Erik Howard

The Motley Fool has a new article on why Google should buy Twitter.

They assert that Google would be the most suitable match for Twitter. They could afford to buy the non-revenue generating Twitter in this bad economic environment.

They would have no problems hosting Twitter. Google has the horsepower and bandwidth to prevent Tweet Overload. The culture and vision of both companies would not clash as much as a Microsoft Twitter tie-up. Imagine also the new market Twitter’s content would open up for Google’s ad-machine.

Would Google want to spend $1 Billion plus for Twitter? They already index public Twitter content. What other benefits could be had from a Twitter acquisition?

While startups, consultants and individuals are rushing to put their applications in the cloud large enterprises are, for the most part, are still sitting on the fence.

What is preventing adoption of cloud computing for enterprises. It basically comes down to a few issues – security, accountability and standards.

Most cloud vendors, but not all, are mum (publicly at least) on the exact details of their cloud infrastructure. Large enterprises want assurances that their applications and their data will be secure in the cloud.

If I had to pick one cloud vendor who I trusted the most in the security arena, I would go with Joyent. They are going to be a little more expensive than your commodity cloud vendors, but you are getting rock-solid service, security and support for your money.

As a potential corporate consumer of cloud services, I would want to know how my usage is being tracked and billed. “Just trust us” is not a good answer.

Right now there are no standards when it comes to deploying applications into the cloud. Applications deployed on Google App Engine need to be modified for App Engine’s environment. Same is true for Microsoft’s Azure platform.

There are no standard API’s for managing instances and services in the cloud. If you decide to move your application from one cloud vendor to another. You will probably have to re-write any custom applications you developed to manage your cloud presence.

Cloud computing can and will play a big part in enterprise architectures. Cloud vendors need to figure out how to address the concerns that potential enterprise customers may have.

Should you host your next application in the cloud or should you continue to host your application on dedicated servers?

If you were itching to put your next application in the cloud, you may want to hold off on that move. In some cases it makes sense to start your application in the cloud, but in most cases it doesn’t. In the past, reliability was a big concern with hosting in the cloud. Your instance could disappear at any time without notice. There were no up-time guarantees or solid SLA’s. Most of these concerns are melting away as the cloud computing industry starts to mature.

If looking strictly at price points, cloud computing may seem just a little more cost effective than renting a dedicated server. But it’s not an apples-to-apples comparison. For cloud servers, you are paying for the resources that your virtualized instance uses. With a dedicated server, you pay the same amount regardless how much that server is used.

Don’t fall for the cloud computing marketing hype of “pay for only what you use”. Who in their right mind is only going to let their servers run from 9am to 9pm to save costs? What they really mean is if your application needs to scale, create a few more virtualized instances to handle the load. When the load subsides, you can destroy those instances since you no longer need those resources. If you had experienced high loads with a dedicated server, you would have to quickly have your vendor provision new hardware. That process could take anywhere from 2-24 hours. That doesn’t include the time you would spend getting the server ready for production.

Most virtualized cloud instances are un-managed, meaning it’s your responsibility fore the care and feeding of your instance. Dedicated servers come in managed and un-managed flavors. A managed dedicated server is usually more expensive than an un-managed server. So if your computer administration skills are on the week side, you’d probably want to go with a managed dedicated server. There are a few companies, such as Enki, offer managed cloud computing services.

There are also other companies (Rackspace, GoGrid) that offer a hybrid strategy of dedicated servers combined with a cloud to handle spikes in traffic or temporary large computing projects.

I’ve managed dedicated servers now for many years with many different vendors. Each experience has been different from the next. From 99% reliability to outright fraud. My experiences with cloud computing have been favorable. But don’t expect much hand holding.

As far as cost, again – it depends on the type of application you want to host. If you just want to host a blog, you will probably be better off with getting a virtual private server (VPS) than a dedicated server or putting your application in the cloud.

If you find yourself transcoding thousands of videos, running a social network, need your content distributed globally, hosting a Facebook application, or have some other unpredictable high-volume application, then the cloud is the place for you.

If you know what your bandwidth requirements will be month-to-month and you can plan your growth, then it will probably be more cost effective to stick with dedicated servers.

Microsoft’s ASP.NET MVC 1.0 has officially been released.  The ASP.NET Model-View-Controller (MVC) framework is an addition to ASP.NET . I’ve created an ASP.NET MVC 1.0 Resources page to help ASP.NET developers download and learn more about the new ASP.NET MVC framework. If you would like to add something to the list or have any changes, just leave a comment or send me a Tweet.

Just finished downloading IE8. The install downloaded with no problems and delays. Nice job. I was expecting to have to wait till later this evening to try and download IE. The installation went fine on my Sony Vaio laptop running Vista Ultimate. Your mileage may vary.

After a reboot (when is this going to be fixed?), I fired up IE8 to see what our Microsoft Overlords have doled out to us. IE 8 will ask you if you want to go with some a default configuration or customize your settings.  Some people will get a little confused by certain terms – Accelerators comes to mind. What exactly am I accelerating anyway? Thankfully there are not a lot of setup screens and the process took less than 20 seconds.

The basic interface has not changed that much. Few new buttons here and there.  One thing you will notice immediately is the speed of the browser. This is prehaps Microsoft’s fastest web browser to date. It does not feel slugish. Browsing from page to page was very snappy and responsive. The rendering of pages is very clean and crisp. I didn’t notice any layout problems with any page that I browsed. Microsoft does provide a Compatibility view for web pages that are not so XHMTL compliant.

One thing that I’m really excited about is the new Javascript debugger located off the tools menu. I can’t tell you how long I’ve been waiting for decent Javascript debugging in IE. The debugger is a cross between Firebug and the Developer toolbar plugin for FireFox.

With the IE 8 developer tools your able to do:

• Browse DOM objects
• Set breakpoints and step thru your code
• Profile you code
• Validate CSS, HTML, Feeds
• Manage Cookies
• Includes a ruler, color picker
• Outline div’s
• and much, much more

I was skeptical about this relase of IE. It seems pretty solid out of the gate. I won’t switch over from FireFox to IE 8 quite yet as my main browser. Security is the big unknown right now. Not just with IE 8, but with any web brower on the market right now. Regardless, good job Microsoft.

If you had an extra $29 billon dollars just sitting around in the bank, what would you do? I wouldn’t buy Pure Digtial that’s for sure. Cisco has now bought Pure Digital for $590 million dollars. Not a bad price at all for a 2 year old crapsumer video camera company.

Pure Digital  the popular Flip Video cameras. You can find them just about anywhere. Matter of fact, I actually own one of their cameras. It’s easy to use and the video is produces is ok. My 9 year old daughter takes the camera with her everywhere. She was the big hit on one of her field trips.

I’m all for stimulating the economy, but WTF Cisco? You just announced last week you are getting into the enterprise server market, then you turn around the following week and buy a consumer video camera company. What’s it going to be next week Chucky Cheese?

Besides the obvious choice of throwing networking options inside new models of the Flip camera, how can this acquisition help Cisco?  A more logical choice would have been to purchase GoGrid or another up and coming Cloud Computing company. Now that would make sense and you wouldn’t have had to spent $590 million dollars.

I’ve been having battery issues with my iPhone the past couple of weeks. I could not for the life of me figure out what was causing my battery to be drained down to nothing within a few hours.

I’ve got a couple of pages of apps on my iPhone. All of them, for the most part, have been behaving well. I don’t make a lot of calls and I haven’t been listening to lots of music lately, so I narrowed it down to new apps installed with the past few weeks. That narrowed it down to just one app – Twitterrific.

I know sure what Twitterrific is doing, but it’s like the electricial nosferutu for the iPhone. Anyone have any suggestions?