Last days, there’s a bouncing topic on Real Time Searches, since twitter launched their search engine, with the ability of getting results on real time. Traditional search enterprises, specially Google, are discussing about getting the Real Time search on their services.

Google is working on a partnership with Twitter as Google’s CIO states in this way, Larry Page admitted Google had so far “done a relatively poor job of creating things that work on a per second basis”.

What is going on? Let’s analize it a little comming from the precedent search engines.

We will use the trend “American Idol” to compare and decide over the results.

1. Google

We’ve ever had the possibility of making a restricted search for a site e.g. :site:twitter.com “american idol”

Search URL

If we analyze the 10 first results we get:

• 1^st result is a twitter user mobile’s page: American Idol (idolatry) containing the keywords on URL and title
• 3 top results are from mobile user pages, not Statuses
• 1^st statuses result is from Mashable user on 4^th position, 1 day and 8hrs ago from the posting

2. Google Custom Search Engine

Steve Rubel created on May 10, 2006 a Google Custom Search Engine scanning Twitter, based on the Google’s Crawler, PageRank and results service.

Search URL

The results are worst to direct search on Google:

• 7 top results are from user names or tittles
• 1^st status result is the same as before, Mashable on 8^th position

3. TweetMeme and other Twitter search engines

TweetMeme is a search engine for Twitter. This kind of search engine was the first on getting real statuses and order not provided by the PageRank or similar ranking algorism.

Search URL

The results are quite good in content information but 1^st result is from 59 minutes ago… that shouldn’t be considered real time…

4. Google + Greasemonkey

Installing the Greasemonkey script amd the Twitter Search Script for Greasemonkey

The best real time results before Twitter Search.

• First result is about 5 minutes ago

Nowadays, with Twitter Search the results are really Real Time.

Kinds of information

Now is time to think if the Real Time Search makes sense, specially for searching Social Network status. So we are going to separate the Social Information from the Real Time Requied Information

1. Real Time Required Information

Let’s think about what relevant information would be required on Real Time:

• Disaster coverage
• Currency exchange / Trade market
• Transport information: Traffic, flights, trains…
• Live Events Coverage

So anybody can ask… where are the News?

News are not real time… when a new occurs, someone has to arrive there, write or record the notice, send it to the Media and publish…so the delay make them not Real Time. In spite of this, news should be available for searching within 10 seconds after the publication.

One common point of all this kind of information is the continuous status changing and the need to discover the Real Time status anytime we should need this.

All this information is nowadays unavailable for searching on search engines, meaning in Real Time, and we need to go to the original sources to get the most closest to Real Time information.

2. Real Time Social Information

With the Twitter explosion, people are requiring the search for the social information, especially for the information covering some of the real time required information described before.

But as usual there is a lot of noise on the information: irrelevant information and spam are the common noise generators, as we can note on Twitter Search. And crawl all this information really doesn’t make sense!!!

So the Social Valuable Information have to be filtered in order to get the real value of its, and this is the problem in my opinion Google can have.

A good way of filtering the information is crawling the social trend, this is hot information, and use strong recognition algorisms to find spam on this (same as made on blogs comments)

In spite of filtering algorism some info would be not considered as spam when it is, and some moderation is required, but aren’t we talking about Social?

Why not let the Social Users who can mark Real Time Search Results as spam and delete them!

May 21st, 2009 by Victor

Some time ago the Social Search Engines have been growing up from small startups companies. Based on the concept of collaboration, this search engines provide users with different ways of changing their search results:

Voting up or down the results

Users may can to vote up or down the results of their search, so this votes can be used for future searches for other users.

Commenting the results

Post a comment to a given result depending on the user opinion or knowledge on this. The comments can be used as an extended snippet for the result.

The Social Search Engines are Rich Internet Application developed under the Web 2.0 philosophy and using Ajax as platform for developement.

Scour was the first Social Search Engine I used. It provides the posibility to search through the 3 most popular Search Engines: Google, Yahoo, MSN. And configure the weight of every search engine on your final results. Scour also have a promotion system based on points convertible into real money through your and your friends searches.

Now Google Experimental Search enable Google users to comment, vote, change the position rank or delete a record on our search.

Will the Social Search Engines change the way we search the web?

Sure it will do, we’ve been trained to use the social generated content, we started with mailing lists to go through forums and groups, we have seen growing the Wikipedia and keep the social phenomena growing to the social networks where all content is user generated.

The social search engines will success when the user get concerned about the relevance of the vote or the comment he is making.

The pagerank will not depend on some variables that can be “hacked”, it will be determined by users to users.

December 10th, 2008 by Victor

Paraphrasing Heraclitus here to introduce Change Management concept, as a set of tools and techniques to manage people-side of change process.

In times of change, as current ones worldwide, the natural human reaction is to resist: changes introduce the unknown. They take us out of a place we know and are comfortable with and force us into something new. We don’t know what to expect, so we anticipate all kind of unpleasant events to occur.

The approach needed to face up an organizational change should take into account three main actors:

• Self: individuals have to see changes as new opportunities and challenges to face, thinking outside of the box, defining personal goals and professional growth to achieve.
• Team: nowadays teams share the responsibility and the resources for getting things done and should learn and change together.
• Organization: change processes are initiated by either individuals or small teams, but the focus of change is one which goes beyond that small unit. It is directed towards the entire organization, or towards other organizations. It is important to understand such social systems, and how to plan and implement change.

Once we have seen what are the threats to neutralize and the main actors to align towards a successful change process, we should face change management as an important project to perform: to truly deploy change management in an organization, someone must begin thinking about the deployment as a project that must be managed, involving both a “technical” side and a “people” side:

1. Adopting a common change management methodology for the organization
2. Forming a Change Management Office
3. Requiring change management plans on all new initiatives
4. Selecting key projects and training the project team
5. Institutionalize change management into the training curriculum

November 10th, 2008 by Ana

On The Internet there are lot of services based on the user preferences, you get suggested by your preferences at Youtube.com, got personalized radio stations on Pandora or Last.fm, get your favorite style music on Itunes and so on…

So preference management are a must on the Internet services, and probably are spreading to other sectors far away from the Internet. We can remember how Tom Cruise on Minority Report is asked for his last buy and suggested with new products at entering a shop.

This suggestion is pretty easy if we would have the customer preferences somewhere.

Then there are tones of possible applications for Portable Personality:

• Music suggestion
• Ambient configuration on a domotic house: light, temperature…
• Customization on the car : Driver position, music…
• Suggestion on shopping.

This are a good set of possibilities for standard day by day life, but what about the entrerprise usage. Its a key for the Portable Personality technology success.

The increasing demand of mobility on service based jobs, have make to grow a big set of portable devices: Mobiles, PDA’s, laptops and netbooks…

Every consultant, carry on his own work tool (laptop). When most of times he is going to work in another place where there are computers available to external workers, but the configuration time needed to set up the production environment on the new computer takes so long, so everyone carry their laptop.

With Portable Personality technology it should be easy to handle, workers can get at any time:

• Live configuration parameters for: E-mail, Internet Connection, remote printers…
• Live customization of the desktop, OS.
• Live setup of required software and its configuration
• Bookmarks, addons… and all the navigator configuration.

Without bringing the laptop over, worker would have their own environment replicated on other machine on the fly.

Then we can state that Portable Personality is: a preference packaging technology which enables us to dispose of all of our preferences set everywhere, anywhere…

So what is not?

• Dispersed services with his own Preference Management system.
• A technology for increasing the revenue on Ad serving
• Existent USB technology for configure production environments on computers.

The Portable Personality Technology Status

Taking a look the Portable Personality site of the Tampere University of Technology we can see what is the project structure:

Portable Personality presentation

Considering the mobile as carrier device of the personal preferences package it can connects to other devices (PC’s and Music store server) to feed them with user preferences.

I let here a technology challenge for the Tampere people… Why shall I carry on my mobile to get the service?

November 4th, 2008 by Victor

Times of every terminal connected to all-omniscient mainframes seems to be far away. Nowadays, enterprise users work with several devices (smartphones, laptops…) and their aim is clear: get to the applications and data they need, when they need them.

Current solution toward anywhere, anytime access to business applications is the so-called cloud computing (see previous post about what is and what is not). In fact, is not a really new concept, as integrates concepts as software-as-a-service, virtualization, outsorced Web hosting…

Accepting that this phenomenon will transform IT organizations (today’s mobile, interconnected environments demand new approaches to delivering business applications), as we know now, how can business technology decision makers face it up? Here we find a field guide:

• Select your cloud environment. Decide what type of cloud you need:
• Infrastructure clouds: raw CPU time and storage resources to run your own applications.
• Application Platform clouds:for developers to build and scale their applications.
• Software-as-a-service clouds: provides specific business apps like CRM,ERP…
• Choose a cloud provider. Perform a benchmark to assure good levels of failover, redundancy, resilience, security policies, and test DR capabilities.
• SLA Control as IT’s role. Focus on vendor management: establish service level and service quality to be achieved, and an economic compensation if SLA is not accomplished.  Periodical reporting is needed to review performance issues or outages, remedial actions and lessons learned.

November 3rd, 2008 by Ana

Microsoft just launched their Cloud Computing service architecture: Azure
With similar idea of the existing Google App Engine, Microsoft introduced itself on the new trend,  the Cloud Computing, over The Internet.
This is the Azure architecture schema :

Azure is provided with a full integration on Microsoft Visual Studio, to enable developers to publish applications easily on the cloud. Initially with the .Net services but will be extended to the Eclipse editor and other languages as Phyton, Ruby and PHP.

Important to note the good work with the API side, provinding three ways of webservice communication: SOAP, REST and XML.

Azure will provide services through this Microsoft Products, making them fully Cloud Computing:

• Windows Live
• Office Live
• Microsoft Exchange
• Microsoft SQL
• .NET Platform
• Microsoft Sharepoint
• Microsoft Dynamics

On this test stage the service will be free but with certain limitations on usage (cpu usage, tranference…). The final price of the service will be announced soon.

Microsoft is again on the top op the wave, with some delay respect their competitors in cloud computing engine services: Amazon, Google. Time will say if Microsoft have reach the service level of competitors.

October 28th, 2008 by Victor

Current world-wide financial crisis means, as we can see in any newspaper around the globe, cost-cutting initiatives, which turns into less production and increasing unemployment. What about IT markets?  Are IT services a worthwhile investments in crisis times?

The answer, definitely, seems to be yes: enterprises still expecting IT to deliver distinctive solutions that serve customers in unique and more effective ways, balancing cost,growth, opportunities and risk. And the question that arise inmediately from this statement is: how can IT show its business value?

• Alignment with business needs. IT departments (from CIO’s to junior programmers) should be aware of the importance of link IT services to business outcomes , both implementing process performance improvements and cost-savings technologies.

• Challenge the status quo. Those crisis times provide also a favorable scenario to go one step forward: IT concerned not only about reliable systems performance, but also about innovation, efficiency, tech development, etc.

IT will be one of the dinamization elements during current crisis, its role will evolve from technology provider to solution partner, to provide organizations within the necessary competitive advantage to weather this heavy storm.

October 27th, 2008 by Ana

Today ambient review

Taking a look around The Internet (the sky) we can see that there’s a big cloud approaching over us, is the emergent Cloud Computing technology.

Today we can see the clouds something like this picture:

It’s partially cloudy, there are some important clouds that appears to be growing up so fast, but the clouds still let us see the Sun over them.

The situation is stable but we can preview that the current clouds keep growing and are appearing some small clouds.

Theres a moderate strong wind carried by the trend and lot of hopes on the cloud computer technology.

The ambient humidity has increased, there is some vaporware, specially on the applications brought by the wind, seems that everyone want to be “on the clouds”.

Tomorrow forecast

The wind will increase the strength and will bring many Cloudware that will cover the sky.

There would be 2 types of clouds:

1. Rainy clouds : Cloudware that had been so inflated with user expectations (with a big amount of vaporware most of times) and bring the rain with them. All the technology that was desired to be at clouds is falling down again to the local system.
2. Persistent Clouds: Cloudware that have been forged with a long process, good analysis and feats all users requirements without breaking any of the keys stated on the WiaWin article.

Long term forecast

There will be many factors that can modify the sky state (The entire Internet), some of them :

1. The wind: all the new trends about technology or society
2. The success (or not) of the persistent clouds applications.
3. The success (or not) of the laws to protect the privacy and the stored information on the clouds.
4. Social factors and the growing of the social networks can make the clouds persistent and useful.
5. The enterprise usage, by assuring the privacy, the enterprise can rebuilt it’s own architecture and base part of them on the Cloud Computing technology, with the consequent saving of investment in infrastructures, hardware…

October 26th, 2008 by Victor