Facebook is getting ready to open source its year old application platform. What this means is that other social networks will be able to host the same applications that are all the rage on Facebook without building their own application platforms.

I honestly can’t decide whether this is a momentus occurrence or a non-event. I guess we’ll have to see whether all the applications that have been written for Facebook migrate onto other social networking sites and what the resulting network effect is. My gut is that some of the popular ones will migrate to some of the other major social networks but most will not.

I’m voting for “non-event”. I understand why the applications drive a lot of traffic and page views on the site, but don’t see the value to Facebook to allowing other social networks to leverage this resource. Perhaps they have a strategy I haven’t figure out yet or maybe it is a knee-jerk reaction to OpenSocial. This will be worth watching.

Thanks to Techcrunch for the heads up.

One of the most interesting things I find about using Wordpress to host this blog is the absolutely amazing list of plug-ins that are available for it. There is other blogging software out there (I was a previous user of Typo) but even if it blow the doors off Wordpress (I haven’t found one yet) you almost have to use Wordpress simply because of the ecosystem of developers who support it. Otherwise you miss all the best stuff.

It is this ecosystem that got me thinking about what is required to write software these days. It used to be that if you built the best mousetrap you’d be pretty well off and the mice would flock to it (not to mention the cats). If the software was good, people would use it. Today once of the critical success criteria seems to be your ability to seed an ecosystem of plug-ins, templates and other functional enhancements written by people who are not you. Your software needs to be extensible, if not completely open source.

This is certainly the technique being used by Facebook and others who are trying to make their websites into the defacto operating system for the Internet. And of course you can contrast Firefox with its thousands of plug-ins against Internet Explorer with…somewhat fewer. I think the strategy is sound but the mechanism for ensuring that an ecosystem does blossom around your software is not so clear.

One thing is certain though, without it you aren’t going to be wildly successful. Extendable software is here to stay.

As an aside, there is a decent list of Wordpress plug-ins on the Daily Blog Tips blog. There were a few I hadn’t come across before and they look useful.

With all the chatter these days about the high price of oil and gas, the impact of global warming on pretty much everyone and the general destruction of this planet we call home, I thought it might be valuable to point out the most obvious way to make a major positive impact as I just don’t see it talked about enough.

It is pretty simple and will have an effect way beyond solar panels, wind power, more insulation in the attic, energy efficient appliances and the continuously talked about and never available electric car. It is even cooler than Google’s biofuel buses.

Are you ready for it? Simply stay home. Commuting to work has got to be one of the most ridiculous concepts in today’s broadband, highly connected, 24×7 online environment. As someone who hasn’t had a real office job in seven years and has built two companies in that time yet never paid a dime in office rent, I can assure you that it is completely possible to stay connected with a global team of people, accomplish great things and never wear pants. All this wonderful technology we talk about and blog about allows you to do it with ease (and actually rather cheaply). And the environmental numbers speak for themselves.

Plus, you get to see your kids grow up. I highly recommend it.

Reuters is carrying a article today talking about the fact that Microsoft is getting ready for customers to move to the cloud for all sorts of applications. Not surprisingly, they figure the first major migration will be Exchange mailboxes and that they really don’t care if someone buys the software or pays a monthly fee to host it on Microsoft’s infrastructure. Given that Exchange hosting in the cloud has been available for years from a whole range of companies, this isn’t much of a stretch. I’ve never worked with a company that didn’t hate all the hassle of hosting their own Exchange farm of computers.

The real interesting question is what they plan to do about Microsoft Office. Granted, cloud migration of major desktop applications requires a persistent, fast online connection but it is almost a guaranteed outcome of the current trend. Throw in offline capability like Adobe Air and it won’t be long before most of us are creating, storing and sharing our documents on the net.

In a somewhat related article, The Guardian reports that a US court has ruled that border agents can search your laptop as your cross into the United States. British border security has a similar option. While there are lots of options for encrypting and hiding information, the whole issue sort of becomes moot if you have nothing on your laptop in the first place and everything is up on the cloud. Even better if that cloud is in a country that doesn’t respond to search warrants! Not that we’d ever do anything illegal of course…it is just the point of the matter.

As a heavy user of databases, both in my smaller ventures like TravelGator and also in my consulting work for large financial services companies helping them figure out how to do nasty jobs like trade surveillance, I’ve spent hours (days?) trying to figure out how to load, analyze and extract data from large databases in an efficient manner (and before the market open the next day). Unfortunately, traditional databases like Oracle and MySQL make this job very difficult . They required significant of tuning to get queries to run fast and are completely inadequate for anything that is adhoc in nature. Even the industry leading ETL frameworks have all kinds of limitations when it comes to loading large datasets that require a lot of cleaning and normalization.

So it is fun to see that startups haven’t completely given up on trying to do the database better, even given the large players in the space like Oracle, SAS and others.. Aster has released a product that came out of a Stanford PhD project (why is it always Sanford…?) that is attempting to do for databases what Google has done for search - make the database scale horizontally to thousands of generic, off the shelf servers.

Apparently they are already working with MySpace to load and analyze 100 terabytes of data that they’ve collected from the users. If this thing works it might help move the database out of the Oracle era of small incremental improvements and into the future.

Thanks to Read Write Web for bringing them to my attention.

You always read about Moore’s Law and how it can only be maintained as long as the transistors on chips get smaller and smaller, something that is getting increasingly more difficult over time due to good old physics (electrons don’t like to behave the smaller you get).

I wonder how Moore’s Law applies to soccer?

I tip o’ the hat to Engadget for pointing out the video.

Wow…I remember when Priceline first went public in the beginning of the dot com craziness and it was the company many of my clients were watching - mostly because of their name your price auction format but also because they seemed to be able to do no wrong. Now they are a decade old and pretty much mainstream.

I must be getting old…

A fun site to waste time on: passive aggressive notes.com. One of my favorites:

It would seem that Michael Arrington has a thing for bashing TheFunded.com. His post today was overwhelmingly negative but I actually disagree completely. TheFunded is a great resource for early stage companies to get a handle on the good VCs and the bad VCs out there (and there are plenty of both). As a founder, the one thing you have very little of is time and to waste it chasing a fund that is never going to invest is nearly the worst thing you can do. It can take your company down if you don’t watch it.

Now I’m not usually a fan of online reviews as they tend towards either very negative or very positive and hence uselessness but in this case the network on TheFunded is rather specialized (only CEOs need apply) and having watched postings there for about six months, I can say that for the most part the experiences being shared are spot on based on my own experience pitching for money.

I’m a fan even if TechCrunch isn’t.

Not unexpectedly, Overstock sent a letter to all of its New York affiliates notifying them that it was dropping them from the site. The issue is that New York State had enacted a law that deemed Overstock to have a New York presence simply because it had affiliates in the state and was therefore to be required to collect sales tax on behalf of the state.

This is somewhat expected given the court battle that Amazon has launched to attempt to avoid the same law. So far Amazon hasn’t dropped affiliates but I wouldn’t be surprised to see it happen.

On one hand, I understand the desire of online retailers not to be subject to taxing authorities in states they don’t operate in. On the other hand, if Amazon has any New York State employees they are certainly deducting unemployment insurance and income taxes from their paychecks and paying it to the state. The difference being that they have likely contracted with a payroll company to do it and that law already exists.

So the likely outcome here, assuming that more states pile onto this bandwagon (you can’t fight the government after all…right big tobacco?), is that a big tax processing company will step in to collect and remit sales taxes on behalf of online retailers and the consumers who have so far had a tax holiday when purchasing online are soon to be out of luck. Time to move to New Hampshire.

Thanks to the Small Business Blog for the heads up.