I have been talking to a lot of prospective cloud management start-ups lately, and a theme I am hearing repeatedly is that SMB is the great untapped opportunity. Most are hoping to be the RightScale for the SMB market by providing them with super simple web-based interfaces to clouds like EC2. What I’ve been telling them, is that unless they define SMB the way IBM does (when I was last working at IBM in 2005, eBay was classified as SMB), Cloud for SMB is a ship that has already sailed… [Read more]

My wife and I spend a lot of time online. The other day, I lent her my notebook for a few minutes mid-surf, and she quickly went over to Reddit. As it turns out, most of the links I’d opened were the ones she wanted to read anyway. Over at GigaOm, Om’s been reflecting on Facebook for some time now. And this got me thinking.

Surfing is increasingly a social activity. Think of news aggregators as questionnaires: “Which of these stories do you find most interesting?” If we are what we surf, then the people with whom we have the most in common are likely to have similar surfing patterns. This notion alone isn’t particularly revolutionary, and it’s driving innovation in fields like web analytics. But apply it to Facebook Connect, and it opens up a whole new realm of social networking.

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Call it a history, an event log, a lifelog, microblogging, or whatever you like: The practice of telling your social circle what you’re up to appeals to our always-on OCD, our need to interact, and our love of bumper-sticker succinctness. Sometimes it’s sublime; other times pedantic; occasionally awkward. But it’s here to stay, and represents another model of communications.

Twitter is to blogging as Instant Messages are to e-mail. And it’s on the rise.

Can it keep growing?

On the one hand, microblogging platforms enjoy strong network effects: More people means a more useful network. You can find and follow more people, and add more applications. Twitter’s acquisition of search tool Summize is one example, but there are many other apps out there. So in theory, it should grow and get better.

On the other hand, there’s a downside: The bigger you are, the harder you fall. and while Twitter outages get the headlines, it’s the slow contagion of spammers and linkbait that may prove the undoing of microblogs.

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Many of us have love/hate relationships with quotes, cliches, platitudes and aphorisms. When they’re clever and spot-on, we love them. When they’re trite and overused we roll our eyes and wish we could turn back time j-u-u-u-s-s-t a wee bit and forget the whole thing never happened. So what to do when there are some oldies but goodies out there which aren’t a perfect fit? I don’t know about you, but I’m going to use them and see how it goes:

“Things are more like they are now than they have ever been.”
– Gerald R. Ford

“Same as it ever was, same as it ever was, same as it EVER was.”
– The Talking Heads

“Laws are like sausages, it is better not to see them being made.”
– Otto von Bismarck

“Where is he going with this?” you may be asking yourself.  I’ve been reading and speaking/emailing with people a LOT about virtualization, and now there’s “the cloud.” Many thanks to Alistair for covering some interesting new analogies of cloud computing in his write up from Structure08; the idea of “fluffy little clouds” will help me sleep better at night.

I keep seeing analysts and pundits opine about how new policies and ways of thinking are necessary in this brave new world of virtualization.  They say traditional operational methodologies and policies don’t apply.  I disagree.  I’ll further go on to say that not much has changed at all, nor will it in the world of the almighty cloud, which is really nothing more than virtualization taken to the next degree.

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At Structure08 last week, Bitcurrent and GigaOm introduced Briefings. These 20- to 30-page reports look at a particular industry or technology in detail, combining what we learn while reporting on the space with research and internal discussion.

The first briefing focuses on cloud computing, which was the topic of much of Structure08. It’s available from the Briefings website at an affordable $250 through Paypal. If you’re trying to come up to speed on cloud computing quickly — whether as an investor, an entrepreneur, or an IT professional — we hope this format of background, landscape, and industry direction will fit the bill.

We’ve got many of these planned — my next one will be on Application Delivery Networks, and we’re also doing one on mobility and telepresence.

I wrote a piece a while back about how centralized computing makes a cloud a big target. I didn’t want to get into the biological origins of this stuff, but one commenter was right: Monoculture is a precursor to extinction.

In university (which seems a long, long time ago) I wrote my thesis on evolutionary theory and product life cycles. Admittedly, not a screamingly fun topic, but it did give me a chance to read up on the Burgess Shale and other such things.

Now comes word that Amazon’s EC2, by virtue of the independence it affords hosters, is being used by bad guys for nefarious misdeeds (thanks to Rachel Chalmers of The 451 for pointing it out.) This provides an additional risk: Many of the Internet’s defense mechanisms involve black-holing specific hosters when the sites they’re operating do bad things.

Of course, when you’re hosting many applications, having one of them get blacklisted can be a nuisance for all the others. What’s interesting is the back-pressure we’re seeing arise against the popularity of cloud computing: At Structure, we debated the fear of lock-in; Stacey has a great piece on enterprise obstacles to adoption; and here, we’re seeing the downside of on-demand, easy-access platforms.

In other words, the bigger they are, the harder they fall. And that doesn’t just apply to dinosaurs.