Connecting the dots ...
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?
*chirp (won’t that asterisk in the front backfire with some search engines?) is supposedly the best, cutest, Twhirl-killer mother-of-all Twitter Client. Except it’s Dead On Arrival. Read the full story here…
..and in the meantime a little consolation prize:
Image by jdlasica via Flickr
Disturbing news this morning: TechCrunch Founder Mike Arrington was about to leave the DLD Conference (hey, Eran, where’s your review?) when a stranger approached him, deliberately spat in his face and disappeared in the crowd.
This is as lowly as it gets. It’s also very cowardly. TechCrunch covers a lot of companies and people, some positively, some negatively, others not at all, which can hurt… and Mike does get occasionally abrasive, but does not go into personal attacks.
Anyone who has issues with Mike him can bring it up publicly, in a civilized manner. With zero barrier of entry to blogging, Twitter..etc there is no excuse not to do so.
Mike Arrington is now taking some time off, not only because of the spit-attack, but also to reflect on earlier threats on his and his family’s life and security.
What happened today is a despicable act, not to be taken lightly. I am not making fun of it either … but perhaps to cheer Mike up, I must point out that he is now in a Very Elite Club, where his fellow members are none other but Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer.
We probably all remember how Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer received the egg treatment in Budapest last year:
But I suspect some of my readers are too young to recall that ten years before the Ballmer-incident, Microsoft Founder Bill Gates received a full cream-pie in his face on a visit to Belgium:
(Cross-posted from CloudAve. To stay on top of Cloud Computing news, analysis and just our opinion, grab the CloudAve Feed here.)
Related posts:
From the it doesn’t get any stupider than this department: 86 people in the UK have broken the World Record in underwater ironing.
What’s wrong with these people? I wouldn’t want to be anywhere close to an ironing board even on land, let alone underwater. These people should take a flight on Us Airways… (oops, sorry, bad joke).
Here’s another world record in a much more pleasant category. 
First time I beat TechCrunch was in July 2006:
…their Feedburner subscription base grew almost 100% overnight. But it pales in comparison to my 2.5million % growth rate … yes, I went from 200 or so to 51k. Jeff Clavier did quite well, too, at 56k, but hey Jeff, I am catching up!
Too bad it was due to a Netvibes glitch, and once they fixed it, my readership fell back to – well, normal levels.
Today I am winning again: TechCrunch has 0 –yes zero – subscribers, while I have 1141.
This time the culprit is Feedburner, which chucked the subscriber stats to zero for many blogs, including TechCrunch, while I lucked out, and only “lost” about half my subscribers. Over @ CloudAve we were less lucky, the migration to Google’s new setup cost about 85% of our subscriber base, but that still beats zero…
Yet it’s a Pyrrhic victory, which I hope won’t last – Feedburner (Google) needs to pull their act together.
InfoWorld announced the winners of the 2009 Technology of the Year Awards in Applications, Middleware, and Data Management:
The Awards are presented in a slideshow format, and InfoWorld made it almost unreadable: there is an ad in between every single page, you either 20 second to flip a page, or have to click “skip” every single time, then click one more time to close another page that hides the slide. Frankly, I think they went way overboard with this.
That said, I did the work for you, here are the winners:
Congratulations to the winners!
(Cross-posted from CloudAve)
(Photo Credit: *takeitez* on Flickr)
O-Day was supposed to be the first US Presidential Inauguration largely available online. I thought it was a good idea to provide the embedded video here, courtesy of Hulu. It worked well for hours .. during the countdown.
Then it promptly died as soon as the actual broadcast started. It appears Hulu killed the embed feed, while the video on hulu.com itself is still working well.
Hulu = Fail on O-Day. Way to welcome the first tech-savvy US President.
Feedburner started as a cool new blog feed management/reporting service a few years ago, and quickly became a de facto standard. A quick scan of my Feed Reader shows hardly anything but Feedburner. Since Google acquired the company almost two years ago, we haven’t seen a lot of new services – but that does not change the almost monopoly status. Feedburner rules the market, and I’m no exception.
A few months ago Google started to migrate accounts – first only those who wanted to run Adsense in their feeds. Since I don’t care for advertising, I did not bother first, but knew the day would come: the final deadline is February 28th, but anyone can move to the new servers on their own schedule.
Seeing all the negative buzz on Twitter I was planning to wait – but then I “lost” 70% of my subscribers even with the old setup, so I figured I might as well take the plunge. And here it is now: a shiny, brand new (old) feed @ http://feeds2.feedburner.com/zoli.
Google says (FAQ) the stats will “recover” in about a week. Funny thing is, the one service entirely missing from the reports is Google’s very own Reader. I certainly hope this “loss” is only in the stats, and readers are receiving our feed without interruption. If you are, you don’t have to do anything, the old Feedburner URL will continue to be redirected, says Google. Then again, if you’re cautious (like I am), or perhaps are not following our feed yet, you might as well grab the new feed here.
Either way, thanks for reading my Blog.
Publisher / Editor of CloudAve and Enterprise Irregulars.
I do most of my business blogging there, with occasional asides here. More...
Implementing DISQUS
Quick note: I’m in the process of implementing DISQUS now. (Thanks for the help, Daniel!) Thousands of comments are being imported, but they don’t show under the relevant posts yet. Also, DISQUS labeled a few hundred comments as spam – I need to manually comb through those.
So if you commented here before and don’t see your comment now – apologies, hope to sort this out soon.
Update (1/29): Pre-DISQUS comments are in the system but they don’t show for some reason. Bear with me for a while – either we’ll have a fix or I’m removing DISQUS soon.
Update #2: Removed DISQUS, due to ongoing SPAM trouble. I may write more on this one day…