Hewlett-Packard has made its mark in the cloud computing space with today’s rollout of HP Cloud Assure, a new SaaS designed to help businesses adopt cloud-based services in a secure platform.

HP Cloud Assure is made up of a suite of the company’s software, including HP Application Security Center, HP Performance Center and HP Business Availability Center. HP will also provide enterprises with a team of engineers to perform security scans, test performance, and monitor availability.

The purpose of HP Cloud Assure’s platform is three-fold. The software will maintain security in the cloud by scanning networks, operating systems and web applications. Second, the software will ensure performance by making sure cloud services meet bandwith and connectivity requirements. And lastly, HP Cloud Assure will monitor cloud-based applications for performance issues and ensure increased service uptime and visibility. HP Cloud Assure works in three types of cloud service environments: infrastructure as a service, platform as a service, and software as a service.

HP is officially throwing its hat into the cloud computing rink with the release of this software.

Here’s what Scott Kapur, VP of SaaS for HP said about the potential of cloud computing for HP.

“There is no question that cloud computing is providing a new set of opportunities for businesses, but it presents new risks as well. With over nine years of SaaS experience and a leading portfolio of solutions in security, performance and availability, HP is uniquely positioned to help assure our customers can leverage the promise of cloud while removing risk from the equation.”

Bill O’Reilly has the last word on Twitter for today. He thinks the Twitterati is crushing talk radio, by sucking up all our listener time. He thinks that’s bad; I hope he’s right and it drives Rush out of business. It won’t drive The View out of business if Barbara Walters has a say; she regularly tries to shut down the Twitversation.

We’re becoming a nation divided along the Twitter faultline, forced to declare which side we’re on. This morning I felt a jolt and reached for my iPhone to check in with my wife on the highway. She immediately asked whether it was on Twitter, and by the time I checked 10 seconds later there was three screens of earthquake tweets. Jeremiah Owyang was on the phone talking to someone in San Jose who felt it five seconds before it reached Jeremiah in the Valley. How long will it be before we’ll see an app tied to the accelerometer that registers each temblor into a realtime grid to track the pattern?

Tonight I read that Twitter has changed replies to mentions, mapping more accurately to the use of the @ sign anywhere in the Tweet. This morning Bit.ly received a $2 million round for its url-shortening/data harvesting service. Not slowly but very surely the 140 character landscape is being carved up and sold off at auction. Tim O’Reilly’s VC arm led the Bit.ly round, yet another marker of the attention economy carved up into discrete chunks.

Now that the VCs have corralled the @ signs and the URLs, what remains? The body of the text, the domain of Track and its wannabes. Glam Media’s Tinker is one such parlay, virtualizing keywords into event clouds and then distributing them via widgets around the Twitter nervous system. TweetDeck gives you yet another column for targeted searches, and who knows what we’ll see soon from FriendFeed and then Facebook.

When Bill and Tim O’Reilly converge, you know we’re at a twitting point, where the metadata orbiting the message stream is more valuable than the initial data itself. The recent Cloud Manifesto brouhaha underlines the tactics and deceptions of the players as significantly more important than the words of the original document. When we understand our metadata, our attention breadcrumbs, our gestures can and are being harvested, syndicated, and metered back to us, will we one more time leave it to the professionals to steal all our money and our childrens’ future?

Something tells us it may be different this time. It’s not that we’re smarter or more willing to do the hard work of paying attention. It’s not going to be easy to harness this out-of-control stage coach as it barrels down the trail on the way out of Dodge. There’s still plenty of anger, about too much Twitter, about our roles as consumers and the apparent lack of a connection to our jobs that pay for our room and board. Are we supposed to save or spend? Read or write? Eat or be eaten?

No, we’re no more clueful than we were a Tweet ago. Nick Carr will still have plenty of opportunity to mine the ineptitude of our crowd sourcing, the pathetic noise of our social mediocrity. But what the pundits don’t know is something we do: the more we are challenged about the value of our intuitive meanderings, the more we know how lucrative they are becoming. Over and over again, these systems are bending to our will, ill-defined, untamed, irrational, whatever.

It’s precisely this kind of civil disobedience that is our real job. On the Gillmor Gang this weekend, we argued about whether Darwinian brute force was appropriate, or whether we should just sit back and leave the driving to others. Is it rude to not believe the patronizing platitudes of IBM as they try and stuff the Manifesto down our throats? How beautiful was it when Amazon said, ever so politely, thanks but no thanks: We’ll just continue to rock around the clock on this cloud thing, and oh by the way, eat our dust.

These Amazon guys ain’t afraid of nobody. Not Microsoft, not Google, certainly not SAP and Sun and Cisco all busy puttying up a nice complexity firewall to slow the kids down. So we ultimately see the real work being those folks – Microsoft, Google, Salesforce, Amazon – who aren’t signing. They prefer to keep tweeting, keep connecting, not locking us in to complex derivatives it will take trillions to unravel.

You probably couldn’t find two more different people sharing the same name than the O’Reillys. But they both understand how powerful the Twitting Point is. One is the classic negative gesturer: when Bill buys, I sell. The other is going public as a lead investor while maintaining his role as a publisher and event producer, thereby sending the significant message that transparency can validate complex business relationships without conflicts of interest. Again, the metadata speaks louder than the details of the individual perceptions.

We will still suffer the arrows of the change-phobic for some time. But it was only a few short years ago when the notion that markets are conversations was revolutionary, or that Superman had to use a phonebooth to change the world. Today we each are broadcast networks: Bill O’Reilly said that. The new Marshall McLuhan. Go figure.

Sonoa Systems, a provider of analytics, management, and governance solutions for cloud services and APIs, has struck a deal with MTV Networks (MTVN) to optimize the network’s online and mobile content distributions. Sonoa’s product, ServiceNet, will help MTVN manage the delivery of video feeds as the they open their APIs to partners and consumers in the cloud.

MTVN is using Sonoa’s cloud-based service to give their online syndication partners a platform to use and deploy the network’s content feeds. Sonoa’s analytics will help MTVN measure performance and usage patterns of each syndication feed and allows the network to see how people are using their technologies and APIs. And having this highly personalized information will let MTVN determine new revenue opportunities and measure customer satisfaction.

Sonoa’s product is another way of how enterprises can leverage the cloud to help serve partners and clients. In this case, the cloud is being used as a distribution platform for content. Using the cloud for mass distribution of media content is pretty compelling and just shows how the cloud is continuously expanding business models and data storage functionality.

Here’s what Chet Kapoor, CEO of Sonoa Systems said about the partnership:

“As more companies look to create new business models via cloud services, solving the common challenges faced when exposing services, feeds and APIs become critical to their success. Our solution solves these issues delivering a layer of security, control, performance and visibility in the cloud that result in better performance and substantially lower operational costs. MTVN is definitely ahead the curve, their innovation is truly a great example of how both traditional enterprises as well as web-centric companies can use cloud services to better serve and reach their partners and customers.”

This guest post is written by Vic Gundotra, Vice President of Engineering for Google’s mobile and developer products. (Prior to Google, he spent 15 years at Microsoft, most recently as their GM of Platform Evangelism.) Vic credits his now-7-year-old with forecasting the importance of mobile data access, and now carries at least 4 phones at all times. Fortunately, he had two kids before adopting the possibly-prophylactic habit.

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Focus on the mobile user, and all else will follow

Simpler data, better browsers, and a smoother experience

Today the mobile industry finds itself in a unique position to do right by its users:

Worldwide phone penetration continues to climb at a break-neck pace, with over 4 billion mobile subscribers at last count.¹ (In comparison, the PC industry is forecasted to see its sharpest unit decline in history.²) Prevailing economic conditions will accelerate this trend, as users consolidate pricey communication services into cost-effective, all-in-one mobile devices.³ And for the first time ever, half of all new connections to the internet will come from a phone in 2009.⁴

Google’s mobile traffic reflects these milestones — having quintupled since 2007⁵ — and it underscores users’ appetite for mobile data services. But as a community of operators, device manufacturers and software providers, we continue to get in their way. In short, and as a general rule, we make it too costly, too unfamiliar, and too difficult to do anything beyond voice calls.

In reply I offer up three suggestions: simpler data plans, better web browsers, and a smoother on-device experience. And in each case I’ll use Google traffic numbers as a proxy for total internet usage and user happiness.

Disclaimer: As a Google employee using internal data to carry the weight of this article, I owe it to the reader to lay bare my economic incentives: the company I work for has a financial interest in the broad and sweeping adoption of the Internet-as-we-know-it. Indeed, more internet users leads to increased web usage, which often leads to more Google searches and downstream ad clicks. I use Google data because it’s what I know best, and because it reinforces my industry-facing remarks, but make no mistake: I’m fundamentally interested in what’s good for the mobile internet. It just so happens that this is also good for Google. With that said, I hope you’ll find value in the words and data that follow.

Flat is the new phat

Consider MetroPCS, a regional carrier in the United States with just over 5 million subscribers on their 2.5G CDMA network. Over the past year, their Google search volume grew over 2.5x more quickly than another global carrier with 10 times as many users, and a 3G network.⁶

Metro’s “secret” is a free month of web access at signup, with the option of flat-rate, unlimited data thereafter.⁷ As a result nearly half of Metro’s subscribers use the web on a regular basis. (It’s also worth mentioning that MetroPCS was recently recognized for excellence in customer satisfaction.⁸)

In contrast, many operators subject users to a labyrinthine set of data options, from pay-as-you-go to daily caps with significant overage charges. Now, can you imagine paying your at-home internet provider for every page load? Or needing to know the size of a website before visiting it? Or managing your monthly download quota across your entire household? It’s simply not practical, and it’s all the same internet, so why do we treat mobile users as second-class citizens? Case and point: my colleague’s January phone bill contained 27 pages of itemized data charges, spelled out in excruciating detail.⁹

Unless we declare flat the new phat — and soon — I fear Occam will do something terrible with his razor.

They want it all, they want it now

Users “get” the web, and they’ve known for over 10 years that the browser is the thing that takes you there. Likewise, more and more of today’s killer applications are the Amazons and Facebooks of the world, not software that you download to a local machine. So it should come as no surprise that mobile users want phones (and browsers) that put a fully-featured internet in their pocket.

For example: the availability of a modern web browser explains why iPhone and Android users — just 13% of the high-end market¹⁰ — represent nearly 50% of Google’s smartphone traffic worldwide.¹¹

Similarly, users of the T-Mobile G1 and its newer WebKit browser search Google 20 times more often than Nokia Series 60 users.¹²

Both data indicate that it’s about usage — not just units — and this trend will continue unabated with more efficient JavaScript engines, and more sophisticated HTML5-compliant browsers.

The simple truth is that mobile users have wanted fast and full web access all along. Consider two quick facts about Google search behavior: the “tail” of PC and iPhone queries is significantly longer than that of feature phone queries;

and the gap in query diversity between desktop and high-end mobile devices is shrinking.¹³ People want all the world’s information on their most personal of personal computers, and we need to offer browsers that scratch this quintessential itch.

“One web will triumph.”¹⁴ Users want all of it. And they want it now.

Friction is fugly

In the early days of mobile search, customer feedback was clear: “I can’t find Google on my phone.” And in hindsight it makes sense: unintuitive device menus and preference panes mandated 20+ mind-numbing clicks just to locate portal content¹⁵ — nevermind “off net” sites like Google. This Frankenstein’s monster of OEM, carrier, and 3rd party software made it impossible to discover — much less enjoy — mobile data services, and showed a complete disregard for users’ on-device experience.

Thanks to an influx of smarter phones, many mobile users can now reach 3rd party software with a single tap or click. And in Google’s case, this desktop-like experience increases search traffic by many orders of multitude.¹⁶ Why? Because it provides a frictionless onramp to search results. Likewise, and prior to its v5.0 release in February 2009, Google Earth saw more activations on the day of its iPhone launch than any other day in the product’s history. Why? Because the iPhone’s App Store and on-screen layout make it easy to find, try and access mobile data services.

And herein lies the rub: users appreciate well-written software, but ease of use and on-device navigability are critical preconditions for usage. (After all, if you hide a tree in a forest, who cares whether someone hears it fall? Chances are they’ll never find it anyway.) The proliferation of app stores is a positive step in this direction, as are efforts on the part of OEMs to give developers unfettered access to low-level functionality.

We have to surprise and delight users with fast and fluid interfaces. Friction is just fugly.

- Sent from my Android phone, with a WebKit browser and an unlimited data plan

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1. ITU, 2009
2. Gartner, 2009
3. comScore, 2008
4. eMarketer, 2008 and 2009
5. Google internal
6. Google internal
7. MetroPCS, 2009
8. J.D. Power, 2008
9. January phone bill, redacted
10. Canalys, 2008
11. Google internal
12. Google internal
13. “Computers and iPhones and Mobile Phones, oh my!”, 2009
14. Opera, 2008
15. http://www.biz-lib.com/products/ZMOMX.html
16. Google internal

Microsoft’s Steven Martin has ironically blown the whistle on an attempt at an “open” coalition that freezes out certain companies. Ironic in that Microsoft and IBM played this game years ago with the WS-I, an industry standards group that pointedly stonewalled Sun Microsystems’ involvement before caving under media pressure.

In a Google Groups post Introducing the Open Cloud Manifesto, Rueven Cohen describes an effort involving “several of the largest technology companies and organizations” to “draw a line in the sand.”

We are still working on the first version of the manifesto which will be
published Monday, March 30th with a goal of being ratified by the greater
cloud community. Given the nature of this document we have attempted to be
as inclusive as possible inviting most of the major names in technology to
participate in the initial draft. The intention of this first draft is to
act as a line in the sand, a starting point for others to get involved.
That being said this manifesto is not specifically targeting any one company
or industry but instead is intended to engage a dialogue on the
opportunities and benefits of fostering an open cloud ideology for everyone.

As inclusive as possible? Not targeted at any one company? Engage in a dialogue? What a load of crap that is. It’s the same back room cigar-smoke-filled scam of the good old days when Web Services first began its inexorable move to reshape computing. More than anything, the attempt to lock out Microsoft seems destined to backfire on those who are running this operation. The best way of pinning the tail on this donkey is to try and get quotes on the record from the possible partners in this effort. Is Google participating? No comment so far. Amazon? Apparently not. IBM? Bob Sutor, what say you?

If cloud computing follows the dynamics of the social media buildout, it’s likely we’ll see an Open Social-like alliance of vendors around an open architecture. Unfortunately for the Microsoft haters, Redmond has built considerable momentum on its own around open fundamentals for Silverlight, Live Mesh, and the incipient Azure Services. The analogy that may serve best is Facebook’s Connect, where the company stumbled earlier, adjusted and optimized, then rolled out changes to its core portal strategy that leverage the social graph API and UI tools while attacking at the heart of the monetization model pioneered by Twitter.

That’s likely what is threatening the Manifesto crowd, the difficulty of locking Microsoft out of an open relationship with users when they themselves demonstrate a disregard for the rules they are in the process of attempting to forge and then shove down Martin’s throat. Even in these early days of cross-cloud standards, the pay as you go fundamental of the Cloud changes this from a religious to a pragmatic discussion: how do we do this and what does it cost?

Microsoft understands it have no choice this time in being open; it also understands that being open in the Cloud is good business. The Manifestos get that too, and are trying to write some rules that Microsoft can’t sign, in secret, and then – do what? Those who favor being closed to being open in furtherance of being open somewhere down the road undercut their credibility.

By shining a light on this, Martin and Microsoft may have ensured that future meetings will be open for all participation. It’s going to be hard for Google or IBM or whoever else thought this was a good idea to stand up and take credit for it. The war over WS-I was long, ugly, and ultimately a loser for those who started it. Have another cigar, Reuven.

rPath, a company that specializes in technology that simplifies the distribution and consumption of applications via virtual appliances is making some interesting moves in cloud computing. Basically, rPath helps business close the gap between applications and operations by ensuring the delivery of application deployment quickly and inexpensively. Now rPath is using this technology to help enterprises and organizations deploy their applications in the cloud.

rPath’s technology allows applications to be deployed and managed in a variety of cloud environments, including Amazon’s EC2 servers. But rPath’s technology also works in private clouds. In fact, rPath is helping the U.S. Department of Energy manage and operate applications in a private cloud environment. rPath gives scientists working for the DOE a way of deploying applications as virtual machines in the cloud. As governments slowly heading towards putting data in the clouds, rPath is helping make sure that applications actually work in this environment

rPath recognizes the significance of the cloud in the enterprise space and formed the “Cloud Computing Adoption Model” to provide businesses with a game plane for achieving long-term benefits from adopting a cloud computing infrastructure. The five levels of cloud computing adoption are shown and explained below:

rPath is definitely doing some fascinating things for businesses looking to efficiently deploy applications in the cloud. And the company is committed to helping businesses understand the cloud and its implications. Here’s a nifty video rPath made to help people understand cloud computing:

Email and web security provider BorderWare Technologies is releasing a comprehensive URL filtering solution that could fill the gaps that currently exist with existing URL filtering measures. URL filtering is the common way to prevent users from entering a site with questionable content. The way security software works is that each time a questionable link is being accessed, the software filters through approximately 35 million websites and pages that are currently categorized in filtering databases, according to BorderWare. Google has indexed more that 1 trillion sites, meaning that there is a 96 percent deficit of uncategorized sites in the index.

BorderWare’s Dynamic Inspection program hopes to fill this security gap by offering a software that performs a real-time examination and analysis of all webpage content as it enters an organization’s network without the false positives that URL filtering are sometimes prone to, attempting to offer 100 percent coverage. BorderWare Dynamic Inspection is a real-time engine performing content filtering for every webpage along with URL categorization and anti-malware. By using advanced analysis in relation with policies set by an organization, Dynamic Inspection is able to evaluate each webpage within a site, before it enters an organizations network, instead of blocking entire sites based on generic terms in the URL or content that may falsely identify threat. BorderWare also offers an interesting free service where you can check the “reputation” of a site through the website Reputation Authority.org.

BorderWare faces competition from a variety of other software providers, including McAfee and Websense. Web security software is a highly competitive business; it should be interesting to see if BorderWare can capture a significant marketshare with the roll out of its new product.

Live video startup Ustream has launched the mobile version of Watershed, its broadcasting platform for enterprises. Watershed Mobile will let organizations stream video onto a variety of mobile devices, including the Nokia N95 phones.

Launched in February, Watershed allows organizations to broadcast live video in minutes with their own private-label branding. Watershed Mobile will let organizations disseminate high quality video to a mobile phones via a fast streaming service. The service also includes integrated chat, GPS, and audience polling. The polling feature lets organizations ask their audience what they want to see or what actions they should take in a live broadcast situation.

Ustream has also signed on a few big-name businesses and universities to its Watershed streaming products, including Oracle, Duke, Sun Microsystems, UC Berkeley, and Sling. Watershed is helping create large-scale webcasts for these clients, with Oracle is considering using Watershed to broadcast from their annual worldwide events. Sun Microsystems is using Watershed for official earning calls and other internal webcasts.

The ability for businesses to stream live video onto mobile devices could be very useful, especially when Ustream integrates a variety of mobile devices into the platform. But as we’ve stated earlier, the price for Watershed’s streaming service (mobile use is now integrated into these pricing options), a SaaS cloud computing service with pricing in a pay-as-you-go basis, isn’t cheap. Pricing starts at $1 per viewer hour for 1,000 viewer hours per month or less and scales down to $0.25 per viewer hour for streams that a reach 50,000 viewer hours per month or more. (A viewer hour is one viewer watching a stream for one hour, or 60 viewers watching for one minute, etc.). Ustream has also introduced monthly plans where businesses can pay a flat fee for viewer hours. For example, for 11,000 hours of viewing in a month, companies will pay $879 per month. Through either of these pricing models, mass streaming to thousands of people could be expensive. While a few thousand dollars is a drop in the bucket for big companies like Oracle and Sun Microsystems, smaller businesses may not be able to afford streaming video to a mass-scale, especially in thus economy. Mogulus also offer online video streaming for businesses, but hasn’t gone to the mobile space yet. Ustream has been making a big push into the mobile space and recently rolled out its mobile video broadcasting apps.

Cloud computing and social networks are two of the more powerful movements in the web 2.0 space. So the potential of social media and the cloud integrating is compelling to say the least. Salesforce.com recently rolled out the Service Cloud, a customer service application that tries to capture the crowdsourced pools of knowledge floating across the internet from sites like Google, Facebook and Amazon, and then uses this information to better equip commercial customer service operations with useful knowledge. Salesforce has now connected Twitter to the Service Cloud, allowing customer service reps using the SaaS to access tweets from more than 8 million Twitter users.

Salesforce’s CRM for Twitter allows enterprises to search for tweets about their companies, products and brands. Here’s how it works. First, Salesforce CRM searches within the Service Cloud for any tweets that are relevant to a company. Then, the company can capture and monitor the conversation, creating a database in the Service Cloud that keeps track of all subsequent conversations about the company. The Service Cloud also allows enterprises to tap into company-wide online communities, creates connections to existing social networks and the blogosphere, provides SEO tools, shares the social network knowledge with business partners, and integrates customer service operations into the cloud.

The Service Cloud seems like a useful tool to capture and then sort conversations about a particular enterprise. But what’s fascinating is how businesses want to tap into the dialogue of what’s happening on social networks, like Facebook and Twitter. Social networks are becoming much more than an online gathering of friends; Facebook and Twitter are becoming destinations for ideation, e-commerce and marketing. Its of no surprise that companies want an easy and simple way to capture all of the information that is relevant to their businesses and then leverage this knowledge to improve customer service. As we’ve said earlier, Salesforce has consistently managed to provide innovative, desirable technology platforms for enterprises to merge their business operation with the web 2.0 world.

Dare Obasanjo writes about Facebook’s news feed redesign and decides it is a big mistake. He’s backed by some 94% of users responding to a Facebook application poll, and cites internal gossip that Mark Zuckerberg thinks user feedback is irrelevant. I think Dare is premature in this assessment.

First of all, Facebook is not copying Twitter; it’s copying FriendFeed, who originally copied Twitter. Where Obasanjo describes two different models – phone book and micromessaging – there already are three, including personalized aggregation or what I will call the micro-portal. Facebook already had part of the last functionality, so its opening of the micromessaging stream consolidates all three legs of the tripod.

In doing so, Facebook is counting on the same relative inertia that Twitter has so carefully cultivated. The calculation is that 175 million people are less likely to move away from something than they are to wait and see what is going to happen. Twitter decided they could stonewall third parties once a critical mass was reached, parrying attempts to build competitive subservices by slowing down API access. Today’s Twitter to FriendFeed delay: a reported 40 minutes.

Why would Facebook users leave? They’d have to have a reason, another better service that provides what they apparently feel is lost by the news stream reworking. Certainly not Twitter, the counter-metaphor that is allegedly causing the trouble. Then who? MySpace? Open Social? Windows Live? Why? The problem with Dare’s thesis is that there’s no motivation to leave something that continues to provide the fundamental service, phone book, The devil you know…

Assuming inertia is not the same thing as discounting the concerns of users. This realtime landrush has captivated millions and encouraged a fundamental shift from blogging and print-based media to a swarming vestigial soup of emotion, information, and complete bullshit that is impossible to ignore. Put simply, what Facebook and Twitter are trying to tame is a wave of innovation with an impact not unlike that the 30 second TV ad triggered.

Before the 30-second spot, companies were known by their names: British Telecom, Federal Express, Kentucky Fried Chicken. Afterwards, the names were literally changed to their contractions: BT, FedEx, KFC. Speed became the brand. The cable news networks turned the news cycle into the news stream. With the DVR, the content became the commercial, with product placement compressing seconds into microsecond glimpses in fast forward.

The microstream behaves according to a set of rules not of its choosing but defined by its users. The twin coordinates of follow and track are the immutables: who do you care about and how can you be signaled. Once you open the channel, you make a decision about flow – a signal to noise algorithm that can only be fine-tuned if the calculation of value is responsive to changing events. Track is dynamic, the magic elixir that converts the normal into the exceptional.

Look around. Everywhere you hear the wail of those beleaguered by the microstream, helpless in the face of having to choose between giving up or being overwhelmed. What would we have given to have anticipated the collapse of the world economy, the few valuable signals that would have gotten us out while the getting was good? The value of information is in its timeliness, wrapped in the context of behavior by those we have learned to trust for their instincts, insights, courage, and humor in the face of the obvious.

Whoever conquers Track will be like those who made music and pictures come out of thin air, coursing over invisible wires and virtual rabbit ears. The big networks emerged out of that soup, and to this day they remain powerful beacons. Now the social media clouds are forming, and they have no choice but to confront and conquer the microstream.

Facebook has no choice but to unleash the flow, and they have the horses to deliver Track in the near term. Once that occurs, Twitter will have to choose to stand pat and wait out the confusion, or deliver a commercial Track of their own. What Dare Obasanjo describes as a fact:

On Twitter, users explicitly decide as part of following someone that they want all of the person’s tweets in their stream. In fact, this is the only feature of the relationship on Twitter.

is more likely a factoid, an assumption of intent based on what the creators of a service decided. In fact, Twitter was a side project of a podcasting service, and Track was a late-night coding experiment that users turned into what is likely the company’s business model.

Following someone for all their tweets is just one part of the equation. Tracking them for interaction signals is also important, as are realtime conversations archived to a common container. We’ve all seen the advantages of a single stream of information, whether it’s email and then IM as Gmail pioneered, or email and IM and micromessages as is being pioneered right now. If you listen carefully to Ev Williams’ comments on Charlie Rose recently, you’ll see he and his team understand this.

Facebook does too, and its decision to carefully unbundle some of its feature set from its walled garden approach should not be underestimated, as I believe Dare does. It’s a matter of numbers, in this case how many will drop off or materially change how they use Facebook in ways that will reduce the service’s momentum. Facebook Connect continues to accelerate in the marketplace, expanding the leverage of the firewalled social graph around the network.

For the advanced user, an open Facebook stream and Track delivers Twitter track for free. What Twitter is now doing to a smaller competitor (FriendFeed) will not play as well with its bigger rival. Imagine what a marketing bonanza for Facebook Pages would occur if contests that depend on realtime entries (like the 30th caller to a radio station) were off limits to Twitter users whose tweets are delayed by 4 minutes, let alone 40.

Obasanjo makes much of the difference between Twitter’s intended stream and Facebook’s accidental one:

The fact that you got a news feed was kind of a side effect of filling out your virtual rolodex but it was cool because you got the highlights of what were going on in the lives of your friends and family. There is a legitimate problem that you weren’t getting the full gist of everything your 120 contacts (average number of Facebook friends) were doing online but it would clearly lead to information overload to get up to the minute updates about the breakfast habits of some guy who sat next to you in middle school.

Information overload. Side Effect. Some guy from middle school. Track solves all these problems, for each and every cloud. Please stand by. We are experiencing technical difficulties, but we’ll be right back

A heavy news week has seen substantive improvements to the iPhone and Silverlight platforms, a Sun buyout rumor, Sun and Cisco weighing in to the Cloud expansion, and continued reverberations from Facebook’s full frontal assault on Twitter and the realtime stream. Any one of these stories would have sufficient legs by itself, but the combined jolts to the system add up to something bigger.

Apple’s iPhone 3.0 software announcements won’t ship until summer, but the implications for developers have already fostered some counter-shots across Apple’s bow from both Google and Microsoft. Steve Ballmer pigeonholes the iPhone as a $500 device with a ceiling of a small section of the worldwide market, with devices in the $200 range a broad Microsoft opportunity, while Android fans laud Google App integration and the lack of developer roadblocks as signs of a coup in progress.

But Apple has an iron grip on its lead in the market and an even surer understanding of what it will take to retain its dominant role in mobile computing. The 3.0 upgrade plugs virtually all the holes in the architecture, with Spotlight search across all apps the last feature that allowed Blackberry users to fight on. We can continue to complain about AppStore embargoes on video and VoIP over 3G, but Push Notification splits the baby for the developer market without capsizing the battery drain of background processing.

Indeed, virtually every iPhone application category shows significant signs of breaking out with the combined feature set. What Apple understands is the symbiotic relationship between media and carrier, with Apple the mediator and market maker. The New York Times app is now close to replacing the print edition from a usability perspective, and the ability to upsell extended features via on-demand subscriptions provides a rationale for the company to give away the store today.

Microsoft’s support for H.264 video in Silverlight 3 goes a long way toward ratifying the codec popularized by YouTube as the base video format of the Web. Much as Apple has locked down the avenues for competitors to make inroads on the heart of the elite mobile market, Microsoft is moving aggressively with Silverlight to establish a cross-OS platform on the desktop. Silverlight 3 is moving so fast there will be only one beta before release perhaps as early as the summer but certainly well in time for the PDC in November where Ballmer promises the Azure cloud will ship.

Scott Guthrie’s Mix ’09 keynote showed dramatic progress in developer tools for SIlverlight, essentially moving Windows development tools for desktop apps into the Silverlight environment. Silverlight’s new out-of-browser feature further blurs the distinction between a Windows app and a cross-platform (read Mac) app, as does deep linking to automate search engine optimization. Like Apple, Microsoft is using its deep platform control and investment in API tooling to stay open enough provide credible alternatives to open stack strategies.

Sun’s open strategy may not have had an obvious effect on the struggling company’s bottom line, but its R&D investments appears to have attracted IBM in much the same way that Yahoo’s vulnerability encouraged Microsoft to try and acquire that other beleaguered Valley property. Sun’s moves in storage may also have triggered Cisco’s jump into the server market, as both companies try to consolidate their assets quickly under a Cloud umbrella. When Microsoft can deliver what used to be called the Biztalk enterprise message bus as a RESTian Azure service hooked up to AppEngine and Facebook, you can see why Sun may be the first of a series of dominoes falling that may end at Oracle’s doorstep.

Of course, a cloud service bus can carry an activity stream, so Facebook’s Everyone opening of its tweetstream means that Twitter’s “control” of track is soon to be commoditized. Realtime search of the cloud message bus can now be accomplished (during Azure’s CTP phase) for free, and shortly afterward by any of the growing number of cloud players at a price that will likely approach zero as the stream is given away as a come-on for SLAs, security, and geolocation services.

Facebook is deadly serious here, like Apple and Microsoft giving users enough control of the services they need to bootstrap today in return for eventual allegiance to the code bases and tools they use to get there quickly. As Twitter goes from being the arbiter of access to an equal or perhaps weaker partner in monetizing the social cloud, the pressure to be acquired will accelerate.

For Microsoft, who needs a game changer in search, social search in realtime may prove sufficiently attractive at a time when a Twitter-esque service could be slapped into Azure with a minimum of effort. What better way to market the Azure cloud while finding the 15 or 20% search share where Google has no realtime clout? The last time I tried it, it took 10 minutes and then 2 hours for Google to index a Tweet. Why, you could even keep calling it Live Search.

Kontagent, one of last year’s fbFund winners and social analytics platform, has launched measurement tools for iPhone and web applications with Facebook Connect support. Kontagent’s application integrates tightly with platforms such as Facebook to offer widget and Facebook application developers a high level of analytics data. Now Kontagent is offering its free tools to Facebook Connect iPhone and web apps so that the applications can have access to the startup’s powerful measurement platform.

Kontagent will provide the same in-depth data it provides to Facebook Apps to the Facebook Connect iPhone and web apps. This includes detailed data of demographics based on geographic location, age groups, gender, user engagement times and other variables. The platform provides powerful A/B testing across any viral channel (a button, an invite or a notification) that sits inside Facebook. Kontagent also will also offer developers viral optimization tools to track the virality of the application on Facebook. For example, the platform will track how much time it takes users to receiving a viral notification and then act on the notification or invite.

Kontagent co-founder and CEO Albert Lai says that the extension of the platform to include Facebook Connect mobile apps could be helpful for developers looking to create and then track an additional viral movement around an iPhone app besides just through the iPhone app store. Lai says that the data Kontagent provides will help developers engineer in-depth ways in which games can become distribution vehicles both on the web and on the iPhone. The cross-platform play is compelling because of the ability to retrieve powerful analytics for both native Facebook apps as well as for Facebook Connect apps.

With Kontagent’s new tool, developers will have insightful tools to measure and then optimize social distribution of their apps via Facebook and Facebook Connect. And these tools are being incorporated with mobile apps, putting some iPhone apps on the same playing field as web apps. Lai says they are in talks with MySpace to possibly develop the same in-depth analytics for MySpaceID apps but declined to comment further.

The consolidation in enterprise technology is upon us. Once mighty Sun Microsystems is now reportedly; in talks to be acquired by IBM for a mere $6.5 billion.  That is two quarters of revenues for Sun.  If you factor in the $2.6 billion in cash and short term investments on Sun’s balance sheet, the true offer is closer to $4 billion.  Sun’s shares jumped this morning 65 percent.

Sun’s main Solaris server business has been suffering for years from the onslaught of cheaper open-source Linux servers, which it now offers as well.  But Sun still holds big presence in key industries.  The play for IBM is to consolidate its server market share in the face of increased competition from HP (which bought IT consulting giant EDS last summer), and now Cisco (which is trying to expand into the server and storage markets).  Sun’s commitment to open standards also meshes well with IBM’s philosophy.  Remember, it owns MySQL.  (Larry Dignan at ZDnet has a good analysis here).

The acquisition would create an even greater mish-mash of technologies under the IBM umbrella, but IBM has never had a problem selling incompatible systems.  Sun also has a deep wealth of technology patents and engineering talent that IBM will be able to redeploy.

But if that is all that Sun has to offer IBM, any potential acquisition would just be tactical—a move to shore up market share in traditional data center sales until cloud computing changes the business entirely.  In fact, Sun is planning on announcing today its own cloud computing offerings, which was recently bolstered by its purchase of Q Layer.  Sun’s approach to cloud computing is to offer enterprises mission-critical cloud alternatives which can also play well with the public cloud offerings out there from Amazon, Google, Salesforce, Microsoft, and so on.

That transition will take many forms, from turning corporate data centers themselves into one large virtualized computer to offering true compute, storage, and database services in the cloud.

Social productivity startup Spigit, has launched a new version of its idea generation software, InnovationSpigit 2.0, which tries to use social networking to promote innovation with the enterprise space. The software helps businesses and teams contribute ideas, offer feedback and evaluate concepts to streamline idea generation and promote innovation.

InnovationSpigit 2.0 uses game-theory reputation and ranking, currency and asset management, trading markets and incentive and rewards platforms to encourage participation among employees. For executives, InnovationSpigit uses algorithms to separate raw data from employees into productive ideas. The software features idea category sorting and discussion forums. Spigit also extracts good ideas from the bad ones, identifying ideas that are relevant to the business and then rewards the employees who contribute the best ideas with a rewards system.

Spigit has had some big-name clients sign on for its software, including IBM, Sun Microsystems, Intel, WebEx, Walmart, Sam’s Club, and Southwest Airlines. But while Spigit’s software may be useful and innovative, it isn’t cheap. An annual subscription could run as high as $200,000 for a larger business. Smaller businesses can get the software for close to $25,000 per year.

Jive, another startup who offers social networking software for businesses, is doing similar things but Jive’s software seems to be more horizontal, and focuses on incorporating social business software into multiple parts of the business platform. InnovationSpigit only launched a year ago, so bringing on clients like Southwest Airlines and Walmart is a testament to the product’s utility in promoting innovation within a enterprise.

Cloudkick, a Y Combinator startup, offers a free, easy server management system to businesses whose web infrastructure is maintained by Amazon’s EC2 or Slicehost cloud-based servers. Built off of Amazon Web Services’ API, Cloudkick gives users a single control panel where you can manage all of your servers (or instances) through various platforms.

Cloudkick’s dashboard allows you to easily add or remove EC2 or Slicehost servers with a click and then monitor an unlimited amount of instances. You can see all the servers in one place, and color-code and label each server. Cloudkick will check whether servers are alive and functioning and then alert you, via email or voicemail, if servers go down. Cloudkick also provides data on bandwith and other metrics on servers in easy to use graphs and tables, allowing you a visual snapshot of server activity. You can also access servers straight from web and can run commands through your web browser remotely, which is handy when you are trying to manage servers from another computer.

So far, Cloudkick’s virtual control center is integrated with Amazon and Slicehost only but plans to add more cloud computing platforms in the future. Currently, the startup is managing about 350 servers of 40 Y Combinator startups.

Amazon offers a web-console along with their product but you cannot add servers from other cloud platform, you can’t tag or label servers, you can’t run commands on servers from the web and EC2 doesn’t offer graphing or monitoring features. There are other cloud management services out there, like Rightscale, that offer similar services to Cloudkick. In fact, Rightscale offers a few more features in a easy to see dashboard, but the kicker is that Cloudkick is free. Rightscale’s plans run into the thousands.

Cloudkick is part of the dawn of cross-cloud applications and management tools. The application seems like a useful tool for businesses looking for an easy-to-use dashboard to control cloud-based servers. And it helps that its free. As technology companies roll out their cloud platforms, like Microsoft will be doing soon with its platform, Azure, and businesses begin to become increasingly reliant on the cloud, these management tools will become even more useful. And Cloudkick could gain good traction in this space if they integrate their application with more than just two types of platforms.