21 posts tagged “web2.0”

We announced big news today - our preliminary results for our fiscal second quarter, and as importantly, that we're acquiring MySQL AB.

If you're interested in the financial details for the quarter, tune in to our conference call (see details on sun.com) today - we'll obviously have more to say as we release our formal results on January 24th.

But the biggest news of the day is... we're putting a billion dollars behind the M in LAMP. If you're an industry insider, you'll know what that means - we're acquiring MySQL AB, the company behind MySQL, the world's most popular open source database.

You'll recall I wrote about a customer event a few weeks ago, at which some of the world's most important web companies talked to us about their technology challenges. Simultaneously, we gathered together some of the largest IT shops and their CIO's, and spent the same two days (in adjoining rooms) listening to their views and directions.

Both sets of customers confirmed what we've known for years - that MySQL is by far the most popular platform on which modern developers are creating network services. From Facebook, Google and Sina.com to banks and telecommunications companies, architects looking for performance, productivity and innovation have turned to MySQL. In high schools and college campuses, at startups, at high performance computing labs and in the Global 2000. The adoption of MySQL across the globe is nothing short of breathtaking. They are the root stock from which an enormous portion of the web economy springs.

But as I pointed out, we heard some paradoxical things, too. CTO's at startups and web companies disallow the usage of products that aren't free and open source. They need and want access to source code to enable optimization and rapid problem resolution (although they're happy to pay for support if they see value). Alternatively, more traditional CIO's disallow the usage of products that aren't backed by commercial support relationships - they're more comfortable relying on vendors like Sun to manage global, mission critical infrastructure.

This puts products like MySQL in an interesting position. They're a part of every web company's infrastructure, to be sure. And though many of the more traditional companies use MySQL (from auto companies to financial institutions to banks and retailers), many have been waiting for a Fortune 500 vendor willing to step up, to provide mission critical global support.

So what are we announcing today? That in addition to acquiring MySQL, Sun will be unveiling new global support offerings into the MySQL marketplace. We'll be investing in both the community, and the marketplace - to accelerate the industry's phase change away from proprietary technology to the new world of open web platforms.

The good news is Sun is already committed to the business model at the heart of MySQL's success - first investing to grow communities of users and developers, and only then creating commercial services that attract (rather than lock in) paying customers. Over the past few years, we've distributed hundreds of millions of licenses and invested to build some of the free software world's largest communities. From Java to ZFS, Lustre to Glassfish, NetBeans to OpenOffice.org and OpenSolaris, we've been patient investors and contributors, both. Free and open software has become a way of life at Sun. MySQL's has similarly driven extraordinary adoption of their community platform, with more than 100 million downloads over the past 10 years. Their users, as with Sun's, run MySQL across every major operating system - Linux, Windows, Solaris and the Mac; and every major system platform, from IBM, Intel, AMD, Dell, Sun and HP.

Not coincidentally, those companies are exactly the companies with whom Sun has signed OEM relationships - so the integration of MySQL into Sun's ecosystem and channels will be exceptionally straightforward.

So how do we plan to go after this new opportunity? In a few fundamental ways.

We've historically worked at arm's length to optimize MySQL on Sun's platforms. Just as we did for Oracle in their early days, our performance engineering teams will sit (virtually) with their counterparts in MySQL and in the community, leveraging technologies such as ZFS and DTrace (which we didn't even have in the Oracle era) to ensure Sakila flies - along with the rest of the LAMP stack (from memcached and php, to the broader ISV community around MySQL). MySQL is already the performance leader on a variety of benchmarks - we'll make performance leadership the default for every application we can find (and on every vendor's hardware platforms, not just Sun's - and on Linux, Solaris, Windows, all). For the technically oriented, Falcon will absolutely sing on Niagara... talk about a match made in heaven.

Second, I've asked our team to negotiate an arms' length commercial transaction, prior to closing, that allows us to provide Global Enterprise Support for MySQL - so that traditional enterprises looking for the same mission critical support they've come to expect with proprietary databases can have that peace of mind with MySQL, as well. This gives traditional enterprises a world of new choices and competition. As I said, if there's one item customers have been asking from us for years it's more innovation in the database marketplace - we're now in a position to respond.

Third, we'll be announcing some exceptionally attractive platform offerings, leveraging the success Lustre and ZFS, along with new systems platforms (like the new 48TB Thumpers and 64 thread Niagara2 machines) to deliver eye popping price performance. Ultimately, that's what customers want - real value, supported globally, with quality and performance. Most importantly, MySQL's partners are going to be the centerpiece of our solutions and offers - just as we've done with Solaris and Java, we're going to work very hard to make our ISV's wildly successful as we broaden the market. It takes decades to build a broad partner portfolio, and they are an enormous part of the value customers see in Sun, and we certainly see in MySQL.

And finally, this acquisition will kickstart a new set of investments Sun will be making into the academic community. Why universities? As we continue to invest in open source software development across the world, it's apparent that nearly all roads lead to academic environments - and it's high time we (as an industry) started watering the trees at their roots. It's one thing to say you're committed to education, it's another to put your money where your mouth is. Within the next 60 days, Greg will be announcing a new set of global research fellowships designed to advance the state of engineering on the internet. (Stay tuned on this blog, and on Greg's, for updates.)

So why is this important for the internet? Until now, no platform vendor has assembled all the core elements of a completely open source operating system for the internet. No company has been able to deliver a comprehensive alternative to the leading proprietary OS. With this acquisition, we will have done just that - positioned Sun at the center of the web, as the definitive provider of high performance platforms for the web economy. For startups and web 2.0 companies, to government agencies and traditional enterprises. This creates enormous potential for Sun, for the global free software community, and for our partners and customers across the globe. There's opportunity everywhere.

To the folks at MySQL, from employees to customers and partners - welcome, and we're thrilled to join you. This acquisition spells the beginning of a new era on the internet.

Starting with the letter M.

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We’ve been following Yahoo’s push to “socialize” their large webmail userbase. In November, it was called “Inbox 2.0.” At CES this week, Jerry Yang referred to “Yahoo Life.” But in reality, according to a Yahoo spokesperson speaking to TechCrunch, the project has no name.

Name or no, the project is designed to have a deep impact on the way people interact with their email—and one another. The new interface will continue to integrate email and IM, as well as offering other capabilities. For a sampling of the technology, check out this example from ZDNet (via TC; photo also from ZDNet):

He [CEO Jerry Yang] gave an example of planning a dinner for CES. You can drag the thread into a map and it will bring up the profiles of those on the mail, note preferences (for food in this case) and suggest restaurants in the area. You can also take an email message, pop up the profiles of those on the message, takes an address from email and show it a map.

This information will also be accessible to third-party apps. These capabilities are based on the technology acquired with Zimbra.

My favorite part of this setup is the fact that, according to ZDNet, “based on frequency and volume of communications[,] email is reordered on the strength of the connections.” Meanwhile, similar attempts from another major search engine’s IM client, feed reader and webmail interface (which shall remain nameless) want to force us to be friends with anyone we’ve ever emailed.

While I do think that Yahoo Mail users should be given the option to opt out of the service, I also think that this is one of the few new social networks that won’t have any trouble gaining a broad audience. However, they’ll want to keep their eye on Google and GMail, which look to be headed in the same direction, and quickly.

Check out ZDNet for more screenshots from Yang’s “sneak peek” at CES.

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VapourWare 2007

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Here's the first gorgeous shot of an Google Android prototype in the wild. It looks HTC-ish in build, similar to the grainy versions we've seen in the official videos and the renderings in the SDK emulator. Our source, a Giz reader, had some feedback to add to the prototype, which he used for a day: Even in early form, it's light and fast, much faster than the desktop emulator at times. And as a longtime programmer, he thinks it's a lot more put together than Window Mobile 5 on the back side of things. It's a prototype, so things will obviously change, but these are all great signs. I just pray that hardware by other makers is a lot more adventurous. In my mind, those HTC designs remind me a little too much of WM and will for a long time. [Thanks Tipster X]

Over the past week, one of the messages on the Wikia search mailing list I am on asked for an update on the Wikia search project. To which Jimmy Wales replied with, "On track, we are hard at work right now..." and displayed the image below. The Unofficial Search Wikia blog was able to pin down Wales' on IRC and got the following comment:

Many people have speculated that this is for a crawl and/or Hadoop cluster and this was confirmed by Jimmy Wales on IRC when I asked if the servers were for a web crawl he replied “they are for the wikia search web crawl, yes”.

Here is the image that Jimmy pointed the list to:

Rick Friedman for The New York Times

Nicholas Christakis, a Harvard professor who is using Facebook to study how people form social relationships, said, “Our predecessors could only dream of the kind of data we now have.”

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Each day about 1,700 juniors at an East Coast college log on to Facebook.com to accumulate “friends,” compare movie preferences, share videos and exchange cybercocktails and kisses. Unwittingly, these students have become the subjects of academic research.

To study how personal tastes, habits and values affect the formation of social relationships (and how social relationships affect tastes, habits and values), a team of researchers from Harvard and the University of California, Los Angeles, are monitoring the Facebook profiles of an entire class of students at one college, which they declined to name because it could compromise the integrity of their research.

“One of the holy grails of social science is the degree to which taste determines friendship, or to which friendship determines taste,” said Jason Kaufman, an associate professor of sociology at Harvard and a member of the research team. “Do birds of a feather flock together, or do you become more like your friends?”

In other words, Facebook — where users rate one another as “hot or not,” play games like “Pirates vs. Ninjas” and throw virtual sheep at one another — is helping scholars explore fundamental social science questions.

“We’re on the cusp of a new way of doing social science,” said Nicholas Christakis, a Harvard sociology professor who is also part of the research. “Our predecessors could only dream of the kind of data we now have.”

Facebook’s network of 58 million active users and its status as the sixth-most-trafficked Web site in the United States have made it an irresistible subject for many types of academic research.

Scholars at Carnegie Mellon used the site to look at privacy issues. Researchers at the University of Colorado analyzed how Facebook instantly disseminated details about the Virginia Tech shootings in April.

But it is Facebook’s role as a petri dish for the social sciences — sociology, psychology and political science — that particularly excites some scholars, because the site lets them examine how people, especially young people, are connected to one another, something few data sets offer, the scholars say.

Social scientists at Indiana, Northwestern, Pennsylvania State, Tufts, the University of Texas and other institutions are mining Facebook to test traditional theories in their fields about relationships, identity, self-esteem, popularity, collective action, race and political engagement.

Much of the research is continuing and has not been published, so findings are preliminary. In a few studies, the Facebook users do not know they are being examined. A spokeswoman for Facebook says the site has no policy prohibiting scholars from studying profiles of users who have not activated certain privacy settings.

“For studying young adults,” said Vincent Roscigno, an editor of The American Sociological Review, “Facebook is the key site of the moment.”

Eliot R. Smith, a professor of psychological and brain sciences at Indiana University, and a colleague received a grant from the National Science Foundation to study how people meet and learn more about potential romantic partners. “Facebook was attractive to us because it has both those kinds of information,” Professor Smith said.

S. Shyam Sundar, a professor and founder of the Media Effects Research Laboratory at Penn State, has led students in several Facebook studies exploring identity. One involved the creation of mock Facebook profiles. Researchers learned that while people perceive someone who has a high number of friends as popular, attractive and self-confident, people who accumulate “too many” friends (about 800 or more) are seen as insecure.

In “The Benefits of Facebook ‘Friends,’” a paper this year in The Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, Nicole Ellison, an assistant professor at Michigan State University, and colleagues found that Facebook use could have a positive impact on students’ well-being. (Note to parents: in an earlier paper the researchers found no correlation between grade-point average and intensity of Facebook use.)

An important finding, Ms. Ellison said, was that students who reported low satisfaction with life and low self-esteem, and who used Facebook intensively, accumulated a form of social capital linked to what sociologists call “weak ties.” A weak tie is a fellow classmate or someone you meet at a party, not a friend or family member. Weak ties are significant, scholars say, because they are likely to provide people with new perspectives and opportunities that they might not get from close friends and family. “With close friends and family we’ve already shared information,” Ms. Ellison said.

Ms. Ellison and her colleagues suggest the information gleaned from Facebook may be more accurate than personal information offered elsewhere online, such as chat room profiles, because Facebook is largely based in real-world relationships that originate in confined communities like campuses.

Mr. Sundar of Penn State agreed. “You cannot keep it fake for that long,” he said. “It’s not a Match.com. You don’t make an impression and then hook somebody.”

But some scholars point out that Facebook is not representative of the ethnicity, educational background or income of the population at large, and its membership is self-selecting, so there are limits to research using the site. Eszter Hargittai, a professor at Northwestern, found in a study that Hispanic students were significantly less likely to use Facebook, and much more likely to use MySpace. White, Asian and Asian-American students, the study found, were much more likely to use Facebook and significantly less likely to use MySpace.

Facebook began in 2004 at Harvard and was restricted to students until 2006. As Ms. Hargittai points out in her paper, “Requiring such an affiliation clearly limited the number and types of people who could sign up for the service in the beginning.”

Most researchers acknowledge these limits, yet they are still eager to plumb the site’s vast amount of data. The site’s users have mixed feelings about being put under the microscope. Katherine Kimmel, 22, a graduate student at the University of Cincinnati, said she found it “fascinating that professors are using something that started solely as a fun social networking tool for entertainment,” and she suggested yet another study: how people fill out Facebook’s “relationship status” box. “You’re not really dating until you put it on Facebook,” she said.

But Derrick B. Clifton, 19, a student at Pomona College in California, said, “I don’t feel like academic research has a place on a Web site like Facebook.” He added that if it was going to happen, professors should ask students’ permission.

Although federal rules govern academic study of human subjects, universities, which approve professors’ research methods, have different interpretations of the guidelines. “The rules were made for a different world, a pre-Facebook world,” said Samuel D. Gosling, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Texas, Austin, who uses Facebook to explore perception and identity. “There is a rule that you are allowed to observe public behavior, but it’s not clear if online behavior is public or not.”

Indiana University appears to have one of the stricter policies. Its Web site states that the university will not approve academic research without permission from social networking sites or specific individuals.

Professor Hargittai of Northwestern conducted her Facebook study through a writing course that is required of all students at the University of Illinois, Chicago. Some 1,060 participants answered survey questions on paper. Professor Ellison of Michigan State used a random sample of 800 undergraduates who were invited to participate via an e-mail message that included a link to an online survey.

Dr. Christakis of Harvard said he and his colleagues were studying the profiles of the East Coast college class with the approval of Harvard’s Institutional Review Board, and with the knowledge of the unnamed college’s administration — but unknown to the students being studied.

“Employers are looking at people’s online postings and Googling information about them, and I think researchers are right behind them,” said Dr. Christakis, a sociologist and internist who was an author of a study that received wide attention this year for its suggestion that obesity is “socially contagious.” (The researchers did not use Facebook.)

Among other topics, the Harvard-U.C.L.A. researchers are investigating a concept, first put forth by the pioneering German sociologist Georg Simmel, known as triadic closure: whether one’s friends are also friends of one another. If this seems trivial, consider that a study in 2004 in The American Journal of Public Health suggested that adolescent girls who are socially isolated and whose friends are not friends with one another experienced more suicidal thoughts.

“Triadic closure was first described by Simmel 100 years ago,” Dr. Christakis said. “He just theorizes about it 100 years ago, but he didn’t have the data. Now we can engage that data.”

See it here