When we talk about cloud computing, we often talk about a monolithic cloud in the sky. But in fact there are many clouds. There is the Salesforce cloud, the Google cloud, the Amazon cloud, the Microsoft cloud, the Facebook cloud, and so on. For the most part, businesses still need to pick a cloud and stick with it. But that is changing as new applications are developed to combine clouds together.

A new Facebook app from Appirio called ReferMyFriends does just that. (Yes, Salesforce and Facebook can be combined). ReferMyFriends essentially uses Facebook as a front-end for Salesforce. It allows a company’s employees, associates, or even customers to refer their friends on Facebook for open job positions or marketing campaigns.

The way that Appirio does this is by mapping the company’s contact database on Salesforce to each employee’s contact list of friends on Facebook. As marketing campaigns are created in Salesforce, there is an option to make them visible in Facebook. (Being selective is the key here). Then it will use the keywords associated with the marketing campaign to see if there are any matches with your friends. When you go to the ReferMyFriends app page in Facebook, you are presented with a list of campaigns and friends that might be good leads.

So if your company is presenting a seminar on cloud computing, for example, all your friends that have expressed interest in cloud computing would show up. Then you can choose to send them a personal note with a link with more information. Nothing is sent to them unless you explicitly refer them. This also works for job referrals, which I think is the killer app here.

Since all of this is managed by Salesforce on the back-end, if any of your friends follow up and become a customer or go for a job interview, you are notified through Facebook. So when someone in your social sphere interacts with your company, you are alerted and can intervene or make yourself available if appropriate.

ReferMyFriends is actually an update to Appirio’s existing MyFriends@Work app, which will switch over on Monday. It is not cheap either. Appirio, which makes some of the top apps on the Salesforce App Exchange, is selling two different extensions from $10,000 to $25,000 a year. That is the cost to the company to hook the app into Salesforce. The Facebook part is free.

Appirio is backed by both Salesforce and Sequoia Capital, which have invested a total of $6.7 million into the startup.

When twitter recently added a “Suggested Friends” feature, I was more than a little disappointed. Unlike Facebook’s “People You May Know” feature, no explanation is provided for why these people were suggested.

In an enterprise setting, the most valuable people are the connectors: “The people who know which people know what”, according to Alan Lepofsky of SocialText.

The larger the organization, the more likely someone else is working on the same problem. And the less likely you’ll find them.

Automatic “Friend Suggestions” shift the connector role from people to software. These suggestion algorithms can use all sorts of data, from mutual friends to similar content (if we both tweet the same thing) to match relevant people. If you have the data, there’s a million ways to slice it. But every attempt I’ve seen seems mediocre at best.

While touring IBM’s Innovation lab at Lotusphere last week, I was surprised to see IBM is also tackling this problem with their “Social Networks & Discovery” project (SaND for short). And it looked FAR better than anything I’ve seen previously.

Their relevant person suggestion engine (screenshot above) uses mutual connections across multiple networks, shared knowledge tags, and even values certain connections above others (like a mutual boss).

Perhaps even more interesting, the IBM aggregation and filtering system works on any entity in a system–people, textual documents, or meta-information (tags). Like Google, searching on any term returns a ranked results list. But unlike Google, pausing over a link shows the relationships between people, tags, and documents (screenshot below).

As I tweeted earlier this week, I rarely read RSS anymore. Too much content, too little time. As this information proliferation grows–on both sides of the firewall–filtering relevant people and content will only become more necessary.

This is still in the research phase, and isn’t shipping in any IBM products yet, but I expect to see it in Lotus Connections fairly soon.

(Hat Tip to TechCrunch fan Ido Guy–an IBM researcher on another project, he pointed this out to me and said, “No one else in consumer or enterprise is doing this yet.”)

Normally I wouldn’t write about this. I’d keep my head down, hoping that someone else would say what I might. Many of the people cited in Rafe Needleman’s post are friends, professional colleagues, and actors in the Web 2.0 comedy. But this stuff isn’t funny, trading in the politics of personal destruction is not professional, and letting this slide is not an act of friendship.

Writing or producing or performing for a living opens us up to the slings and arrows of those who feel helpless, unrepresented, or disrespected. The way the Internet works, anonymity is a shield to hide behind. The only thing worse than that anonymity is the fix for it: digital numbers tatooed on every arm. As we found out in the last administration, destroying our human rights to torture the potentially innocent backfires when we all are presumed guilty.

If anonymity is worth the cost, we have to find some other ways to keep the discourse at what my father used to call a low howl. As a father of two children (15 and 8) my responsibility is to leave them with a sense of what is the right thing to do. My father has been dead for 34 years, but I can conjure up at any moment what he might think about any action I’ve ever taken. Of course, I’m really just mapping my sense of what’s right on top of what he taught me to honor.

The actions of the haters in the virtual world may be excused as a function of the distancing of technology, but I think that’s just blaming the tools — guns don’t kill, bullets do. We all know better than to revel in the tyranny of the whisper, the flexing of the innuendo, the bullying of the vulnerable. But as parents, we fail when we let the hatred pass as just another day’s work, a kind of wink and a nod that excuses the drumbeat of thoughtless banter and real fear slipped in along with the childish and class cut-upping.

Do we really have to let this get as far as death threats before we realize how seriously off the rails we are? It shouldn’t be this way, but it is. And since it is, it’s time for a trip to the principal’s office, not for the kids but for us parents. The kids don’t know better, but we do and yet we condone this crap as entertainment, or competition, or all’s fair in love and war.

I’ll continue to joust with the haters and the ignorant, the ones who sign their names especially. But someone from the world I inhabit (and I dismiss the argument that the mainstream and new medias are fundamentally different) who treats hate as a parlor game will need to fix this before I will continue to respect and compete with him or her. Because entertaining with hate is teaching the young that this is OK, that they have something to aspire to, something to achieve, something to profit from.

We all make mistakes. I’ve made plenty, and I’m sure I’ll hear more about them after this. Three of the people in Rafe’s article are members of the Gillmor Gang, and Dave Winer is one of the main reasons we all have the power in our fingertips to speak our minds in this digital age of lowered barriers. These people don’t deserve these attacks, period. Neither do their families and friends. I take it personally. So should you.

Intacct just launched the Winter 2009 edition of their SaaS based financial accounting system. Major highlights include a Global Consolidations product for real-time financial reports across international boundaries, integration with QuickArrow for managing professional services teams, and a plethora of partnerships with other SaaS providers.

In some ways, this isn’t big news–just the latest iteration of a SaaS product. But corporate accounting has seen little innovation in the last two decades. (Barring experimentation with throughput accounting.) It may be the heartbeat of an enterprise, but it’s also typified by boring legislation, non-user-friendly ERP addons, and infrequent software upgrades.

So I asked the Intacct folks how using the SaaS paradigm changes things:

Currently, financial reports happen on a monthly or quarterly timeline. For international companies, gathering this data is further complicated by exchange rates and varied government regulations. By providing a SaaS back-end, we provide real-time financial dashboards–even across national boundaries and differing on-premise accounting solutions.

We’re trying to change the clunky enterprise software model. SAP’s integration of services is hugely attractive to IT, but a pain for users. By using SaaS, we can seamlessly partner with other cloud services–and our average client is now using five SaaS products.

Lastly, we’ve changed the incentive model for resellers. The majority of accounting software sales comes through the reseller channel. By giving resellers a portion of our subscription fees, they’re incentivized to keep clients happy with better on-premise support–without costing the client more. The reseller channel currently accounts for 50% of our new business, up from 20% last year. We project that to grow to 80% very shortly.

It can be illuminating to compare the strategies of the major cloud platform vendors. Instead of matching currently exposed features, let’s imagine what each major player could do to tack away from competitor strengths and toward their own. For example, Google.

Unlike Amazon Web Services or Microsoft’s forthcoming Azure cloud, Google’s overall application architecture is firewalled off from direct developer access. Yes, AppEngine can be addressed directly, as can the Google APIs. But to date there is no easy way to engage with Gmail Labs unless you are a Google engineer with 20% of your time on your hands. If you’re a Salesforce, you can invest in API connectors and leverage your own cloud. Or you can add gadgets from your iGoogle toolchest.

But harness the viral power of the social media wave and its central driver — the realtime experience? Google shuts you out as a power user developer, and in the process cedes the ball to smaller players. Take the central console experience as embodied by the Gmail/GReader/GApps container. IM feeds and services from FriendFeed, Twitter, TwitterSpy, Identi.ca, the open sourced Jaiku, and Leo Laporte’s XMPP engine (to name just the most visible) overwhelm the screen real estate. Yet there are limited tools to orchestrate these streams before they hit the IM stream.

Then there’s the lack of intelligence in managing these multiple windows. Each reboot of FireFox mandates popping out the same set of windows and then dragging and resizing them into position. FireFox 3 added auto-recovery of tabs and their contents, but a FriendFeed realtime Gtalk IM pop-out when recovered has to be closed and reopened. No smarts, no access to user configuration, no continued disruption.

Combining access to screen coordinates and routing of information to IM windows would likely result in an explosion of third party developers and aggregator tools. But what would happen to Google Reader in that scenario. Already we’re seeing growth in FriendFeed rooms as a workaround for GReader’s relatively locked down UI. Reports of the official release of the API notwithstanding, even then we still wouldn’t have access to the larger Gmail container to integrate the Google services under user control.

By contrast, Live Mesh and eventually Azure may well offer console control on a device by device basis. It’s not that Google has a less expansive architecture, it’s that Google doesn’t appear interested in opening the platform up at the user level. Part of the reason may be the complexity of integrating the various teams across the company, but more likely the company hasn’t seen a compelling reason for opening up more granular access to its crown jewels, namely its advertising services.

Think about it. If we could interactively configure our screens to reflect our interests, publish them out via a social graph to our natural affinity and peer groups, and then test content and information flow against advertising models until we find the best mix…. The growth would be explosive, the stickiness fly-paper strength, the incentive for third parties to build and market to power users an offer they couldn’t refuse.

Console real estate is the coin of the realm in the realtime wars. We see the early battles being played out at the rich client interface level, with Twhirl and TweetDeck the most obvious examples. A level down at the routing layer, FriendFeed is way ahead of the social media pack, with a similar business model clash holding back Facebook and Twitter from leveraging their market clout.

In retrospect the real estate crash was easily predicted, but not acted on until too late. Google has been somewhat responsive to critiques of its realtime strategy, most recently offering promises of improving Feedburner latency when pressed. It remains to be seen if the company will be more transparent about its application framework. At its simplest, the question is: will Google open up its console? Final answer?

Last August, I upgraded from a simple flip phone to a HTC Touch. Immediately I began looking for a way to avoid manually entering my Gmail contacts into the phone.

After several hours of fruitless searching, I stumbled on NuevaSync–a free service that sync’d both my Gmail contacts and my Google Calendar.  Thankfully, they also support Google Apps accounts.

When I got an iPod Touch, I started three-way syncing my contacts and calendar across three platforms: Windows Mobile, iPhone, and the cloud.

As a user, this free service is a dream. I only think about it when I need to change a setting–otherwise everything is seamlessly behind the scenes. And they keep improving. They just announced iPhone multiple calendar support, and expect to break 100,000 users sometime this week.

NuevaSync maintains a low profile–they don’t charge, they don’t advertise, their website is spartan, and yet they’re hiring full-time staff.

So I e-mailed David Boreham, their CEO, with a few questions:

Why do people use the service?

A common story is a husband and wife team who want to share a calendar. One of the pair will typically begin using the service first then ask us if their spouse can share a calendar. We have doctors using the service we well as lawyers, scientists, students and even a few venture capitalists. After fixing a number of user-reported timezone bugs we know that we have users in all parts of the world (including Easter Island). We don’t really track specific companies using the service but we know from support traffic that it’s common for several people in the same organization to use the service together, with shared calendars.

How long have you been around, and what’s the roadmap for the future?

Nuevasync began public service in September 2007. Originally the service was deployed as a vehicle for testing our sync protocol implementation. Google calendar was chosen as the first data source somewhat at random, based on the availability of an API and reasonable terms of service for its use. Over time, and particularly after the release of the iPhone 2.0 in July 2008 users selected the service as a way to sync Google contacts and calendar with their phones. Nuevasync adapted to the influx of new users, deploying more servers and moving our operations to a highly reliable data center in the South Bay.

We just released support for multiple colored calendars on the iPhone and iPod touch. Also the ability to select which Google calendars sync to the device, and sync for read-only calendars (holidays, sports team calendars etc). The next big feature planned is support for e-mail push sync. Longer term you can expect us to add support for more data sources (e.g. CalDAV, other public PIM services besides Google).

How many users do you have–and what devices are they using?

We have 95313 registered users and around 800 new users per day. Device breakdown is as follows:

iPhone : 75%
iPod Touch : 16%
Windows Mobile : 7%
Noika : 1%
Other (Palm, Blackberry, PocketPC2003) : 1%

How many people are using Google Apps?

I don’t have exact numbers for Google Apps users, but based on an analysis of users’ e-mail addresses it’s a roughly 80:20 split.

Given your low profile, how do users find NuevaSync?

We don’t have good data on this but based on the timing of our big new user spikes we think that many users find articles about our service when performing an online search. In the beginning we undertook a primitive form of SEO where we’d try Google searches along the lines of what we’d expect a prospective user to do (e.g. ’sync google calendar windows mobile’ — this was long before the iPhone). Then in the search results we’d look for any pages that had editable content (typically blog posts or forums), and we’d add a comment to the page pointing out our service as a possible solution to the problem being discussed. The current set of articles and forum posts grew from this initial seeding effort and the early adopters that generated.
We also know from user feedback that they often recommend the service to friends and colleagues.

Napera, a recent Seattle-based startup, is looking for 100 IT and Network Managers for a closed beta test of their new 24-port gigabit network switch. Details below.

Napera is testing a relatively new concept–targeted security software subscriptions installed onto the network hardware. These security subscriptions recognize that different industries face different threat profiles–for example, the health industry versus the financial services industry.  Each industry is also willing to pay for different levels of security. CEO Todd Hooper explained it to me:

A good analogy is the trial antivirus software that is bundled with
computer. Imagine if networking hardware came with bundled security features
you could activate for a trial and subscribe to remotely, rather than being
a new single function box you had to buy just for this purpose.

The recent mini-epidemic of the Conficker worm shows that breached network security remains a very real threat for the enterprise. Networking hardware is now sophisticated enough that installing applications on the switches themselves results in extremely fast and cost-effective deployment–particularly for businesses too small to hire a full-time security guru.

On the flip side, subscriptions to security in the cloud means your usage statistics can also be collected for continuous improvement. I don’t know if Napera intends to do this, but it certainly seems the logical next step.

Beta details:

Napera is looking for 100 IT and Network Managers to join a closed beta test
of our most innovative product features. We will ship you a fully
functional, business class, 24-port gigabit network switch. Install it on
your network, use it, and keep it, with our thanks for participation in our
beta program. We will ask you to turn on and use advanced features, never
before seen in network switching equipment. Give us your feedback, ideas,
and comments.

The beta test is open to US residents only and will take 90 days.
Participants responsible for hardware shipping and handling.

Apply to participate in the Napera Project Indigo Beta Test at
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=3_2bo0W86aSCZR65aT2zIU5g_3d_3d

Although the data is fragmentary and the likelihood of anything significant happening soon is impossible to calculate, something tells me FriendFeed has reached the point where it is in the driver’s seat of social media. Whether that means something important in today’s climate of layoffs and hard looks at viral business models is certainly debatable. But FriendFeed has maneuvered itself into the interesting position of replacing Twitter as the front end to the micromessaging platform it created.

As Paul Buchheit proved with his simple Javascript experiment, FriendFeed’s APIs already allow him or anyone to create a simple Twitterish UI in a few hundred lines of code. While this particular take doesn’t do everything he or I’d want it to, it does viscerally prove the underlying point — that FriendFeed can shapeshift into Twitter while Twitter can’t return the favor. If the user can get all the benefits of Twitter plus those of FriendFeed, why use Twitter?

Currently I write to FriendFeed’s engine from a combination of sources, principally the GChat XMPP IM window in Gmail but occasionally via Twhirl and only via TwitterSpy (a delayed Track tool) when responding to an @reply message from someone I don’t follow. In the latter case, my response is sent via Twitter at the first hop, and then aggregated into FriendFeed. In the other more common cases, my comments are sent from FriendFeed to Twitter.

Buchheit’s prototype code is but the latest in a series of examples that suggest Twitter’s stranglehold on its users is weakening. Another is Power Twitter, a Firefox plugin that enhances the Twitter Web UI with a variety of features, most notably one that decrypts shortened URLs into a full text description of the link based on the target page’s title. The tool also unpacks image URLs and places the image inline, something that FriendFeed does with images, podcasts, and video embeds as well.

These small flourishes turn the Twitter Web page into something I’ll check from time to time, as opposed to never with the vanilla site. Twhirl provides persistence, aggregation of @replies, direct messages, and follow updates in a single stream, making it a better solution until recently when FriendFeed added real time support and, just yesterday, an import tool to synchronize Twitter follows as FriendFeed subscribers. All that remains unavailable is Track, though there are poor-man workarounds using Twitter Search RSS feeds imported into FriendFeed rooms.

Most of these new features have been available for the last few months, but Twitter’s decision to rate limit the ability for third party developers to add services related to following and unfollowing has struck a nerve. Twitter’s ongoing rate limiting of its full firehose has kept Track dead in the water except in a crippled form, and in doing so power users have found it necessary to migrate to mass following strategies that make the flow of data impossible to manage.

The services affected by the new rate limits identify spam and marketing bots and attempt to prune them while autofollowing “real” friends. Unfortunately, these services need to ping the Twitter API thousands of times to determine who is “real”, and according to some developers Twitter is unwilling to improve its APIs to make such verbose approaches unnecessary. It could very well be that Twitter doesn’t want third parties to leverage its platform for services it would like to charge for themselves, but whatever the rationale, the net result is an impasse.

To be sure, FriendFeed might have similar problems if the market suddenly shifted over to them in numbers sufficient to test the smaller company’s resources. Yet Google’s open sourcing of Jaiku and its transplant on top of AppEngine suggests that apps could be built that slowly but surely pipe more and more messages to multiple engines. Already FriendFeed is smart about avoiding recursive loops between Twitter and FriendFeed; it won’t take much to establish an entry point that is effectively identical from a Twitter user’s perspective while also polulating several redundant stores with identical material.

The longer Twitter sends mixed messages about its plans for the services people inevitably will find mandatory — Track and filtering — the more attractive these alternate stores will become. A smart front end that manages whatever constructs people find useful in a way that can be configured to each or several UI patterns can gather significant market momentum over the next few months.

What can slow this down? For starters, Twitter can release new versions of some of these services to blunt the opportunity for its competitors. Some postulate a partnership between Twitter and a larger player, but Facebook’s apparent .5 billion stock offer makes it pricey for a Microsoft who classically would rather build than buy. The Jaiku play seems to undervalue Twitter, not to mention the trouble Google is having with real time in general (Feedburner, phone home.) Yahoo? No.

IBM bought Twitter 1.0 with Notes in the Lotus acquisition, and fueled its entry into half of the messaging market around the Y2K marketing opportunity. Now micromessaging offers users a more elastic construct to model digital relationships across decomposing corporate silos and virtual communities. Twitter sits midway between the walled garden approach of Facebook and the evolution of messaging embodied by Gmail and its IM integration.

It’s no small thing that valuable connections these days flow over direct messages. The Twitter social graph is constrained by the difficulty in managing too many follows, and the follow dance leads to cross-follow relationships that business relationships to emerge from the value of the affinities which attract people to each other. As track and filtering return, tools will allow partitioning of micromessages into the atomic datatypes of both email and IM, with the added attribute of dynamic provisioning based on a project by project basis. This is where the money flows, and is made.

FriendFeed is Twitter’s API. It’s also an RSS aggregator — a direct competitor of Google Reader — and forces Google to confront the absurd latencies of Feedburner and YouTube transcoding for display on the iPhone. Today’s rollout of in-line video playback in Gchat suggests Google is interested in keeping users tethered to the Gmail console and its Adsense engine, but FriendFeed’s APIs are available to developers while Gmail Labs remains an internal sandbox. And Buchheit’s previous startup was Gmail.

IT Hit just launched the Beta version of their web-based file manager.

Certainly the ability to create, edit, and save Microsoft Office Documents on the server–without downloading the file or any plugins–is the most immediately useful feature.

Unfortuntely, the Microsoft Office integration requires Internet Explorer; however, I successfully used the IE-Tab Firefox extension to edit a Powerpoint deck within Firefox.  Try it yourself at the demo site–no registration required.

On the backend, the file manager uses the WebDAV XML protocol to exchange data with the server. It will run on any WebDAV-compliant server based on .NET Framework, Java, PHP, or any other programming language.

Because the file manager was built entirely in Javascript, it works across the four major browsers–Firefox, Internet Explorer, Chrome, and Safari–in any OS, without requiring additional third-party software.

The pricing varies depending on your needs, and I found it a little complicated to interpret–but don’t expect to get started for less than $1250.

Update: IT HIT e-mailed me to clarify pricing.

Our main target audience are the developers of DMS/CMS/CRM systems that require standards-compliant communication with a server for file management. For such customers we provide a Redistribution License: $2250.
Usually this license is for customers that want to redistribute IT Hit AJAX File Browser as part of their product.

Users that want to install AJAX File Browser on a single website (single domain name) can purchase Single Server / FQDN license: $1250

Often our customers require both client and server WebDAV library, so we also provide packages with significant discount:
IT Hit WebDAV Server Engine for .Net Redistribution License + IT Hit AJAX File Browser Redistribution License: $3350
IT Hit WebDAV Server Engine for .Net Single Server License + IT Hit AJAX File Browser Single Server / FQDN license: $1950

More info on the AJAX File Browser Homepage.

Tomorrow morning Zoho will announce new import functionality for migrating Google Notebooks into Zoho Notebook. This comes on the heels of Google’s decision to stop Google Notebook development and quit adding new accounts.

Also updated is a the Firefox Extension for Zoho Notebook. Much like Delicious, the Zoho extension provides Notebook access via a pop-up menu. Handy functionality includes web page screenshots-both entire page and specific selections, quick text add, and a synchronized copy of your notebook.

Migrating is simple because Zoho allows sign-on using your Google account. Just sign into Zoho with your Google ID, install the new Firefox extension, and type a command when you visit your Google Notebook account. More details Zoho’s blog.

IBM just announced Lotus Notes ActiveSync support will be released later this year. The code is already live, and was demonstrated in a seminar earlier today at Lotusphere.

This is native integration with the iPhone–within the native mail, calendar, and contacts. Previously, iPhone users were forced to use the mobile Safari browser to access the Notes Web Access interface.

Lotus is playing catchup with Microsoft, who released push e-mail for Microsoft Exchange in March 2008.

No news yet on Android support, though Ed Brill, IBM Director of Messaging, said few customers are requesting Android support. Similarly, nothing was said about supporting the new Palm Pre platform.

Genius Inside just released a fully-featured SaaS version of their project management software.

And by fully featured, I mean more than just advanced task tracking–like 37 Signals’ Basecamp product. Genius Project includes Gantt charts, project portfolio analysis, and tracking contractor progress in both relative and absolute terms.

I just watched a demo here at Lotusphere, and was impressed by the customization possibilities. The demo guys completely changed the project requirements–using only the browser menus–in about 15 minutes.

Their website emphasizes the Notes/Domino integration, but the new SaaS version is completely stand alone.

SaaS models are known for fast deployment, and Genius Project is no exception. Several recent installations were small teams within large companies who weren’t willing to wait for the IT department.

They also offer on-premise versions for operating behind a firewall, exporting to Microsoft Project, and a new Blackberry plugin.

For a small web-startup, the software is completely overbuilt. But for medium-large enterprise–or project management teams within large enterprise–this might be a cheaper and more flexible option than thick-client stalwarts like Microsoft Project.

I’ve been reading an interesting quasi-history of the Basement Tapes, a series of recordings produced in a garage in Woodstock, New York in 1967 by Bob Dylan and the group that soon came to be known as The Band. It’s quasi-history because of the participants; Dylan won’t comment, Richard Manuel and Rick Danko are dead, and Levon Helm only showed up for the last few sessions at the end of that summer.

The one common thread is that the recordings were not meant to see the light of day, except as a publishing tape to be distributed privately to encourage covering by other artists. This was eminently successful, with a number of songs hitting the pop charts from people like Peter, Paul, and Mary and Manfred Mann. What fascinates me about the fragmentary recounting of the tale is the process by which Dylan and his collaborators produced a secret body of work that was injected into the cultural dialog not in opposition to but alternatively to the high production of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper.

40-some years later, the technology process is similarly roiled by the intersection, or as some insist the collision, of the last and next paradigms of the Internet revolution. The roles of Dylan and The Band, then called the Hawks, are played by Twitter, FriendFeed, Ustream, the iPhone, and so on. Where the Basement Tapes were recorded in a circle of musicians trading off between instruments and vocals, the real time Web as it is colloquially becoming known employs a variety of lightweight tools to orchestrate a rich, deceptively simple platform.

Sgt. Pepper was recorded over 8 months employing hundreds of hours of Abbey Road studio time, engineers, and elaborate experiments in expanding the envelope of recording and performance technology. The Basement Tapes were done with the equivalent of prosumer equipment and the careful placement of at most 6 microphones. Curiously, an additional microphone dangled in the middle of the circle, to be picked up by various participants and used to interject Voice-of-God humorous pronouncements into the proceedings. With apologies to Dave Winer and Adam Curry, these were the first podcasts.

Last week Neil Young filmed a video in his house with Ustream and released it on YouTube. Young sent email to a friend with the URL on the 9th, and the video spread over the next several days. The song he performed is part of Young’s next record, to be released in March (assuming it goes according to current plan.) A few days ago, David Sanborn and I filmed an iChat session between two MacBook Airs which was edited down to 10 minutes with iMovie and uploaded to YouTube. It took some 15 hours to become available directly on the iPhone. Days and then hours.

Tonight Ustream has released an AppStore download allowing anyone with a Webcam to broadcast in effective realtime over a WiFi connected iPhone or iPod Touch. With an open source piece of Mac software, it’s trivial to project a video onto a Ustream channel, initiate a broadcast, Tweet the show URL, and reduce the latency from hours to minutes. We’ve been experimenting with these techniques to film recording sessions in New York, rehearsals in Tokyo, and improvisations on vacation in the Caribbean. Sometimes the quality of the broadband deteriorates or drops out, but then some of the Basement Tapes were recorded at the lowest possible speed over other takes on cheap tape stock.

I could connect the dots between these “experiments” and the startup world, the IT dialectic, the usual rationalizations for something that needs no such explanation. Soon we will tire of recounting the story of how events are transmitted faster and unfiltered over the real time network and realize that discovery happens when it happens, when the stars and minds align, when the cost of production approaches zero and the real investment is in the ideas being captured and distributed.

On the Basement Tapes you can hear the players melding into a supple machine, the laboratory that produced the group known as The Band when producer John Simon took the lightning captured in the garage and supplemented it with color and better application of technology. What wasn’t lost was the sound, the mesh if you will, that was invented in the garage. Steve Wozniak was quoted a few days ago as suggesting that Steve Jobs’ withdrawal from day to day operations at Apple might give him the time to visualize the future. I’m paraphrasing, but often the role of producer is to encourage but not smother when the take or feel emerges.

The economic crisis tests our mettle, but it also produces the limitations of a canvas from which rare results emerge. Boil down all the noise about real time and you get a common dilemma — too much of nothing, as one of the Basement Tapes famously called the firehose. How you separate the wheat from the chaff, find the trusted voices, harness the beat of the times — these are the valuable things that minutes or days or years later we’ll look back on and understand how everything had to go right to bring us to the moment tomorrow morning when a black man becomes a leader when we need it most.

I’m at Lotusphere 2009 today through Thursday.

Main announcements this morning: IBM highlighted partnerships with LinkedIn, TripIt, Skype, and Salesforce.com. On the internal side, the Notes crew demo’d very functional Blackberry integration, voice chat integrated within Notes, and a very nice browser-based UI.

The emphasis was clearly on social computing and collaboration–including the new Lotus Live–IBM’s latest SaaS effort. Quite timely, given my controversial post on Lotus Notes and the Web 2.0 world.

Clearly, IBM recognizes the growth of social collaboration, and they’re trying to funnel that through the front door–yes, you can use Flickr, Skype, etc–but everything is designed to happen within the context of the Notes platform.

From an IT administrative perspective, this enviroment is far easier to manage. But from a user’s perspective, collaboration squishes through walls–trying to make Notes the knowledge management OS feels restrictive.

While these worldviews continue to collide, they’ll never merge. As testimonials this morning from Coca-Cola, HSBC, and NetJets demonstrate, large enterprise prefers a single piece of software for scalability. Despite users continuing complaints about the lack of flexibility.

Buzz Bruggeman of ActiveWords and I discussed this tension between partnerships and single piece of software–he wondered why IBM didn’t partner with Twitter: “If the next phase  of the ‘net is about discovery rather than search, than anyone in the enterprise space should harness the power of twitter. Otherwise, they’ll be left behind.”

Don’t expect a lot of live-blogging. For real-time updates, follow the twitter stream. Otherwise, wait for the daily TechCrunchIT recap. (Or ping me on twitter if you want to meet up.)

Marc Benioff has an uncanny sense of how to stitch together the multitude of social media and Web service resources that dominate the technology space. While many of the audience decry the notion of the enterprise applicability of these tools, Benioff and Salesforce think they’re on the way to what he calls “the next billion dollar opportunity” on top of this realtime platform.

On stage at Salesforce’s announcement of its Service Cloud, vendors like Google, Facebook, Plantronics, and even the Obama/Biden transition team are solving business problems with existing services. Salesforce spaces these announcements out over time at about one every two months. Sometimes the progress seems substantial, other times more incremental. Stitched together into a CRM service spanning Google Search, social media communities, and best practices databases, the net result delivers real value at just the time corporations are looking for leapfrog technology.

Benioff has always understood the marketing value of talking the Web services talk, the Web 2.0 walk, the social media move away from the public portal to the enterprise service fabric. But what is even more strategic is his ability to orchestrate those same promises of the future into leading edge value propositions that he can upsell as part of the multi-tenant architecture. Somehow, Salesforce has used Web technologies to turn liabilities into assets, from a site that provides user-managed reports on uptime to a Salesforce to Salesforce private channel between subscribing companies — a kind of Sam’s Club for data.

Oddly, Salesforce’s successes don’t undercut its competitors, at least not directly. Benioff touts connectors to Amazon Web Services and Google App Engine to extend the Force.com offerings, all the while enhancing developer allegiance with a form of incentivised buy in instead of lock in. Although Benioff loves bashing Microsoft, the time will soon come when Azure will interoperate. And watch Microsoft build connectors in the opposite direction to make switching costs a marginal part of the investment in the Cloud.

It may seem like a strange choice to latch onto the “conversation” brand well after that Cluetrain seems to have left the station, but Benioff understands the power of delivering on the science fiction of the last rev of disruption. In the process, he sells the next set of iterative announcements, overlapping them with customer wins and the slow build of coordinated endpoints and the harnessing of Web standards. Salesforce has moved beyond the failed promise of code reuse to the provable premise of platform reuse.

Enterprise RSS promised to be far more than just Google Reader on steroids.

It allows groups to keep abreast of private updates using push technology without cluttering up e-mail. Similarly, I use SM2 everyday to monitor news about CrunchBase. Currently I get a daily e-mail, but it’d be nice if I could subscribe to a password-protected RSS feed.

On Monday, Marshall Kirkpatrick claimed enterprise RSS is dead–citing Newsgator’s continued infusion of cash as evidence the market is dead. Brad Feld responded with his thoughts on why enterprise RSS is alive.

Yesterday, I spoke with JB Holston, Newsgator’s CEO, and asked him for his thoughts:

You’re known for RSS readers–what problem do you want to be known for solving?

First, though our brand is associated with consumer RSS readers–FeedDemon, NetNewsWire, iPhone RSS reader–we never intended to build a consumer-focused product and flip it to Google. From the beginning, we were targeting the enterprise.

We want to be known for solving collaboration problems. We have social widgets, for example Reuters widgets use our technology. We also have a Social Sites application that basically turns Microsoft SharePoint into Facebook for the enterprise. [Screenshot below.]

Our enterprise RSS service has two sides: a Saas deployment used by approximately 150 vendors, and an on-premis server that sits behind the firewall–currently about 125 clients.

Why do you keep raising cash?

Newsgator was first funded four and half years ago–really, we’ve had three rounds of funding from separate groups. Technically it’s been six rounds, but only three events with different lead investors. So far we’ve raised $39 million.

This seems like a lot if we were just an iPhone developer (our iPhone application made TIME magazine’s top 10 list), but as I said before, we’re very focused on the enterprise. Raising $39 million is common in this space.

What’s your response on the death of enterprise RSS?

Who cares? It doesn’t have to be called enterprise RSS because that’s just the backend protocol. From our perspective, enterprise RSS–whether deployed for CMS, or portal enhancement, or social computing, or replaicing external information sources–is just the enabling technology.

Our customer’s don’t come to us and say “we want enterprise RSS”. They come with specific problems like “fix our portal”, “help us drive collaboration”, etc, and then we go use RSS. They don’t care how it happens.

From our point of view, the conversation has moved beyond RSS in the blogosphere. It’s a little startling to see people saying “because enterprise startups require cash, the enterprise RSS market is dead.”

RSS is fabulous technology, and if no one is talking about it, that’s just because the market matured to emphasizing solutions, not technologies.

It’s certainly an interesting argument, but I don’t think the market’s moved into understanding the power of enterprise RSS.

Maybe we’re just too stuck with bad inbox habits to worry about disentangling news from our inboxes. Certainly we’re just beginning to use online collaboration without having to think about it. Only time will tell how deeply RSS penetrates the enterprise.

These days, when I have  technical question, I reach for Google long before customer service. What if customer service could reach for Google?

Salesforce.com just launched a new customer service application called Service Cloud. The new application, built on a SaaS model, tries to capture the crowdsourced pools of knowledge floating across the internet and use them for commercial customer service.

Traditional on-premise contact center technology is disconnected from the experts and knowledge found in the cloud. Yet so many customer service questions are already answered online in forums, Facebook, Google, Amazon, or others. Or the answers are sitting on your personal Instant Messaging history, e-mail history, or corporate intranet.

The Service Cloud includes plugins to each of these environments. (See screenshots.)

“The Service Cloud is the first customer service solution that empowers companies to join and manage all service conversations happening in the cloud,” said Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of salesforce.com. “This has been made possible through the emergence of native cloud computing platforms like Force.com that are built to harness the power of other clouds like Facebook, Google, and Amazon.com.”

Here are the major components:

1. Online communities–talk with the company and with other customers.
2. Connections to existing social networks and the blogosphere–funnel existing knowledge into a company’s knowledge base.
3. SEO–make sure your company’s community shows up high when I reach for Google.
4. Sharing with business partners–the cloud makes it easy to share portions of your knowledge base with partnered companies.
5. Contact center technology–give your customer service agents access to this knowledge base.

It’s certainly an interesting idea. I trust my friends to not only know technical answers, but also to tailor their explanations to my competence level. If that knowledge could be captured and systematized, it could save a lot of money on call centers.

But don’t expect miracles. Unlike CRM, customer service is a much squishier problem. In theory, capturing the knowledge in the cloud sounds great. And it’s easy to suck in via RSS, API’s, and the like. It’s much more difficult to sort and quickly regurgitate for my specific problem.

For an enterprise looking to retool their customer service system, moving to the cloud makes sense. The SEO benefits alone might be worth it.

When President Obama delivers his Saturday radio address, it’s also shot on video and delivered over YouTube. When the news broadcasts excerpt from it, they use the Internet version, the one with pictures. It’s no longer a radio address; it’s a Webcast.

This week I tried to record the second season premiere of Damages, a twisty series with Glenn Close and Ted Danson among others on the FX network. No luck on the first try on Dish Network; the recording lasted 40 of the 70 minutes. A second try on Comcast bombed out after 5 minutes, but it may have been a 5 minute recap of the first season that tripped up the “New” show algorithm. Then on a hunch I checked Comcast’s On Demand repository and sure enough, there was not only the first show of the new season but the whole first season.

Today I get an email from a friend with a pointer to a new Neil Young song, embedded below. It’s the harbinger of spring, the groundhog not seeing his shadow or whatever, the fork in the road where we say what we want and who we want it to over the realtime network. It’s got that Crazy Horse feel mixed with a gnarly hip state of the union vibe. As Neil spits out the lyrics amid chunks of an Apple he’s eating (a visual pun?) the bank is busy repossessing a flat screen TV in the background.

Once the Cartel understands the musicians have repossessed the direct connection to the marketplace, they will quickly come to terms with the New Silent Majority. Apple’s nifty sidestep of DRM and the carrier’s download lock on music attacks both Amazon and MySpace Music where they live. Neil Young has been producing music out of his own studio for years, and this video looks like it was shot out in front of the building it’s housed in. It’s an unbroken circle where the artist controls both the means of production and distribution.

Obama and his team did much the same thing during the campaign, harnessing the realtime network via Blackberry and social networks to coordinate fund raising and campaign infrastructure. The party apparatus was sidestepped, crippling the Clinton machinery and undermining the aura of inevitability and its attendant threat of being shut out in the next administration. It’s like what happened with Dylan’s Like A Rolling Stone, which obliterated the 3 minute song length of the Top 40 AM radio single and with it the differentiation with the better sounding wide open FM format.

Fork in the road indeed. Laced with obscenities, political commentary, and humor, the 2009 Neil Young has once again found himself back in the center of what’s about to happen. Not bad for someone who falls outside the 18-49 demo and right in the heart of the richest, most desperate to have a good time, and ready to take no bullshit about what we’re leaving to the next generation.

A little over three years ago, Ray Ozzie wrote his famous memo re-focusing Microsoft from software to services. We started seeing results of that memo last October, when Microsoft announced Windows Azure.

The SaaS emphasis is also hitting mainstream products like Microsoft Exchange. This morning Steve Gillmor and I talked with Rajesh Jha, the VP of Development overseeing Microsoft Exchange, about the upcoming release of Exchange 14.

While he wouldn’t say much about the actual release timeline, he did say they’ve been working on Exchange 14 for about 18 months. Currently they have 3.5 million test users, mostly in university settings. He contrasted that with Exchange 2007, which had a mere 5,000 test users at the same point in development.

He also highlighted the emphasis on SaaS from the ground up:

Exchange 2007 was first a server, then we built on top of it to make it a service. The feedback on the service came too late–the server design was already complete.

While there are about half a million seats of Exchange 2007 SaaS, the huge number of test users for Exchange 14 means it’s currently the largest multi-tenet Exchange offering–and we haven’t released it yet. From the beginning, the emphasis on co-developing the server and the service aspects of Exchange 14 allowed us to perform much more robust usage tests.

The emphasis on SaaS technology has also attracted a few frustrated Notes users. According to Rajesh, about 5.1 million Notes seats have switched from Notes Servers or Notes Online.

He gave more specifics on learning derived from 3.5 million testers:

From an IT administrative perspective, the university was surprisingly similar to large enterprises. Users struggle to use the software, and administrators struggle to balance privacy with the need to research e-mails for compliance and discovery issues. We’ve tried to architect Exchange 14 in a way that facilitates this.

Our major learnings are scale based–having 3.5 million testers versus 5,000 is no comparison. Since this is the first full-integrated SaaS version from the ground up, having this many users taught us how to optimize deployment, core technology stuff like I/O server footprint, and minimizing help desk call through better usability and web access.

All in all, it sounds like this next version of Exchange should be well-vetted.
(Which means the inevitable frustrations will be all the more aggravating!)

Pirelli Broadband Solutions, the broadband arm of the Pirelli Group, announced they adopted Neptuny’s Caplan SaaS.

Capacity management has long been the domain of large enterprises; it wasn’t cost effective for smaller companies. The cost to implement a capacity management system was higher than the cost savings from optimizing capacity.

Neptuny claims the new SaaS version of their Capacity Management software uses the benefits of the cloud to make capacity management accessible to small-medium enterprises. No on-site infrastructure installations, the servers are supported by Neptuny, and upgrades happen seamlessly. Pricing plans can be tailored specifically to client needs. And the entire interface can be access through the web.

The largest cost of Capacity management remains the people time–analyzing and implementing a new capacity plan requires manpower. But it’s certainly an interesting extension of the SaaS model, and should open up a sweet spot for small-medium size enterprises.

Expect more and more enterprise management tools to hop on the SaaS bandwagon.