Social Cloud

If you spend as much time reading tech articles and attending research presentations as I do, you will quickly realize that the two hottest buzz words (in the software side) are social and cloud. Why do you ask? Well, because of the obvious answer, money. Facebook has become a powerhouse evaluated (or speculated, isn't speculation great) to be worth $50 billion. That is amazing. So now, every service on the web is using the word social (for example, github uses the term, social coding, but really coding on github really does not seem social to me, people hate doing code reviews and merges, github even has a blame feature, which is not that friendly at all (this is an anecdote to my anecdote, I just realize that I do a lot of anecdotes in my posts and i put them in parentheses, I guess I like to go off on tangents, maybe I'm ADD)). So now, there's a bunch of academic research looking at social networks, social networking sites, and so on, trying to understand the connections that people make and what is driving this mass of exodus of social activity on the web. Bottom line, if you can understand how to create a social service, you will get a lot of users, and you will make a lot of money. The making money part is not always that easy though because Twitter is still trying to figure out how to make money and that's making some people nervous, especially because Facebook has a similar built-in service and it's trying to compete directly with Twitter.

The next big buzz word is cloud of course. You see it in IBM commercials all the time, even Microsoft is starting to use it in its commercials as well (I should provide links to these commercials but that would be too much of a burden and that would take away from my willingness to make future blog posts). Ok back to clouds, people always have trouble defining clouds, but in my mind it's simple, it is the same old Software as a Service model that companies like IBM have been pushing to customers for years. The only difference is that these days the Internet is faster, then the response time is better, hence the world is shrinking. Once again, there's a lot of money to be make in clouds because Amazon "seems" to be making money (nothing extra ordinary) from clouds. The other thing that helped is virtualization, in the end, it's still software as a service, but the software now allows you to customize your own operating system, and administrators love that (everyone gets excited about root access, oh yeah). So once again, there's a ton of academic research looking at cloud computing.

Here is the point. I study P2P and I used P2P, and P2P is one of the best examples of social and cloud but without the money (and sadly it does not get funded as much). So if I run a service, and I allow my friends to have access to that service, and they run a service and they allow me access to their service, and you create this huge graph of millions of people sharing services with each other, either with random strangers (gnutella), or with trusted friends (Freenet Darknet) then we have what I call a social cloud. I read this paper the other day called "Social Cloud". It basically combined Facebook and Amazon EC2, you run a service on EC2 instance and use facebook to give friends credentials to access service, and use some accounting (or credit) system to keep track of transactions. Cool idea, but why do I have to use EC2 and Facebook, why can't I use use my home PC (which will give me better performance on some things but worst in others) and host my service through that, and discover my friends by email, chat, or by phone. In the second model, noone makes money and if noone makes money then you can't create jobs. But wouldn't it be nice if you had a distributed facebook, a distributed google, and a distributed twitter, and a distributed youtube (P2PTV is working hard on that one). Distributed services have this nice property of empowering the people, isn't that what democracy is all about, power to the people, so fund P2P projects, the only true way of powering the people. So this goes out to the true social clouds of the world (check out Freenet).