"platform plays" entries
Two new open source projects at Velocity
At Velocity next week there will be two significant open source projects debuting. The first is the Jiffy: Open Source Performance Measurement and Instrumentation tool created by Scott Ruthfield and his team at Whitepages.com. Most tools for measuring web performance come in two flavors: Developer-installed tools (Firebug, Fiddler, etc.) that allow individuals to closely trace single sessions Third-party performance monitoring…
Bill Coleman to keynote Velocity
Bill Coleman has twice transformed our industry, and I'm excited to announce that he will keynote Velocity later this month. Bill is most famous for being the "B" in BEA and for leading the creation of Solaris while at Sun. He is now the CEO of his new startup, Cassatt, which "makes Data Centers more efficient". Bill is awesome and…
Myspace/Facebook App Platforms & Total Installs
Within a few months, Myspace has quietly built an application platform with over twelve hundred applications. I previously posted a graph for Facebook app categories, in which I compared the categories using the number of active users. Unlike the older Facebook platform, Myspace only provides the number of installs: It took a few months before Facebook started publishing active usage…
Structure and Velocity
Several people have asked me about the differences between Om Malik’s Structure conference and our Velocity Web Performance & Operations conference. Velocity is on June 23 & 24th at the SFO Mariott, and Structure follows on June 25th in San Francisco. The conferences are complementary: Structure discusses what is changing in internet infrastructure, and Velocity teaches how to make that…
MySpace's Data Availability is not Data Portability
Yesterday MySpace, Yahoo!, eBay, Photobucket (also owned by News Corp), and Twitter announced the Data Availability Initiative. While I could write at length about how this shows the big companies have already realized how to diminish the DataPortability group's brand by linking anything they do "data portability," that isn't the point of this post. The crux of the announcement yesterday…
The battle for the cloud
Andy Kessler has a great op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, The War for the Web: Microsoft was smart to walk away (for now) from its $44 billion bid for Yahoo. It's never good to overpay. But the software giant – whose stock has flatlined for eight years – was onto the right strategy in looking to the Web…
Velocity preview at Web2.0 Expo
At the Web2.0 Expo this month we have a small preview of some of the topics and speakers at the Velocity Web Performance & Operations conference. (Radar readers get a 20% discount by using “vel08js” as a discount code… and yes it works with the $300 early registration discount!). Failure HappensFriday @ 11:00 am, Room 2009 Artur Bergman and I…
What is Web Operations?
Theo Schlossnagle wrote a brilliant summary of one of the biggest challenges we discussed at the Velocity Summit in January:What is this Velocity Summit thing? It was a bunch of web architects from highly trafficked sites sitting around talkin' smack. It was operated in Foo style. However, one thing that made me really appreciate this meet-up was the lack of…
How Technology Almost Lost the War, but Should Do Better
Technology almost lost the war, but can't we make it better?
Sneaking Around With Other People's Platforms … and a Countdown to Graphing Social Patterns West
Multiple Platforms, One Geek. What's a man to do?