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What is Glue? - Definition from the Merriam-Webster Dictionary:
- 1 a: any of various strong adhesive substances ; especially : a hard protein chiefly gelatinous substance that absorbs water to form a viscous solution with strong adhesive properties and that is obtained by cooking down collagenous materials (as hides or bones) b: a solution of glue used for sticking things together
- Hm – not what I am looking for, if you need it, you can buy it here – end of story.
- 2 something that binds together <enough social glue…to satisfy the human desire for community — E. D. Hirsch, Jr.>
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Social Glue … now we’re getting closer. So again, what is Glue? There are several companies in the software business with
goo-yglue-y products:Glue is Companies and Products
AdaptiveBlue has a browser extension called Glue. (Blue Glue?
) VC and Blogger Fred Wilson aptly calls it A Social Net That Lives In Your Browser. Then there is Yahoo Glue. And of course there are a bunch of companies that don’t call themselves or their products Glue – they just do it.
Gnip’s mission is elegantly “Making data portability suck less”. Here’s an easy (?) chart explaining what they do:
Boomi is another Glue company, providing integration Platform-as-a-Service (iPaaS – ah, starting 5-letter acronyms
). Read their thought-provoking post on Why APIs Don’t Solve the SaaS Integration Challenge. MindTouch started their life as a wiki company, and grew into “an open source enterprise collaboration and community platform that enables users to connect and remix enterprise systems, social tools and web services.”. Ouch, that sounds so official – here’s another version from the Chief Conductor who just returned from a major Product Launch:
We do orchestration for a myriad of systems, databases and any web service, all with a easy to use wiki-like interface.
Let’s not forget about Mashery, plumbers of the Web, or more elegantly, a “leading provider of API management services enabling companies to easily leverage web services as a distribution channel.”
The list can go on and on, and even in the current downturn we will see more Glue companies. In fact Glue has become investment theme for some really smart VCs:
Glue is our term for the web infrastructure layer that facilitates the connections between web services and content companies
Glue is a Concept – actually, several concepts
- Enterprise Glue: A "web oriented architecture" and beyond SOA
- Data Glue: Mash-ups, mash-ups and more mash-ups
- Social Network Glue: The movement toward cross-network interoperability and data sharing
- Interface Glue: Cross-platform, cross-browser technologies like Silverlight and Adobe Air
- Messaging Glue: Tools that are evolving for meta-messaging
- Identity Glue: Reputation, user-centric identity and web sso
- OS Glue: Cross-operating system runtimes
- Marketing Glue: The abstraction of the management of ad platforms into a common interface
- Infrastructure Glue: Cloud and Utility computing that binds back-end services
Oh, boy. This is big, way over my head. I better leave this discussion to smarter people who actually understand the technology behind all this.
But I’ll share a secret: they will all come together in Denver, on May 12-13 of this year. Will you be there?Glue is a Great Conference – Get Sticky Now
I’ve discussed earlier how Defrag was the best Conference I attended for quite a while. The conference Theme, sessions, very active participants, the venue, the infrastructure (working wi-fi, no small feat!) – you name it, it all came together perfectly. So when Defrag’s organizer, Eric Norlin sets out to launch another conference discussing all of the above and more, it’s bound to be a success. Here’s Eric’s summary:Glue is the only conference devoted solely to solving the web application integration problem-set. People that should attend Glue include the architects, developers, administrators and integrators that have moved past the initial step of seeing the web as a platform, and are facing the real-world challenges of what "stove-piped" web applications mean for their overall strategy. Glue is about all of bits and pieces, APIs and meta-data, standards and connectors that will help us to glue together the varying applications of the new platform.
The Agenda is shaping up, Sponsors are in, and reservations are coming through nicely, recession or not. Like I’ve said, Some Conferences Are Worth Attending Even in Bad Times.
Of course getting a bargain helps in bad times: where else do you get an intense top-notch conference for $395? That is if you catch early bird reservation, so hurry, get sticky now.
By the way, participation does not start in May – you can share ideas right now, I’ll help with resources. CloudAve, my main blogging gig is pleased to be the Media Sponsor for Glue, and you will see a stream of related posts over there as we approach the Conference dates (this may be the right time to grab the CloudAve Feed). We invite everyone interested to participate: please submit your post, we’ll be happy to publish it. And if you prefer to post in your own blog, wiki, Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook…whatever – just make sure to use the tag gluecon (since glue might find – you know, this). We’ll find your post and pull it under the Glue Tab, which will soon turn into a resource list of all-things-glue.
On a personal level I am stoked to be able to serve on the Glue Conference‘s Advisory Board along with great thinkers like Amy Wohl, Phil Wainewright, Chris Shipley, Mike West, and Albert Wenger. I’m really excited about this Conference, and am looking forward to meeting many of you.
What are you waiting for? Get Sticky Now!
(Cross-posted from CloudAve)
Glue – Get Sticky Now
Ma.Gnolia Data Loss – Is Your Data Safe?
Ma.gnolia, a social bookmarking service is down, lost all their user data and they don’t know if / when they can recover.
This is as bad as it can get for any Web 2.0 service (and more importantly for users), and the backlash against Cloud services has already started. My first reaction is taking Stowe Boyd’s approach – a quick overview of how safe my own data is.
Update: also read Krish’s post @ ClouDave: Magnolia Effect – Should We Trust The Clouds?
The Dawn of SaaS-on-SaaS – Even While Amazon S3 is Down.
TechMeme is great in threading together relevant posts, but is largely based (so I think…) on direct linking, so of course it could not auto-detect the ironic relationship between:
- Amazon’s S3 service outage this morning (news of which I’m sure will attract dozens of blogs in the next hour), and
- Phil Wainewright thought-provoking writeup: SaaS vendors, eat your own dogfood, or die
Phil quotes Greg Olsen, CTO of Coghead, a web-based development platform which moved its servers to the Amazon infrastructure recently:
“As ironic as it may be, we continue to see software applications deployed as a service but which fail to use any service-based infrastructure themselves”
“The move to SaaS applications built on SaaS is a much more profound shift than the move from on-premise applications to SaaS applications …”
“Ironically, some of the first victims of this new economy may be some pioneers of the software-as-a-service movement. Today, many established SaaS application providers are applying much more of their precious focus and capital to infrastructure issues than newer competitors that are aggressively utilizing service-based infrastructure … the build-it-all-ourselves SaaS application vendor … will ultimately end up as [an] anachronism.”
Today’s Amazon outage appears to rebuff Phil and Greg’s point. Reality check: this is the first time Amazon S3 went down, and it’s already back up. Salesforce.com had its fair share of outages, so did other SaaS providers, and so did just about any in-house systems companies run their own installed software on. I’m a big believer in focus, specialization and I trust the few mega-cloud companies that will emerge can maintain a more robust infrastructure than we could all do individually. (So yes, if it’s not obvious, I do buy into Nick Carr’s Big Switch concept.)
Another approach is to look at where value can be added: the consensus view from a quick Enterprise Irregulars chat is that infrastructure will be commoditized faster (or it already is) than software, where there is a lot more room for innovation by new and – thanks to outsourced infrastructure – smaller players.
And if acronyms were not ugly enough already, here’s to entering the age of SaaS-on-SaaS.
Update: What better confirmation of my point than today’s rumors about EMC hosting SAP’s system – I assume it’s Business ByDesign, the new On-Demand offering for the SMB market. (Side-note: I’ll be traveling and be time and Internet-challenged for the next three weeks, but SAP’s BDD is one of the subjects I will come back, as it seems to be largely misunderstood. Oh, and I just love the fact how Mozy, my favorite online backup service is often referred to in the EMC story).
Related posts (on the Amazon outage): Rough Type, mathewingram.com/work, LinkFog, Data Center Knowledge, Web Worker Daily, TechCrunch, Moonwatcher, Project Failures, SmoothSpan Blog, Enterprise Anti-Matter.
Amazon vs. Google?
A few years ago this would have been a crazy question. A bookstore against a search engine? Apples and oranges… not anymore. Still, we’re more used to pitting Google against Yahoo, Amazon against eBay. But think about it:
Adoption of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) continues to grow. As an indicator of adoption, bandwidth utilized by these services in fourth quarter 2007 was even greater than bandwidth utilized in the same period by all of Amazon.com’s global websites combined.
The above quote is from Amazon’s earnings release. There are more then 330,000 developers registered to use Amazon Web Services. Some of these new Web 2.0 offerings will actually take off, in fact some will get mass adoption. That translates to tens of millions of users whose online activity flows through Amazon, and this is where Google comes in the picture.
Forget Search, Google is the world’s primary Advertising engine. They need to have (I did not say own!) all our data. Nick Carr is right:
For Google, literally everything that happens on the Internet is a complement to its main business. The more things that people and companies do online, the more ads they see and the more money Google makes. In addition, as Internet activity increases, Google collects more data on consumers’ needs and behavior and can tailor its ads more precisely, strengthening its competitive advantage and further increasing its income.
The business models are different: for Google everything you do is secondary (and largely free to you), since they make their money on the ads, while Amazon directly charges for their individual services (albeit not much). Amazon will have tens of 
millions of users, and Google wants them, too.
If we buy into Nick Carr’s “Big Switch” vision of utility computing (and I do), are these two giants competing to become “The Cloud computer”? Or perhaps one of the 5?
Related posts: ReadWriteWeb, TechCrunch, Between the Lines, Data Center Knowledge, ProgrammableWeb.
Windows Live Photo Gallery: Poor Design or Shrewd Business Move?
I had Windows Live Photo Gallery installed on my computer – for about 15 minutes. Although I despise the aggressive, sneaky nature of Live Installer, which pollutes my PC with Windows Desktop Search without authorization, I still wanted to give it a try, primarily because my favorite Picasa is hopelessly single PC-minded. Surprisingly for Google, the champion of Web-based computing, Picasa is a major pain to use on multiple computers – so I thought I’d give the Microsoft product a try.
I am surprised at the mostly positive initial feedback about this feature-less product. Yes, it’s fast, yes, tagging is easy – but has anyone given any thought to why we’re tagging in the first place? Other than becoming data-input clerks, what can you do with Photo Gallery?
Picasa treats tags/labels as albums, and as any decent photo album would do, allows re-arranging the display order of individual photos by simple drag & drop. It also allows playing slideshows along with music, creating movies and a myriad of other options. Windows Live Photo Gallery allows you to play a slideshow in the pre-determined order – that’s all.
Well, almost. If you publish your photos to Live Spaces, you can create a basic slideshow rearranging the display order of your pictures. (I could not find this option, but let’s believe the Help text.) Now I’m really confused: as much as I am a Web-computing fan, photos (and video) are the one area I still prefer to use a local machine for, after all we’re manipulating fairly large files. So why would Microsoft create desktop photo manipulation software that allows extensive data input yet requires users to go online to enjoy their pictures?
Is this another case of thoughtless, poor design? Frankly, I doubt it. Perhaps Microsoft just showed their hands regarding the future Live business model. Charging for extra storage is nothing new, but I suspect we’ll see bandwidth-based pricing sooner or later. The PC-components of Live are just the hook to get us online, and pay for accessing our own data – and believe me, the bandwidth usage of a 20-minute slideshow will be quite significant. 
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