Yahoo! is releasing its own distribution of Hadoop:

Hadoop is a distributed file system and parallel execution environment that enables its users to process massive amounts of data.
In response to frequent requests from the Hadoop community, Yahoo! is opening up its investment in Hadoop quality engineering to benefit the larger ecosystem and to increase the pace of innovation around open and collaborative research and development.
The Yahoo! Distribution of Hadoop has been tested and deployed at Yahoo! on the largest Hadoop clusters in the world.

Hadoop is free Java software framework born out of an open-source implementation of Google’s published computing infrastructure and fostered within the Apache Software Foundation.
Yahoo! has been the primary developer and contributor to Apache’s Hadoop.
In 2006, Hadoop founder Doug Cutting joined Yahoo, which provided a dedicated team and resources, to lead the project of developing the open-source software and turn Hadoop into a system that ran at web scale. Today, Yahoo! is running the largest Hadoop cluster in the world, which includes more than 25,000 servers and provides the framework for many Yahoo properties including Yahoo Search, Yahoo Mail, and several content and ad services.

Yahoo says its opening up the source code to Hadoop to “benefit the larger ecosystem increase the pace of innovation around open and collaborative research and development.”.
As Nigel Daley, Quality and Release Engineering Manager at Yahoo! Grid Technologies, summarizes:

Hadoop is helping us solve key science and research problems in hours or days instead of months. It provides us a platform to solve extreme problems requiring massive amounts of data processing. It underpins major revenue-generating systems. Opening our distribution enables a faster pace of innovation for the entire Hadoop ecosystem and broadens the use — and ultimately the quality — of this key platform across the industry.

Tags: Apache Software Foundation, Google, Google Inc., Grid Technologies, Hadoop, Java, web scale, Yahoo

How do you create an internet company\product that can get the attention of more than 100 million unique viewers a month?

That’s the tough question that Yossi Vardi’s was trying to find an answer to on his panel at this year’s DLD conference – 100,000 Million Uniques (video) – together with Glam’s co-founder Samir Arora, YouTube’s co-founder and CEO Chad Hurley, CEO of the Mozilla Foundation Mitchell Baker and Toby Coppel who is a VP at Yahoo!.

The answer, according to Yossi and the panel speakers, who all run companies with over 100 million users, is that having a good product is not enough; there has to be an emotional connection between the product and its users.

After discussing the process of starting, marketing and improving their products the panel’s conclusion was that users engagement is the result of an emotional involvement between the users and the product and others users and a feeling of participating in creation of something new.

A good example for that is Yahoo’s Q&A service that, according to Coppel, has more than 140 million users a month. Although most users are passive and only read the questions and answers, 5%-7% of the users write answers, and they do so without getting paid – they share their knowledge with the world.
According to Coppel, the emotional connection to a product is achieved by providing a platform to self organize allowing people to create and share knowledge and experiences and find other like minded people.

Baker explained that Firefox’s success is based on the sense of mission – to build a piece of the internet that is a public assert – which turns out to be an emotional goal for a lot of people.

And what about YouTube? Chad Hurley explains its success on the focus on creating a simple-as-possible user experience and allowing people to distribute content by embedding videos  – “We try to associate our easy to use service with our brand – YouTube – and to allow people to take that experience, take that video code to embed and place on their own websites and blogs so that people can experience it there as well and drive traffic back to our service. Beyond creating a service that adds value people need to connect emotionally to the brand that you’re creating”.

To demonstrate the importance of emotion, Yossi Vardi showed two YouTube videos of the aria Nessum Dorma. The first video, sang by Pavarotti only received about 9 million views while the second video, sang by Paul Potts, a hobbyist opera singer, received well over 40 million views.

Vardi later asked Hurley why the second video was so popular. “Well he’s good” was Hurley’s answer.

Tags: Chad Hurely, DLD, DLD09, Glam, Mitchel Baker, Mozilla Foundation, Samir Arora, Toby Coppel, Yahoo, Yossi Vardi, YouTube

(Originally posted at Cloud Avenue)

Windows Live™Microsoft’s Windows Live ID team just announced their support for OpenID calling it a “de facto standard Web protocol for user authentication.”

Beginning today, Windows Live™ ID is publicly committing to support the OpenID digital identity framework with the announcement of the public availability of a Community Technology Preview (CTP) of the Windows Live ID OpenID Provider.

You will soon be able to use your Windows Live ID account to sign in to any OpenID Web site!

What does it means for users?

OpenID allows users to maintain their identity information (Name, E-Mail, address, etc.) on a single provider and use that information to register and login to any website that supports OpenID. This relieves the user from having to fill out registration form and maintaining multiple different user names and passwords and profiles on different sites add provides a simplified online experience while increasing security.

Over 400 million LiveID users will soon be able to use their LiveID to do just that – login and provide identity information to any site supporting OpenID without the hassles of filling out registration forms and saving user\password information and with the user experience common to all OpenId sites (or, maybe even common to their familiar LiveID user interface?)

The wide adoption of OpenID led by Yahoo and Microsoft provides the required push for site owners to support OpenID providing the same simple and familiar login interface everywhere…

What does it mean for web developers?

With a simple integration effort that shouldn’t take more than a couple of minutes, site owners can relieve themselves from taking care of authentication and registration process while providing their users with a simple familiar interface for signing up and using their services.
OpenID provides an easy and secure mechanism for authenticating and registering users, and with additional online services (like JanRain’s RPX) site owners can handover the entire care of handling their user information to the cloud – cheaper, faster, more secure.

For now, the LiveID team is testing their system’s OpenID Provider which is at a CTP (Community Technology Preview) stage. Widespread support is planned for “sometime in 2009″.

[Update: Screencast Overview]

Tags: Cloud Avenue, Cloud Computing, Federated Identity, LiveID, Microsoft, OpenID, Security, Windows Live, Yahoo

It seems like Microsoft and Yahoo! are talking again to such an extent that is was either required, or in Microsoft’s interest to release the following statement:

Microsoft Issues Statement Regarding Yahoo!

Microsoft announced that it is continuing to explore and pursue its alternatives to improve and expand its online services and advertising business.

REDMOND, Wash. — May 18, 2008 — Microsoft Corp. today issued the following statement:

“In light of developments since the withdrawal of the Microsoft proposal to acquire Yahoo! Inc., Microsoft announced that it is continuing to explore and pursue its alternatives to improve and expand its online services and advertising business.  Microsoft is considering and has raised with Yahoo! an alternative that would involve a transaction with Yahoo! but not an acquisition of all of Yahoo!  Microsoft is not proposing to make a new bid to acquire all of Yahoo! at this time, but reserves the right to reconsider that alternative depending on future developments and discussions that may take place with Yahoo! or discussions with shareholders of Yahoo! or Microsoft or with other third parties.

“There of course can be no assurance that any transaction will result from these discussions.”

This comes just a day after Carl Icahn proposed to replace the Yahoo! board in an attempt to revive the Microsoft acquisition deal…

The current guess is that Microsoft will try to buy just Yahoo’s search business in an effort to prevent a Yahoo-Google deal that’ll make Google take over Yahoo’s paid search business.

I guess there will be more to come on that…

Tags: Microsoft, MSFT, Yahoo, YHOO

Some first thoughts about the implications of Microsoft taking over Yahoo:

• Microsoft’s Vista Gadgets suck. Yahoo has it going pretty well with its widgets that work on many platforms other than Vista.
  Maybe Microsoft will drop Gadgets and support widgets natively?
• Yahoo Messenger is already integrated with Microsoft’s messenger. And its .NET and has a cool new WPF interface. Maybe it can replace buggy Microsoft Messenger.
• Synergy in Live Services:
  • Microsoft Popfly and Yahoo Pipes (Popfly has things to learn from Pipes)
  • Yahoo’s small business services + Office Live (and CRM live, etc.)
  • Online gaming. Microsoft has its gaming studios and Xbox Live! and Yahoo is big on fantasy sports. There’s room for synergy there…
    Yahoo’s online games could be a nice addition to Microsoft’s casual gaming platform.
  • Yahoo Finance to join Microsoft Live Services and take on Google Finance?

Lots of synergy opportunities out there…  I can see why Microsoft+Yahoo makes perfect sense…

Tags: Microsoft, MSFT, Yahoo, YHOO

There has been a lot of rumors and Dennis Howlett just broke the news on ZDnet. It’s also on FT now…
It’s interesting that I got the news via Twitter before the online media broke the story…

Jeff Pulver suggests (on Twitter) that Google (GOOG) is a potential competitor to Microsoft’s offer.
Now, while everything is possible, I don’t think this is going to be the case since the the two companies simply have an opposite strategy – which will result in a big cultural clash.Google has always been about automated content – automated search, news aggregation and even shopping. Yahoo on the other hand has always been about human generated content – people using its services to generate content (Yahoo started as a service for people to classify web-sites).

I think Yahoo fits exactly into Microsoft’s Live Services strategy and such a takeover (if it takes place) will grately enhance the live services platform – which makes MSFT and YHOO and great fit together.

Anyway, It looks like its going to be an interesting trade day on NASDAQ today…

Tags: GOOG, Google, Microsoft, MSFT, Yahoo, YHOO

The new release of Yahoo’s widget engine is finally here.

One of the cool new features is the side dock panel (wtach out Vista SideBar!):

With lots of slickier UI, cool features, tons of community made widgets and an engine that runs on multiple platforms, Yahoo! Widgets are on track as leading platform from widget development leaving Microsoft’s Gadgets platform way behind…

(And did I mention that the weather widget that comes as part of the package actually works?)

Tags: Widgets, Yahoo, YHOO

We’ve seen many new technologies at Microsoft’s TechEd Eilat 2006.
Microsoft rules our desktops. It keeps pushing on new technologies that will make development and deployment for desktop clients easier and provide richer user experience and shorter time-to-market.

As Microsoft keeps concentrating on desktop clients its competitors, such as Google and Yahoo!, turn to internet-based services as a way to provide all sorts of services to users. By providing basic services that are hosted, maintained, and are usually free or require minimal charge, those companies are leading the trend of web based services over desktop software and that means big competition to Microsoft’s desktop platform.

Although AJAX and web based services have a very big hype now days, Microsoft was actually doing this long ago with Outlook Web Access and Sharepoint but unfortunately failed to realize the full potential of these.

There is a very interesting article at Forbes describing the changes Microsoft is undergoing in order to compete in this new market of web based services: http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2006/05/01/8375454/index.htm

Note that this is not the first time Microsoft fails to capture the potential of the web.
And some of us still remember a company called Netscape that ruled the web before the giant fro Redmond woke…

The future of this battle should be interesting…

Technorati : Microsoft, Web 2.0, google, yahoo
Del.icio.us : Microsoft, Web 2.0, google, yahoo
Ice Rocket : Microsoft, Web 2.0, google, yahoo

Tags: Google, Microsoft, Web 2.0, Yahoo