ambient

The guys over at aideRSS (one of the more interesting new RSS services to come out in the last year, IMO) are kindly making AMIs (Amazon Machine Images) available in order to allow people to quickly test Jake Luciani’s Thrudb project.

Thrudb is an open source competitor to Amazon’s recently announced SimpleDB (see earlier post) built on Facebook’s Thrift platform and it comes at a very welcome time as we are building out the backend services to Boompaste to include much more intelligent aggregation services.

The computing world is getting very interesting, yet again, indeed.

I’ve been playing with Twitter quite a bit this week and have been impressed. Never mind that it’s currently where all of the cool kids are hanging out, it’s interesting to me for the following reasons:

• It is a parser. An @ tag identifies people and now, thanks to hashtags, # identifies nouns. This allows systems to aggregate and potentially create a true del.icio.us-killer (by flipping it inside out) and a super-simple semantic notation system that could scale very easily.
• It works really well as group chat. There are features here that could work in a lot of different settings. Look for an open source Twitter clone in the near future, something that does for micro-blogging (is there a better term) what WordPress did for blogs.
• The potential integration with Boompaste is huge. Very excited about this.
• It’s a social network in the truest sense of the phrase. Like, I’ve actually met and interacted with real people.
• The API - I now no longer know immediately if I’m interacting with a human or a bot and that’s cool.

TechMeme, of course, is abuzz with discussion about Amazon’s new SimpleDB. Don’t know if this is a huge announcement in its own right, but it definitely demonstrates Amazon’s commitment to taking distribution, its true business objective, to the next logical, though not obvious, step.

On a side note: Business Week has a good write-up of Google 101, the company’s efforts to teach web-scale computing to the next generation of computer scientists. Makes me wish I was still a college student, in Seattle. (Go public schools!)

And finally, a gestalt moment… I’m reading a book by German Theologian Ulrich Duchrow (whom I had the pleasure to meet in San Diego) called Property for People, Not for Profit: Alternatives to the Global Tyranny of Capital. There is this line on page 36 in regards to Hobbe’s analysis of power and society:

“Then Hobbes distinguishes natural power, such as special physical and mental abilities, and instrumental power, i.e. tools such as riches, reputation and good friends, with which one can win more power. From this he concludes ‘that the capacity of every man to get what he wants is opposed by the capacity of every other man’. In the struggle that results, power means finally the ability to command the services of other people.

Thus a power market develops, in which the power of a human being is regarded as a commodity: ‘The value, or worth of a man, is as of all other things, his price: that is to say, so much as would be given for the use of his power: and therefore is not absolute; but a thing dependant on the need and judgement of another’…”

So, I read that and realized: hey, I know that. It’s called cloud computing. And even a little MapReduce is thrown in there. We just did it with humans first. We call it society.