Matthew Botos

I finally decided to give Twitter a try; so you can follow me if you like. As a new medium, I imagine it’ll take a little time to find a good use for it; initially I’m planning to follow some of the software folks I’ve met recently and share a little more about what I’m doing on a day to day basis, both personally and professionally.

I was searching Google for twitter to get some ideas and was suprised by the second link: Barack Obama’s (now-defunct?) Twitter feed. Aside from the fact that it’s impressive to see a politician embracing such new technology, taking the number 2 spot for such a popular term is no small feat. It leads me to one of two hypotheses: either his team really promoted the feed as a way to keep up to date, or is was organically popular enough to rise to that rank. I have a feeling it’s both, which is actually even more of a feat.

The second cloud computing track was on massive data processing in clusters and 15clouds, including a presentation by Facebook on their use of Hadoop and custom development of Hive to facilitate their own operations.

Data mining the 180 TB of Facebook data, which grows at 2 TB a day is no small task, so the team uses a cluster of 350 8-core machines to crunch data and figure out which popular features deserve further investment, demographics, and whatever else they can fish out of the sea of personal information users provide.

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It’s pretty cool to see one of my former projects, the Unity enterprise social suite, getting plenty of coverage at the Enterprise 2.0 conference. (Naturally, the news came to me through the social grapevine of my del.icio.us network.) I was involved in the first year or so of the project, and it looks like it’s really evolved - this photo by David Terrar gives you a hint.

As noted in the articles, it was a big undertaking with lots of technical challenges. Sharepoint seems a little overemphasized; we also built a handful of custom web applications, feed infrastructure (ATOM as well as RSS), Google Search Appliance integration (one of my contributions), NewsGator Enterprise, and security.

Of course, the bigger challenge in any enterprise is cultural adoption by employees and management. To that end, deploying enterprise 2.0 takes passionate advocates from project management to grassroots early adopters. The Unity team has carved a solid beachhead there, so it’ll be exciting to see how it continues to grow!