Twitter; eating my words and loving in

A year ago I speculated on the "decline of Twitter". At the time I speculated that the hype had died down and Twitter might fade. Boy was I wrong.

I think what I got really wrong was the flexible nature of Twitter. A year later I find myself on "The Future and Your" podcast saying why "Twitter was better than Facebook"

Twitter has won me over because of its flexibility. Its core simplicity makes it the global market place for ideas. By using search terms (begun with # many times) or locating on people or places, including some great Web 3.0 mash-ups with Twitter, and the emergence of Foursquare has really turned me in to something of a Twitter evangelist and advocate.

Twitter shows that less can be more and simplicity can be strength. The content is out there, in micro pieces that can be assembled based on person, semantic content, or location. Who, what, where is there. You can look at Tweets over time so you have the ability to mine Twitter on Who, What, Where, and When. I can look at what some key people in a group are doing in North London about Sustainability.

What makes Twitter an killer app is the TinyURL and authentication link in. So I can join other Web 3.0 mash-ups with my Twitter account, and I can follow Twitter searches to new kinds of information.

Facebook is where you find, Twitter is where you meet. Twitter could easily be mashed up in to almost anything you want in a Social Network: a dating site, a political site, a blog, even a organisation tool.

Slavoj Žižek - First as Tragedy, Then as Farce

Slavoj Žižek - First as Tragedy, Then as Farce from The RSA on Vimeo.

One of the premises he presents is that Gates got rich by charging Rents to access to the global Internet via Windows, which is an interesting view of Microsoft's economic position.

External Content Type

<br/><a href="http://www.microsoft.com/resources/msdn/en-us/office/media/video/office.html?uuid=0b7779fb-2259-4060-a0b1-d635eb56ac53&amp;fg=sharenoembed" target="_new" title="Create External Content Types using SharePoint Designer 2010">Video: Create External Content Types using SharePoint Designer 2010</a>

In SharePoint 2010 Business Connectivity Services (BCS) will replace BDC. I never saw BDC deployed in the wild but can only imagine how useless it would be. Now SharePoint provides BCS via a new kind of content type called External Content Types which will make bring LOB data in to SharePoint a lot easier.

Installing SharePoint Server 2010

Anyone with experience installing SharePoint 2007 will be happy to hear that the process is not that different in 2010. Anyone who wanted an easier deployment and installation tool in 2010 over 2007 will be unhappy with this so overall I am more unhappy than happy.

Need to install passphrases to add servers to farm is a new feature but not that major.

RNIB's new Accessible Content Management System (10 min)

Overview of Active Directory

As I have posed before getting Active Directory correct is the key first step in getting a SharePoint project running. So you should take the time, no matter your role, to understand AD as you start to plan out an Enterprise solution.



This video goes in to great detail about setting up Active Directory on Windows Server 2003 R2.

Overview of Exchange 2007 online with BPOS

This information will be made outdated by BPOS with Exchange 2010, but it is a good starting point.

BBC News - Microsoft pulls plug on Kin phone

BBC News - Microsoft pulls plug on Kin phone: "Microsoft has cancelled the European launch of its Kin mobile phone, less than three months after unveiling it with great fanfare.

The phone has been available on Verizon in the US since May, but it is rumoured that only 500 Kins have been sold."

Ouch, 500 phones, it seems that Google and Microsoft both don't do mobile devices.

Thought Googles OS Android is popular with new providers and I imagine we will see a Apple/Android/Blackberry universe for a while.

It has been my anticipation for a while that Microsoft might try to buy RIM. They have already ceded the default mobile device for the Microsoft stack to blackberry, so it may or may not be necessary for them to sell.

Kin looked a lot better than Windows Mobile 6.5 but as I watched the demo I kept anticipating the drags and other functions not to work, or wondered about how hard that would really be to do, or waiting for some warning message to pop-up. 3 years of PDA with Windows Mobile 6.5 has broken the element of trust for me and small Microsoft devices.

That said as I have learned with the iPhone and iPad that it only takes one device to rebuild trust.

Simple clear explanation for Cloud Computing

Good overview of SharePoint value to show anyone

Next time you are in a room full of people who just don't understand what SharePoint is suppose to do, show them this video. Then they ask how and what are the risks, those are the hard questions.

Complete, WFE, or Stand-alone

Installing a SharePoint server you will be asked if you want a Complete, WFE, or Standalone. This window does not give you much advice in to which you should use.

image.axd (JPEG Image, 350x295 pixels)


Well Stand-alone is only when you are creating a single box with its own SQL Express, that one is pretty clear.

As for WFE and Complete, it would seem that the best practice would be to install your WFE servers as WFE and your Application server as Complete.

But I would not suggest doing that. The thing this window does not tell you is that a Complete installation can easily be reduced to just a WFE, but you may decide that your Web Front Ends should also query the index. There is also a chance that during the development cycle you may need to run everything on one server that will be a WFE ultimately, but needs to stand in for a while as a complete server.

I always install all servers as Complete, then go and turn services on and off in the administration tool later.

FOOTNOTE: This is no longer a confusion with SharePoint 2010 which has more intelligently limited the options to Standalone and Server Farm.

Creating a MashUp for SharePoint 2007 with JackBe Mashups

SharePoint 2010 introduction of AJAX may make a great deal of this outdated, but if you need a Mashup platform now for SharePoint 2007 here is one to try.