We’re headed to Israel for IGT09, and while we’re there, we’ll be meeting some of Israel’s startups. The folks at Israeli VC firm Gemini have set up a two-hour session entitled Crowdalytics and lean startup metrics on November 30, as well as one on cloud computing on the 1st.

The overall focus of the session? Startup acceleration and community monitoring. Startups need to learn fast from their mistakes, and they do this best when they have a complete perspective of their online presence. Today, that presence extends far beyond their own website, out into the communities and platforms of the web. We’ll look at analytics for lean startups and the emerging field of community monitoring, and discover how watching the web can help fledgling companies build the right business faster.

A bunch of local firms are going to be there, including EyeView, Mintigo, Collecta, Outbrain, TwitWit, Footbo, Ekoloko, Clicktale, and Confidela. Bitcurrent collaborator and Syntenic CTO Dan Koffler will also be joining us.

This week, many people have been given beta access to Twitter’s new Retweet feature. Unfortunately, rather than seizing the opportunity to pave the cowpaths by building a feature that reflects the way users are currently retweeting each other, Twitter have launched something which behaves quite differently.

You have to change your retweet behavior to use the new feature. This has angered many users, myself included, so I’d like to explain how I think the new feature should have been designed. To start with I’ll look at where retweeting came from, I’ll then explain some of the problems with the way it works currently, how Twitter are trying to address these problems with the new feature, and finally how I think the problems could be better addressed.

Why do we need a retweet feature anyway?

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Lots of good conclusions from the Hybrid Cloud panel at Interop; too many to see on one slide, so here they are.

• Hybrid isn’t one app in two places; it’s internal and external apps talking to one another
• Migrating for new apps is easy; for already deployed ones, it’s much harder
• In the new world, the developers are the admins and ops toolsets are changing
• The 2010 platform will be
  • Infrastructure-aware; parallel; split between dev and ops
  • Not really PaaS; but not IaaS either
  • Runs both in-house and externally
• Increased focus on making it easy for developers to transition to on-demand environments
• Portability becomes a bigger concern (in/out and between clouds)
• Where enterprises will initially embrace it:
  • Collaboration, messaging, things “just above” infrastructure
  • Areas that don’t add strategic value
  • Leverage utility model of what’s there now (apps with inherent burstability)
• Ideological battle in infrastructure
  • Bottoms-up focus on primitives (storage, queue, compute); we build things from easy-to-connect, RESTful functions
  • Top-down modelled approach, which we reduce down to the underlying patterns and can generate code from them (policies, etc.)
• Growth of 2 kinds of technologies
  • That make this easier for developers (Ruby on Rails) ➜ This will win
  • That help to migrate legacy systems into cloud-compatible containers
• Enterprises about 5-7 years behind consumer/public Internet (Web tech, Hadoop, enterprise mashups)
• Let us not forget: All big web businesses use a ton of Oracle
• Huge $ to be made solving enterprise migration: Discrete components or specific apps
• Standardization is 15% of the problem; standards bodies are still arguing taxonomies
• Internet standards are built on rough consensus and running code; whoever produces a useful product that is available to many people quickly will win

Interop’s in full swing in New York this week. Yesterday’s Enterprise Cloud Summit sold out, and the panelists and audience made it a joy to moderate — lots of good questions.

Let us know if you have questions or want to use the content somewhere.