Facebook In 2022

Image via CrunchBase

If Facebook is the next Google it will still be around, it will still be doing cutting edge work. It will still be innovating. But right now is not the best of times for Facebook. They got to wait it out.

Facebook could emerge the identity provider of choice. Facebook could host the credit history and score for the global population. As in, Facebook could do what many governments have not done.

Data mining is going to be big for them. Or can be.

Frankly I don't know what Facebook will be like in 2022. That is kind of far. 12 years back I had not seen a Facebook coming.

What will Facebook look like in 2022?

Like Google, Yahoo, and even Amazon, Facebook will have to recast itself as the internet landscape changes. Google started as a better search engine. As the internet grew and exploded in use, Google shifted to providing a bevy of cloud services, trying to be the provider of your core internet experience through apps such as Google Documents, Gmail, and Google Maps. Now Google is shifting gears again by moving offline with Google Glasses, Street View, and Driverless Car. ..... Today Amazon is plotting a network of urban warehouses that can ensure same-day delivery, and has even turned itself into the preeminent cloud computing provider with Amazon Web Services. .... The next 10 years of Facebook will be defined by solving the mobile problem. .... What if Twitter starts building out a more thorough profile? What if Instagram remained independent and built a robust web platform? ..... Rather than a desktop-focused social network, Facebook will be the universal sign-in solution for the social web, a collection of various mobile applications, and a powerful external ad network that overcame Google’s publisher network. ..... Watch over the next few years as Facebook builds a large publisher network based on the promise of true demographic targeting.... The Facebook of 2022 will look a lot more like a data warehouse .... Facebook in 2022 will look much more utilitarian

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Paperless Post Iterations

Image via WikipediaEvite Cries Y(h)elp! Copies Paperless Post Pixel By Pixel

Only now is Paperless Post thinking in terms of the freemium model, and I believe they have been profitable for a year now. That is curious. Most others start with the freemium model. They build the user base, and monetize later.

With Paperless post you get to send out invitations to important events in your life. The paper is gone, but the beauty is preserved, perhaps even enhanced.

And it is not just about digital. It is not just that you used to send paper versions, and now you send digital versions. The digital medium allows for the collection of data as to how the invitation card travels around as people open up the cards, RSVP and so on. That feedback loop was not possible with the paper incarnations of the cards.

Other than sending more and more beautiful cards to more and more people for more and more events what are some of the directions Paperless Post could go on to?

One obvious thing that emerges is that special social graph of people you invite to the special events in your life, people who show up for those special moments. Culling that social graph could lead Paperless Post into unforeseen directions. Amazon started out selling books. The Amazon Web Services was built for internal use, and now is a major Amazon offering.

Jeff Bezos: Still Innovating

Image via CrunchBaseJeff Bezos was not having the greatest of time when the dot com collapse happened in 2000. The guy still had a lot of money in the bank, but the press was full of critics who said Bezos has never made a dime for his investors, it was only a matter of time before his money runs out also. Bezos proves the bozos wrong. Not only that, Amazon grew like crazy through the Great Recession. And somewhere along the way he gave the world the cloud: Amazon Web Services. He suggested servers were like electricity. Don't buy your own little generator.

The dude is a visionary, sure.

San Francisco Chronicle: Why I, Jeff Bezos, Keep Spending Billions On Amazon R&D: Random forests, naïve Bayesian estimators, RESTful services, gossip protocols, eventual consistency, data sharding, anti-entropy, Byzantine quorum, erasure coding, vector clocks … walk into certain Amazon meetings, and you may momentarily think you’ve stumbled into a computer science lecture...... Look inside a current textbook on software architecture, and you’ll find few patterns that we don’t apply at Amazon. We use high-performance transactions systems, complex rendering and object caching, workflow and queuing systems, business intelligence and data analytics, machine learning and pattern recognition, neural networks and probabilistic decision making, and a wide variety of other techniques ..... our architects and engineers have had to advance research in directions that no academic had yet taken ...... Service-oriented architecture -- or SOA -- is the fundamental building abstraction for Amazon technologies. ...... Our e-commerce platform is composed of a federation of hundreds of software services that work in concert to deliver functionality ranging from recommendations to order fulfillment to inventory tracking. ...... to construct a product detail page for a customer visiting Amazon.com, our software calls on between 200 and 300 services to present a highly personalized experience for that customer .... our key data services store many petabytes of data and handle millions of requests per second ...... The storage systems we’ve pioneered demonstrate extreme scalability while maintaining tight control over performance, availability, and cost. To achieve their ultra-scale properties these systems take a novel approach to data update management: by relaxing the synchronization requirements of updates that need to be disseminated to large numbers of replicas, these systems are able to survive under the harshest performance and availability conditions. These implementations are based on the concept of eventual consistency. The advances in data management developed by Amazon engineers have been the starting point for the architectures underneath the cloud storage and data management services offered by Amazon Web Services (AWS)...... our Simple Storage Service, Elastic Block Store, and SimpleDB all derive their basic architecture from unique Amazon technologies ..... product data ingestion and categorization, demand forecasting, inventory allocation, and fraud detection ....... advanced machine learning techniques provide more accurate classification and can self-heal to adapt to changing conditions .... The diversity of products demands that we employ modern regression techniques like trained random forests of decision trees to flexibly incorporate thousands of product attributes at rank time...... Technology infuses all of our teams, all of our processes, our decision-making, and our approach to innovation in each of our businesses. It is deeply integrated into everything we do. ...... Whispersync, our Kindle service designed to ensure that everywhere you go, no matter what devices you have with you, you can access your reading library and all of your highlights, notes, and bookmarks, all in sync across your Kindle devices and mobile apps. The technical challenge is making this a reality for millions of Kindle owners, with hundreds of millions of books, and hundreds of device types, living in over 100 countries around the world—at 24x7 reliability. At the heart of Whispersync is an eventually consistent replicated data store, with application defined conflict resolution that must and can deal with device isolation lasting weeks or longer.... We live in an era of extraordinary increases in available bandwidth, disk space, and processing power, all of which continue to get cheap fast..... we have unshakeable conviction that the long-term interests of shareowners are perfectly aligned with the interests of customers...... As always, I attach a copy of our original 1997 letter. Our approach remains the same, and it’s still Day 1.

The Cloud Outage

O'Reilly Community: The AWS Outage: The Cloud's Shining Moment: if your systems failed in the Amazon cloud this week, it wasn't Amazon's fault. You either deemed an outage of this nature an acceptable risk or you failed to design for Amazon's cloud computing model....... two dueling architectural models of cloud computing applications: "design for failure" and traditional. ..... The Amazon model is the "design for failure" model. Under the "design for failure" model, combinations of your software and management tools take responsibility for application availability. The actual infrastructure availability is entirely irrelevant to your application availability. 100% uptime should be achievable even when your cloud provider has a massive, data-center-wide outage. ...... The advantage of the "design for failure" model is that the application developer has total control of their availability with only their data model and volume imposing geographical limitations. The downside of the "design for failure" model is that you must "design for failure" up front. ...... Physical redundancy encompasses all traditional "n+1" concepts: redundant hardware, data center redundancy, the ability to do vMotion or equivalents, and the ability to replicate an entire network topology in the face of massive infrastructural failure. ...... If you had redundancy across availability zones, you would have survived every outage suffered to date in the Amazon cloud. ...... If you had regional redundancy in place, you would have come through the recent outage without any problems except maybe an increased workload for your surviving virtual resources. ...... Cloud redundancy enables you to survive the complete loss of a cloud provider. ....... Being home to the world’s reserve currency confers great advantages on the U.S. economy. Because of it, our government, companies and households can borrow money more easily and cheaply. And because all that demand for dollars artificially raises its value, we can import goods at a cheaper price than other countries. ...... Applications built with "design for failure" in mind ..... will achieve uptimes you can't dream of with other architectures and survive extreme failures in the cloud infrastructure. ...... no humans, no 2am calls, and no outage! ..... Netflix, an AWS customer that kept on going because they had proper "design for failure" .. ? Try doing that in your private IT infrastructure with the complete loss of a data center.

I should have, but I did not expect this to happen. Servers are known to go down. Heck, PCs crash. The browser freezes. The cloud went down. In a big way. What's next? Datacenters? I think it did happen once. One Google datacenter went down. Correct me if I am not remembering it right. What if Facebook's datacenter in Oregon went down for an hour?

So the cloud went down. And there has been much talk. The Amazon Web Services is pretty much the cloud that most of us are privy to. And you thought Jeff Bezos was in the business of selling books.

The cloud should not go down. The cloud can not go down. It is like when there is a power cut the generator turns on on its own immediately, and so although there was a power cut, you did not feel it. The cloud needs that mechanism. Otherwise it is not a proper cloud. The cloud is not like the rest of us. The cloud is not supposed to go down.

Amazon's Amazing Cloud

Image via Wikipedia

GigaOm: How Big is Amazon’s Cloud Computing Business? Find Out in 2010, AWS will generated about $500 million in revenues and will grow this to $750 million by 2011. By 2014, it would bring in close to $2.54 billion in revenues. ..... the total market for AWS type services .. will eventually grow to $15-to-$20 billion in 2014 ...... the total global cloud market in 2010 will be $22 billion and $55 billion in 2014..... Amazon was smart to bet early and bet big on the cloud computing opportunity

Larry Ellison on the Charlie Rose show in the late 1990s in an aside derided Amazon as being in the business of "selling books." But Amazon through its amazing cloud service has gone on to revolutionize computing in ways Jeff Bezos never imagined when he started out. He started out wanting to sell books. Amazon built its infrastructures for its own use, but upon building realized it had too much excess capacity. What to do? Necessity is the mother of invention, like the cliche goes.

There are so many big, wonderful dot coms in existence today that owe their existence to Amazon. Jeff Bezos took the electricity out of the equation. You don't need to have your own personal generator. You simply plug in.

Software as utility, hardware as utility: these were once revolutionary concepts.

We need some major revolutions in the ISP business so all humanity can come online. That is very important to the future of computing.

You Can Create An Android App Too, Anyone Can

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