Creating social network accounts for corporations

It's getting very common nowadays to have an account on the social network for your corporation. It could be a need to have a Facebook or Twitter presence, or creating a Facebook application for your corporation.

But regardless of the nature of the presence and account, it is undeniable that you really want the account to be owned by the corporation, not an individual employee.

Imagine that today you asked an employee to create a Facebook application or fan page. He creates it with his personal Facebook account. His personal account is thus the owner of the Facebook application or fan page. You could have multiple admins or developers, but there can be only one owner, and as far as I know, it is non-transferable. Some year later he leaves. And there goes your owner of the Facebook application or fan page. I do not think it is possible to revoke his access to the application or fan page, because he is the owner.

That sure sounds like bad news to me.

The correct approach here should be to create a new social network account for the corporation. Have all operations and management done via that account. Make it the owner of all media and content on the social network. In fact, create a corporate email address for this too. Like social@mycorporation.com.

And then have the corporation own the account. Control access to that account, and if passwords are shared, change the passwords when an employee who knows the password leaves. But really avoid too many people knowing the password. Assign additional admins or developers on social media projects with delegated capabilities.

As social media become more and more predominant, it is critical that companies develop a social media policy, and be aware and protective of their social media presence.

Where can Twitter get money?

Twitter has recently annouced that they might offer a premium twitter service at the end of the year. But before then, there were endless thoughts and advices on how to run twitter. How various company should buy twitter, why twitter should sell, and wonders on how long twitter will go down the deadpool.

Except seriously, twitter has nothing to be afraid about. Various attempts have been made to create alternative microblogging services, tools, and software, but they did not seem to gain the same amount of traction and adoption rate.

Twitter is an infrastructure. Messaging delivery infrastructure.

The rate of growth is unbeliverable fast. The ecosystem of tools and services around it is huge as well.

People are using it for real time news and search. Recently, if I have to find information, I use twitter search first before I even try google.

Companies are monitoring twitter for keywords to do direct sales and product support. In fact, they are more responsive than me sending them an email for support!

Imagine if twiiter goes bankrupt and into the deadpool. Imagine all the companies that will be affected.

Which is why all the alternatives to twitter keep coming up. And the advices to business models and selling to a rich company like microsoft or google.

People are afraid of losing such an important tool. And people do recognize its importance!
And so the investments come. People who are betting on a future with twitter. They might want direct paybacks on the long term. Or they might have interest in the twitter ecosystem. Or they might be using twitter and am convinced how it will help them in the long run.
That is an interesting growth/survival strategy.
Start with something free. Make it easy to use, and easy to create tools and services around it (the API). As long as it gains popularity with the netizens, and the ecosystem starts to grow, investments (or donations) will come.
But that's easier said than done I guess.

IBM to buy Sun, but what about Java?

Disclaimer: These are my personal opinion and is not representative of where I work

The rumors and news are spreading like fire, and there are lots of arguments on both sides. They talk about cloud strategies, hardware, existing customers, etc.

But what about Java?

First, I have to say my post here might be biased. I'm not exactly in favor of this buy over. I work in a small company which is a Sun partner, which means I do have quite a bit to lose in this buy over.

Anyway, about Java.

There are many companies with a lot of stakes in Java. There is IBM (the buyer), HP, Oracle, for the players that I can think of offhand. I'm sure I missed out many others, but I have limited exposure.

Java is open. It is run by JCR. Many would have argued. But Java is still very much associated with Sun, who is seen as a steward of Java. A protector. The hero against Microsoft and .NET (though, I do find .NET and C# to be quite appealing and nicely designed).

Sun own the trademark to Java afaik. One has to wonder what happen when IBM buys Sun.

Sun is a strong innovator. Sadly, they did not manage to capitalize on them too well. For example, for tools, IBM manage to overpower them with Eclipse back then. BEA WebLogic for Application Server.

Which is not exactly a bad thing I guess. Java is truly open. It is fair game.

Now, what happens if IBM buys over Sun. Will IBM take advantage of this and start steering Java to a direction which is advantagous to themselves? Gain an edge in the speed they push out Java Standards than the others? Will the others be playing catch up with IBM in terms of Java Standards?

These are just speculations of course.

On the other hand, what about the various Sun projects? Regardless if they are open-source or otherwise, they are still very much managed by existing Sun engineers. Glassfish, OpenESB, OpenSSO, MySQL, even OpenDS. I'm not all together familiar with IBM's portfolio, but I would think they have their own offerings of Application Server, SOA architecture, Directory Server, Single Sign On, Identity Management, a

Are Clouds Suitable for Enterprise?

For the third time (that I can remember anyway), Amazon S3 went down again. It was a short 6 hours this time, much shorter than the previous outage (I think it was a day or two?). That, however, did not change the fact that the service, which many entities come to rely on, is unavailable.

So is Amazon S3 unreliable?

From the Amazon S3 SLA:

...use commercially reasonable efforts to make Amazon S3 available with a Monthly Uptime Percentage (defined below) of at least 99.9% during any monthly billing cycle.

99.9% per month, for a month of 30 days, translates to 43 minutes. That is 43 minutes that your data on Amazon S3 is not available to you. Now, imagine you are a business relying on Amazon S3 to store your critical business data. That is 43 minutes you are unavailable to fulfill your business order.

43 minutes do not sound that bad, does it? Now, imagine, though, that your customer would like to perform a business transaction with you. And you tell your customer that he would have to come back later, when Amazon S3 is up. Ideally, you would like to tell him 43 minutes later. But seriously, you cannot know when the service will be up. It could be the next minute, it could be the next day. Congratulations, you just lost a customer. Mathematically it is one, but potentially, that customer could have brought you more in the long run. Opportunities lost.

Now that is just storage. Imagine your database (ok fine database is technically storage too) is in the cloud. Your virtual applications hosted in a Amazon EC2. Messaging service in Amazon SQS. These are infrastructural clouds. Then there are platforms in the clouds like Salesforce.

Business needs reliability. 99.9999% uptime.

Of course, to be fair, achieving 99.9999% uptime is not easy. It could be extremely costly too. It is not just a technical decision, but a financial decision too, to go Cloud hosting, to scale as you need. Weighing the risks with the cost is important.

But the topic here is Enterprise, who actually have the funds to go 99.9999% availability. For them, do they need to go to the cloud?

To the external parties, the customers view the Enterprise as a single entity. Not as two seperate entities. The Enterprise is responsible for its service to the customer. No amount of explaining (that the cloud service they are using) can qualify a service outage. To them, it is better to maintain control over their Enterprise service infrastruture, which cannot be achieved when that service is a cloud provided by another Enterprise.

That said, there are applications that can live in the cloud for the Enterprise. Applications that are not crucial to the business service execution of an Enterprise. Applications that need to scale on storage, and infrequent execution. For example, in the Identity Lifecycle Management, companies perform yearly re-certification of user system accounts, to verify if there are any unnecessary system accesses. These happen once a year for some companies, and actually require a once a year application hosting. They might also require storage of reports. But all these, while important, can afford cloud service outage. Alternatively, they could be archival of archives (better to backup your backup too!) which are not sensetive (can you rely on your service to be secure? Can they be responsible for losing your highly sensitive and important data? The ones utimately affected is you, not them, after all)

So, are clouds suitable for Enterprise? It is not a straight out yes/no answer. Crucial business functions must be always reliable. Idenfity which those are, and which are not. Those that are not are likely good candidates for cloud services.