LinkedIn and Facebook

The press loves a food fight, good vs. evil, Microsoft vs. Netscape (Netscape? Remember them?), Microsoft vs. Linux, Microsoft vs. Google. Okay, enough already. The one I’ll talk about today is LinkedIn vs. Facebook.

For those of you that have been living under a rock and use neither, LinkedIn is a social networking site where people can post their online resumes and search for jobs or business connections. I have been a member for several years and have several hundred people whom I have met over my career. I have used LinkedIn for doing research on companies and finding sources to interview for stories or leads to new story ideas, as well as a place where I can collect references for previous work that I have done for my consulting clients. It is also a great place to keep track of people when they change jobs, or about to. (The recent CMP layoffs were presaged by a flurry of connect requests, for example.)

Facebook is a social networking site that formerly was the exclusive domain of college students, and seems like the successor for MySpace when kids want something more grown-up. Its scope has been expanded twice recently: first to allow members from the general population to join, and most recently with a series of REST interfaces that developers could build applications on. It is one of the quickest growing sites around – according to the WSJ, they have added three million users since this latest development. I was one of them and joined a few weeks ago and now have 100 or so “friends.” One of my motivations for joining was to communicate with my daughter, who used the site to do research and figure out where she wanted to go to college this fall by joining several groups and messaging people that eventually formed a group of entering freshman in her particular dorm.

Both services have their own messaging system so you never have to leave the service and use your regular email identity and you can also get info about your correspondents by clicking on their picture. This seems less useful to me – but then I already do too much email anyway. I see my daughter using email less and less because she lives in Facebook and doesn’t want to check her email box.

The Facebook open application ploy is a smart one, and there are now close to a 1,000 different applications that people have put together. As the Journal points out, a popular music sharing app called iLike gets more revenues from Facebook users than from its own home page. I am sure that there are others that will be moneymakers in the near future too. What is interesting about the applications is that you can see what your friend network is using and this way get a lead on the more interesting ones that you might want to fool around with.

Up until now, LinkedIn was its own closed universe. They offered several different plans from free to several hundred dollars per month to make use of their services. I know a few people who have coughed up the cash but most are satisfied with the free service. They have begun their own developer program too, at least according to Techcrunch, but I couldn’t find any details on their site. The details on the Facebook API are easy to find and seem well thought out.

Facebook is easier to build networks, easier than LinkedIn to set up your own groups (see if you can find my group called frosh dads), and easier than LinkedIn to customize your own home page with a lot of silly applications. There is even a group for LinkedIn users, where I got a lot of useful information and links to write this column. [And there is a discussion thread on LinkedIn about Facebook here.] But more importantly, it seems the people on Facebook you ask to be your “friend” are choosier and have somewhat of a higher threshold than on LinkedIn. I took the easy way of bulk uploading about 200 of my Gmail contacts to get started on Facebook, and I should have been more selective: Several people messaged me basically saying who the heck are you and why should I want to be your friend. That brought me back to thoughts of junior high and I don’t want to get into that period of my life, believe me.

One person that sent me a “who are you” request turned out to be someone that I exchanged emails with 12 years ago and haven’t heard from since. At least, he kept better records than I did, but it was nice to reconnect.

With LinkedIn, I get all sorts of requests to be connected with people that I honestly don’t know and don’t think I ever met or corresponded with. I mean no offense if you are one of those. When you write a weekly newsletter, you the reader know a lot more about me than I about you. Depending on my mood, I have either accepted them or denied them, with no real rationale.

Granted, the two networks serve vastly different audiences and purposes: I don’t have any incentive to hide my true identity on LinkedIn, indeed, I want to be as specific as possible about my credentials and professional affiliations, because you never know what work might come in as a result. That is the opposite on Facebook, where you don’t want unknown stalkers coming by, and where you might want to have multiple identities (if you are a teenager or college student) to see how to take your “friends” to “friends with benefits” level.

Alex Iskold has done an excellent analysis back in January about the two sites, showing traffic stats and their different approaches to their networks and content:

A more recent post by Ed Sim on this blog talks about the different rationales and audiences and has some insightful comments by his readers.

I’d be interested in your comments about both services. You can either send me an email directly, post a comment on my Strominator.blog, or message me from within Facebook or LinkedIn. I’ll tally all the replies and let you know across the board what happens.

Selling unified comms and QoS to the channel

The days where the typical corporate network is just carrying data packets are over, and VARs can take advantage of a new breed of applications called unified communications to turn some solid business opportunities.

The idea is to marry voice, email, instant messages, and even video conversations in one central place, to make it easier to keep track of your connections. It is not a new idea.

You can read more about how three trends have come together to make this compelling for the channel in my story today in eWeek here.

College bound

I usually  refrain from personal comments here, but sometimes a dad has to be just a dad and proud of his daughter’s high school graduation. Best wishes, Maia!

Teragrid opportunities for commercial use widen

A unique federally funded computing effort is making it easier for corporations to access the largest-scale computers on the planet. Dubbed Teragrid, the effort spans nine different academic and government institutions and has reached a critical mass this year. The numbers are staggering, even for IT managers who are used to big projects. The TeraGrid network currently spans more than 20 petabytes of storage — that’s enough to hold a billion encyclopedias — and more than 280 teraflops of compute power.

You can read more about the Teragrid in my story in today’s Computerworld.com here.

Not your typical summer beach book

I just finished Conspiracy of Fools the story of the fall of Enron told by veteran New York Times financial journalist Kurt Eichenwald. You would think a 700-page book wouldn’t be this riveting but it is a must read for anyone in business today — especially for those who have forgotten some of the lessons of the dot bomb era. I found it fascinating and full of insights. The level of reporting is immense, and the level of corporate malfeasance is staggering. This may be a big book to cart around in your summer travels, but you won’t want to put in down.

The coming VOIP onslaught

For a webinar I am doing for Tippit.com entitled:

The Coming Voice Onslaught: How VoIP Will Cripple Your Network (And How to Defend It)

Microsoft Home Server review

Here is a question for you:  when was the last time you backed up your home’s digital files? Maybe never? Bad answer.

Microsoft has been working on a solution, and it went into its final production throes this past week. The product is called Windows Home Server, and it is a stripped-down version of its Windows Server 2003 that normally costs a thousand bucks or so. For the time being, you can download a timed-version (it will work until December) freely from this link. You do need to sign up and answer a few questions to join the Connect service, which also has other pre-release software from Microsoft.

You need to install the software on a new machine: it will wipe your disk clean and boot up automatically with the Home Server running. The software is designed to run “headless” which means that you don’t need to attach a monitor or a keyboard, once you get beyond certain basics that I will talk about in a moment. It will install the operating system, split your hard disk into two partitions (one for system files, one for data), and set up a bunch of shared drives for pictures, videos, files, and so forth. Think of this as layering a simple set of controls on top of the standard Windows server platform.

To access these shares, you will need to run another piece of software called Home Server Connector Software from each computer to set up the network connection. There are basically two different levels of access – “remote control” for the administrators that gives them access to the server control console, and ordinary file and printer shares for everyone else.

I tried it out on my home office network to mixed results. I liked a few things:

First, getting to the reason for this column, it is very easy to backup your PCs with this product, provided you have a big enough disk on the server’s PC. You can choose what you want to backup, and it automagically does it in the middle of the night, when traffic is lightest (and presumably your PC that is to be backed up is still powered on). You can set up a different schedule if you are pickier.

Second, Home Server can also automatically synchronize its shared folders with ones on your local PC – that is a neat trick and something you might consider for say sharing your pictures or videos across the network, and something that has been standard with the Windows server line for some time.

Finally, you can control the server from outside your home, if it can figure out how to open up your home gateway ports.  It uses UPnP to do this. Sadly, my 2Wire DSL gateway doesn’t support this (it doesn’t support a lot of other things, but that discussion will have to wait for another day). It would be nice if there were another alternative to UPnP, but there isn’t.

Here are some things that I didn’t like about the software.

First, you initially need complex passwords to set the darn thing up, meaning something with seven characters, upper and lower case and numbers too. That seems a bit onerous for the average home network. This can be loosened up once you get the first user going.

Second, when the install was done, it didn’t recognize the Intel network adapter that was in a fairly recent Dell. Once I installed the right driver, I was good to go. Third, despite its headless installation, you will still need to be sitting in front of the server to set up a shared printer. Next, the only clients for this server are Windows XP with Service Pack 2 or Vista – if you have got anything older on your home network, and chances are good you do – then don’t even bother with the product.

Is this a good deal? It is hard to tell until Microsoft sets pricing. There is still talk that it will be available both as a bundled piece of hardware from the usual suspects and as a software download, but we’ll see.

If it does come as low-cost software and you have an older PC and can upgrade the storage, it might be worth it. But if you have older Windows and Macs, then no: you are better off buying either a Mac mini or a network-attached storage box and saving yourself the trouble.

Here’s a 0GB USB thumb drive

Someone sent me this photo of a USB drive that has a surprise waiting when the cover is revealed.

Rejis moves their data center

It isn’t often that you have access to your local neighborhood data center, literally a few steps down the block. But I did. I live in a residential area of St. Louis called the Central West End, and I pass by the offices of the Regional Justice Information Service (REJIS) almost every day. When I learned that they were going to be expanding their data center, I knew that I had to be there for the actual move.

That was before I found out about the background check and how the move was taking place I would have to be there to witness the move during the middle of the night.

You can read the entire tale in today’s Computerworld here.

Sam Whitmore’s Media Survey podcast

I talk today with Sam Whitmore about the major blood-letting at CMP, my role in founding Network Computing magazine, and other issues with old and new media on his podcast today.