stores all assume you start out with a browser or phone-based equivalent of some sort. But let’s look at the various components, and see what Apple does and doesn’t do well.
Android apps are very finicky. The same OS version on different phones will perform differently, a nightmare for developers. And iPhone and iPad apps are also different beasts and will take some coding to make sure the app works best on both platforms.
I did a quick search on all five mobile phone app stores for that four-letter word that describes one of those rude bodily noises. (I hesitate to include it in this essay for fear that I will run afoul of email content scanning services, not out of any prudishness.) On Apple’s store, there were more than 600 apps that matched – I stopped counting but clearly it could number in the thousands. Android’s Marketplace doesn’t let you search from the Web, when you go to an actual Android phone I got 111 matches. I got less than 15 matches for Windows, Palm’s and Blackberry’s stores each. Now, granted this is a less than representative sampling, but it just shows you at least how hard it is to find a particular app. And the more apps that are created for the store, the harder it is to find them, particularly if you are trying to use your phone to track them down.
Part of the problem with Apple’s AppStore is that you can only search the app title, with limited visibility in the remainder of the description of the app. That can pose problems for developers in how they name their apps.
Last week I had leaky capacitors on my Dell Optiplex, I couldn’t get any reception on my iPhone 4 because my hands were shorting out the antenna, my Toyota nearly killed me due to faulty parts and the waters of the Mississippi continued to rise. I think I need to call my own personal liability lawyer just to get out of bed.
Maybe I am just feeling my own mortality a bit more. We are all getting older, and no place is that more true than on Facebook, where the fastest growing population segment is the over 65-set. Yes, kids, grandma and grandpa have discovered your digital playground. And they are there to stay, too.
It does seem that our digital lives have gotten more complicated lately too. What with posting all my status updates on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, sending to my network the latest books that I am reading on Goodreads.com, my current location on FourSquare.com, tagging various pieces of content to Digg, Reddit and StumbleUpon, posting restaurant reviews to Urbanspoon, recommending songs that I like to Pandora, there are only so many hours in the day left to delete all those male enhancement emails, including the ones I am now getting in Chinese.
Okay, perhaps I exaggerate a bit: I do have a spam folder and it works rather well. But it does seem that there is a social network for just about every aspect of our daily lives, and what few places are absent it is only a matter of time before someone invents one.
In that spirit, it is worth taking a look at an essay that I wrote about social networking policies about a year ago if you don’t remember it.
Since then, I have had some other thoughts. One of the comments was “the [users of social networks] should be aware that their colleagues, bosses and/or prospective ones are now watching.” And now you can add your grandparents to that list too.
Certainly, what you post can influence your job-hunting prospects. We now have the ritual purging of pictures and posts every June, right after the graduation parties and requisite summer European discovery backpacking trip (or better yet, now there is Couchsurfing.com, a social network for people who want to crash on your couch).
One young 20-something that I know who is entering the job market wrote to me asking me for my recommendation letter of reference. We emailed back and forth about taking down his Facebook party pix, and I reminded him that it wasn’t just his own photo albums that he had to be worried about – what about those pictures that he was tagged that could create problems too? He had it covered. But I know that many recent grads aren’t as thorough, or as concerned. They should be. I hear from hiring managers all the time that these digital travails can make the difference between one candidate and another getting an offer letter.
And then there is the issue that earlier this summer reporter Octavia Nasr left CNN after a Tweet she posted praising a leader of Hezbollah. Never have 140 characters had a bigger personal impact.
Given this uptake in social media among consumers, businesses still haven’t gotten on board. A recent Yankee Group study shows that a third of those polled have no formal processes in place or any social media corporate usage policies, do not allow the use of social media at work or have no idea if their company participates in social media. And while social media growth among my generation is happening quickly, the study found that half of the over 50 respondents stated that it wasn’t important for a business to have any social media presence.
We all have a lot to learn about how to use these tools – young and old alike.
I am attending CAworld in Vegas this week and last night’s keynote was by James Cameron, the movie director of Avatar and Titanic. He spoke about the choices he made in his life along the way towards making blockbuster movies, and some of the ideas resonated with me. Here are a few points:
If you want to read another perspective, check out this story by Joe ‘Zonker’ Brockmeier on ITexpertVoice.com on the same subject.
Every day, data is leaking out of your network. You may not know it; you may even pretend to ignore it. But doing so carries high risk: a batch of stolen credit card numbers can be instantly published on a hacking Web site, and more targeted attacks can compromise your employees’ banking information or other identity thefts. Disgruntled terminated employees may decide to leave the premises with your customer or confidential data on their last day. And the threat of potential lawsuits has never been higher, especially with the economy in free-fall in the past year.
Luckily, there are more than ten different data loss prevention (DLP) products that are available, some from the major security vendors like McAfee, Symantec, and Trend Micro.
To help you in your quest, here are some questions to ask before you start evaluating your next DLP product:
If you have to jointly author a spreadsheet with a colleague, what is the first thing that you do? Email it back and forth. This can be painful, particularly as you try to keep track of your partner’s changes and hope the emails transit back and forth across the Internet. Add a third or fourth person, and things get worse. Luckily, there is a better way, and a number of providers have stepped up with tools to make spreadsheet sharing a lot easier than sending attachments.
I take a look at several of these services for an article published in ITworld here.
We all know that the Web is a nasty place, with denial of service attacks, SQL injection, cross-site scripting and other malware invented hourly to try to pry into your networks. Over the years, a number of vendors have come up with various solutions that go under the broad heading of Web application firewalls, or ways that they can help prevent the bad stuff from entering your user’s desktops. It’s worth diving into these products because they offer a great deal of protection that can save you aggravation down the road.
I talk more about how to buy these web app firewalls at ITWorld here.
It all started when one of my clients wanted to pay me with a credit card. It is odd that I have been in business for 18 years and this is the first time that I have been paid in this way. It is doubly ironic in that I used to teach classes on eCommerce back in the early days of the Web and hadn’t ever gotten around to getting a merchant account, which is what you need to take credit card payments.
If you want to accept credit cards, you enter a brave new world where there is an entire collection of jargon to use your secret decoder ring. For example, “discount rate” is the fee that the card issuer (like American Express or Visa) charges you per transaction. Typically these are anywhere from one to four percent, depending on a series of circumstances. Then there is the “virtual terminal” which is a series of Web-based services that allow you to enter the credit card number in your browser and have the transaction completed online. These replace the typical credit card swipe machines that you see in every retail shop.
Since my client wanted to use their American Express card, my first stop was to try my business bank, Bank of America, and see what they could offer me. Online had limited information but I tried the 800 number and got nowhere fast. They suggested that I talk to Amex and see what they could do for me. Within about 30 minutes I was setup with an Amex merchant ID and could start accepting their card via a telephone response number. The issue was that the transactions would take some time to clear and actually end up in my bank. They could also sell me their virtual terminal software, called Payment Express, which would be an extra charge of $20 a month. Amex has many different options that can easily get confusing – my recommendation is if you want to go this way, first sign up online to access your account and then read the various screens that describe Payflow, Payment Express and their physical card payment terminals.
In the interests of research, I pressed on to see what else is available.
Paypal was my next stop. While you can process some credit card payments, once you get beyond a few hundred dollars you need to have a Paypal business account. This means $30 a month, plus transaction fees of 2.4 to 3.1% to use their virtual terminal software. Here is a description of that process.
Intuit was next. Their merchant services are $13 a month, and it took about a day to set me up. They also have their own virtual terminal software and their home page takes something to get used to. They also charge less per transaction, with fees ranging from 1.9 to 2.9%. They have a great series of online demos here on their Web site.
So which do I recommend? If I had to start over knowing what I know now, I would go first to Inuit. They are geared towards their online product, they have a simple sign up process, and if you already use Quickbooks they can integrate with that too if you end up with lots of transactions. (I have been a happy Quickbooks user for nearly two decades, starting with the DOS version, can you believe it?) I would steer clear of Paypal, I just think they charge too much for too little.
There are dozens of other payment processors online, and this isn’t meant to be a comprehensive review. And feel free to share your own experiences on my blog or via Twitter.
Amazon may be the world’s largest bookstore, but in the past eight years it has quietly built up a series of more than a dozen cloud-based computing services as part of its Amazon Web Services (AWS) product offerings.
You can read more about them in my article for ITworld.com here.