Web 2.0 Technologies and Business Information; Krugle
Arch2Arch Editor's Blog |
April 30, 2008 6:56 AM
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Comments (3)
This week's Arch2Arch blogs have got me thinking about Twitter and, in general, Web 2.0 and business. Twitter is the social networking "platform" that lets people post messages of up to 140 characters in length. People can subscribe to other people's Twitter feeds. When Twitter first came out, it received a lot of attention. One of its advantages is that, given the 140-character message size limit, "twittering" is ideal for hand-held devices that are connected to the Internet. It's a way to spread news fast -- whether the news is trivial or important.
In the past couple years I attended two Web 2.0 conferences, and at these conferences there were many talks, presentations, and discussions about the opportunities Web 2.0 offers to corporations (as well as the challenges). Corporations spend lots of money trying to find out what customers and potential customers think about their products and services. The revolution that is termed "Web 2.0" has created an environment where anyone can publish anything they'd like, quickly and easily. The result? An overload of information publicly available on the Web. Most of this information is trivial, indeed. But not all of it. Here's where the potential value to corporations arises.
People who like doing things like twittering their latest activity or mood will sometimes post information that is of high value to companies. Consider, for example, this "tweet":
trying to get Product X properly configured. arggh! what a pain!!!
Now, if that was your company's product, wouldn't it be useful for you to have that information, and know that your product was considered a "pain" to configure by an objective user? But the person who posted that "tweet" probably isn't going to navigate your corporate web site to find the proper page for posting a professional message critiquing your product's configuration process, right?
At the Web 2.0 conferences I attended, I heard about technologies that mine Web 2.0 content for information like the above example tweet, that can be highly valuable for companies. The tools are getting increasingly sophisticated, too. Mining unstructured content has never been easy... Anyway, thanks to Peter Laird for reminding me of all this interesting stuff through his Twitter post.
In other news: there's an innovation happening at the CodeShare site that many architects will find interesting: code that is submitted to CodeShare can now be submitted to the Krugle code search engine, for cataloguing and indexing. Finding out what's available in terms of already developed open source components as you plan a software engineering project has never been so easy. Not that the work of architecting a project design is any easier, but at least we now have some powerful tools we didn't have before. See the CodeShare Krugle announcement.
Finally, I've put up a new Arch2Arch poll, asking about your organization's use of event-driven architecture (see the details below).
 In the Arch2Arch Articles, we are featuring Quinton Wall's Rethinking Connectivity. In this article, Quinton describes how organizations can approach the problem of connectivity through defining four dimensions of connectivity: internal, external, industry, and hosted. Reorganizing our thinking about connectivity into these dimensions can lead to increased adaptability by the organization to changing trends.
 Meanwhile, in Measuring AquaLogic Enterprise Security Performance William Dettelback talks about performance aspects when AquaLogic Enterprise Security (ALES) is applied to handle visitor entitlements for a WebLogic Portal application.
Take a look at these if you haven't done so already, and browse the full archive of Arch2Arch Articles for more architect insight.
As I mentioned above, in the Arch2Arch Blogs, Peter Laird's Mining Twitter for the Enterprise: Survey your Customers' Candid Thoughts using s Social Web 2.0 Service stood out for me, and has drawn also considerable interest from the community. As Peter says, Twitter provides a mountain of information, most of it useless from a corporate point of view. But the Twitter stream also includes valuable gems, such as when people post off-the-cuff remarks about a company's products and services. Should your company be mining the Web 2.0 datastore? See Peter's post and join the discussion.
In another interesting post, Alex Toussaint provides a preview of the improvements in the Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) capabilities in AquaLogic BPM Suite 6.1. Alex's post AquaLogic BMP 6.1 - BPMN includes diagrams that illustrate the BPMN enhancements.
The Arch2Arch Event Calendar features the May 6 online event Synapse and the Path to Information Nirvana. In this webinar, Synapse Group's Paul Citarella and BEA's Anand Ramakrishnan will talk about innovative Information-as-a-Service (IaaS) strategies.
Also on the horizon is BEA.Participate.08, which will happen in Chicago, Illinois on May 12-15. Chris Bucchere posted a blog that includes a sneak preview video related to BEA Participate 2008 on the Dev2Dev Blogs site.
A new Arch2Arch Poll has just been posted. The poll asks:
Is event-driven architecture (EDA) a component of your enterprise systems?
Please participate by voting on the Arch2Arch home page.
Our previous poll asked "Are you using business process management software in your enterprise architecture?" 39% of respondents (11 votes) said "yes"; 46% (13 votes) said "no, but I plan to"; and 14% (4 votes) selected "no, it's not necessary".
If you've got a suggestion for a future Arch2Arch poll, feel free to post your idea as a comment below.
Subscriptions: This blog is written by Kevin Farnham, and is available as part of the Arch2Arch Editor's blog. You can subscribe using our RSS feed or via the Atom feed.
Technorati Tags: Twitter, Web20, Krugle, BEAparticipate
Comments
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Thanks for the mention Kevin!
As Twitter is embraced by the enterprise, perhaps it is time to suggest BEA Tuxedo as the fix for their scalability problems. Tuxedo is well proven mission critical high transaction infrastructure.
Posted by: plaird on May 2, 2008 at 11:55 PM
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Hi Peter. That's interesting, about Twitter's scaling difficulties. Even 140 unformatted characters can become a burden if you're sufficiently successful.
We've seen a lot of new technologies in the past 5-10 years that have enabled very small development teams get a Web-based concept designed, built, and online quickly. It all works fine as long as the site doesn't get too too popular. But, if genuine success occurs, the need for real, enterprise-level scaling soon arises.
For many Web 2.0 style sites, this becomes a stumbling block, sometimes fatal. Your service is suddenly famous based on what it was in the olden days when there were few users. But new users who make their first visits as the site's popularity is mushrooming find the site impossibly slow and error prone, sometimes even unusable (repeated timeouts on requests, etc.).
Not all technologies and component toolboxes are equal when it comes to scaling, that's for sure. What gets a site up and running in a few developer-months of effort probably won't do the job if the site ever becomes truly successful.
Posted by: kfarnham on May 3, 2008 at 6:18 AM
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RIA technologies, such as Ajax toolkits, have an affect on the problem space. Can you convert some full page requests to finer grained (and thus cheaper) Ajax requests? Are users hammering your server with lots of little Ajax requests that would be better as a single full page request?
Some folks say EC2 is the way out of any scalability problem. Just throw more hardware at the problem on demand. While I am excited by EC2, and think it can definately help, it's not that easy. You've got firewalls, load balancers, servers, databases to coordinate. I like what Elastra is trying to do to help make cloud provisioning easier, but it will take some time to get there.
Posted by: plaird on May 3, 2008 at 3:40 PM
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