Scobleizer

I hate lock in. It’s one reason why I have used WordPress for so many years. With it I can move my blog between hosts and, even, can export my blog to a database and import it into another tool. Dave Winer (the developer behind many of the technologies that run underneath blogs) and Matt Mullenweg (the guy who brought us WordPress) have written about, and spoken about, how lock-in is anti customer and anti innovation quite a bit over the last 10 years.

Over the years I’ve asked developers, CEOs, and CTOs why they went with open source solutions rather than buying something from Microsoft or Oracle and they invariably answer something about how they don’t want to be locked in. WIth open source, they tell me, they can see the code, poke around in it, and, even, take it and build their own systems with that code.

That’s exactly what Rackspace is doing today in announcing OpenStack. But that’s not the only big announcement we’re making. Already 25 companies, including NASA, have already started using the OpenStack code to build some impressive things, but more on that later.

This is the biggest strategic announcement we’ve made since going public.

Why?

1. It means the end of lock-in for cloud customers. Don’t like Rackspace for some reason? Take your cloud-based apps somewhere else. We already have competitors who are using OpenStack to run their own cloud infrastructure. Compare this ability to ANY other cloud infrastructure available on the market today and you’ll see we’re the only one who has absolutely no lock-in. How will Rackspace compete? Plain old customer service and fanatical support.

2. It means that new capabilities are coming your way, including those developed at NASA, who have also open sourced cloud infrastructure as part of OpenStack developed to run NASA’s Nebula Cloud Platform.

3. This is a true open source announcement, not one of those “we’re open” announcements where you find out by looking at licenses that something key has been kept proprietary. Compare our licenses to ANYONE and you’ll see we’re the ones who went fully open source.

4. OpenStack will include several cloud infrastructure components, the first being OpenStack Object Storage, a fully distributed object store based on Rackspace Cloud Files, available today at OpenStack.org. The second component, OpenStack Compute, will be a massively scalable compute-provisioning engine based on the NASA Nebula compute project and Rackspace Cloud Servers technology, available later in 2010. Any organization will be able to turn physical hardware into massively scalable and extensible cloud environments using the same code currently in production serving tens of thousands of customers and large government projects.

5. An OpenStack Design Summit hosted by Rackspace was held in Austin, Texas on July 13-16, where more than 100 technical advisors, developers and founding partners had the opportunity to validate the code and ratify the project roadmap.

So, what does this mean? Why would Rackspace turn over code it spent 10s of millions of dollars acquiring and developing?

1. It puts the focus on Rackspace’s famous “fanatic” customer service like never before. Because we have no lock-in anymore there is only one way we’ll keep customers: provide the best support.

2. It extends Rackspace’s development efforts far beyond what we could achieve otherwise. And we have been building some awesome software development teams. You might have missed but we hired most of the MySQL Drizzle development team, among many other great developers. But this wasn’t enough when faced with new cloud competition from Google, Microsoft, and Amazon. One company headquartered in San Antonio, Texas, just was never going to be able to take on companies with market capitalization in the 10s of billions of dollars. But as you’ve already seen from the new capabilities that NASA has brought to OpenStack this brings a massive new group of developers into this and the entire world will benefit from that.

3. It has already helped hiring and employee morale. I didn’t grok just what it would do here. I guess that’s part of my Microsoft background. You know, the one that says “why would a company give away its crown jewels?” But it has turned working at Rackspace for many of my coworkers from just a job to one that’s a mission. After all, our code now is going to be used by NASA. Think about what that does. Also, it’s a lot easier to recruit great developers when they get to work on an open source initiative. I almost didn’t talk about this on the blog because this effect has been so pronounced. I believe it’ll force other cloud companies to go open source as well because they’ll lose key hires to Rackspace and they already have.

4. It further aligns Rackspace with the industry it serves. Go around the industry as I have with my video camera and you keep hearing “we’re betting on open source and companies that don’t lock us in.” Every startup, nearly, uses the LAMP stack and those who don’t go that way tell each other at private industry events like the one I’m at right now in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, that jumping off the open source stack brings negative results for companies. I’ve been talking with CTOs, VCs, and CEOs and they are excited to have more choice in cloud-hosting. More on that later as this announcement rolls out.

Here is the official press release. You can learn more at OpenStack.org and also on the official Twitter account for OpenStack.

Rackspace Open Sources Cloud Platform; Announces Plans to Collaborate with NASA and Other Industry Leaders on OpenStack Project

More than 25 companies, including Citrix and Dell, support open source cloud platform to accelerate industry standards

San Antonio, TX – July 19, 2010 – HYPERLINK “http://www.rackspace.com” Rackspace® Hosting (NYSE:RAX) today announced the launch of OpenStack™, an open-source cloud platform designed to foster the emergence of technology standards and cloud interoperability. Rackspace, the leading specialist in the hosting and cloud computing industry, is donating the code that powers its Cloud Files and Cloud Servers public-cloud offerings to the OpenStack project. The project will also incorporate technology that powers the HYPERLINK “http://nebula.nasa.gov/” NASA Nebula Cloud Platform. Rackspace and NASA plan to actively collaborate on joint technology development and leverage the efforts of open-source software developers worldwide.

“Modern scientific computation requires ever increasing storage and processing power delivered on-demand,” said Chris Kemp, NASA’s Chief Technology Officer for IT. “To serve this demand, we built Nebula, an infrastructure cloud platform designed to meet the needs of our scientific and engineering community. NASA and Rackspace are uniquely positioned to drive this initiative based on our experience in building large scale cloud platforms and our desire to embrace open source.”

OpenStack will feature several cloud infrastructure components including a fully distributed object store based on HYPERLINK “http://www.rackspacecloud.com/cloud_hosting_products/files” Rackspace Cloud Files, available today at OpenStack.org. The next component planned for release is a scalable compute-provisioning engine based on the NASA Nebula cloud technology and HYPERLINK “http://www.rackspacecloud.com/cloud_hosting_products/servers” Rackspace Cloud Servers technology. It is expected to be available later this year. Using these components, organizations would be able to turn physical hardware into scalable and extensible cloud environments using the same code currently in production serving tens of thousands of customers and large government projects.

“We are founding the OpenStack initiative to help drive industry standards, prevent vendor lock-in and generally increase the velocity of innovation in cloud technologies,” said Lew Moorman, President, Cloud and CSO at Rackspace. “We are proud to have NASA’s support in this effort. Its Nebula Cloud Platform is a tremendous boost to the OpenStack community. We expect ongoing collaboration with NASA and the rest of the community to drive more-rapid cloud adoption and innovation, in the private and public spheres.”

Rackspace and NASA have committed to use OpenStack to power their cloud platforms, and Rackspace will dedicate open-source developers and resources to support adoption of OpenStack among enterprises and service providers. An OpenStack Design Summit hosted by Rackspace was held July 13-16 in Austin, where more than 100 technical advisors, developers and founding members joined to validate the code and ratify the project roadmap. More than 25 companies were represented at the Design Summit including AMD, Autonomic Resources, Citrix, Cloud.com, Cloudkick, Cloudscaling, CloudSwitch, Dell, enStratus, FathomDB, Intel, iomart Group, Limelight, Nicira, NTT DATA, Opscode, PEER 1, Puppet Labs, RightScale, Riptano, Scalr, SoftLayer, Sonian, Spiceworks, Zenoss and Zuora.

“OpenStack provides a solid foundation for promoting the emergence of cloud standards and interoperability,” said Peter Levine, SVP and GM, Datacenter and Cloud Division, HYPERLINK “http://www.citrix.com” Citrix Systems.  “As a longtime technology partner with Rackspace, Citrix will collaborate closely with the community to provide full support for the XenServer platform and our other cloud-enabling products.”

“We believe in offering customers choice in cloud computing that helps them improve efficiency,” says Forrest Norrod, Vice President and General Manager of Server Platforms, HYPERLINK “http://www.dell.com/” Dell. “OpenStack on Dell is a great option to create open source enterprise cloud solutions.”

To download or contribute code and get involved, visit OpenStack.org. Follow OpenStack on Twitter @OpenStack.

About Rackspace Hosting
Rackspace Hosting is the world’s leading specialist in the hosting and cloud computing industry. The San Antonio-based company provides Fanatical Support® to its customers, across a portfolio of IT services, including Managed Hosting and Cloud Computing. For more information, visit “http://www.rackspace.com/” www.rackspace.com.

About the NASA Nebula Cloud Program
NASA Nebula is a Cloud Computing service based at NASA Ames Research Center that provides high performance compute, network, and data storage services to NASA scientists and researchers. Nebula allows NASA to share and process large scientific data sets and was one of three flagship projects highlighted in NASA’s Open Government Plan. For more information, visit http://nebula.nasa.gov.

Forward Looking Statements
This press release contains forward-looking statements that involve risks, uncertainties and assumptions. If such risks or uncertainties materialize or such assumptions prove incorrect, the results of Rackspace Hosting could differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements and assumptions. All statements other than statements of historical fact are statements that could be deemed forward-looking statements, including any statements concerning expected development of the OpenStack project; the acceptance of OpenStack technology as an industry standard; anticipated operational and financial benefits from any development of the OpenStack project; the participation of other companies or individuals in the OpenStack project; any statements of expectation or belief; and any statements of assumptions underlying any of the foregoing. Risks, uncertainties and assumptions include the possibility that expected benefits from the OpenStack project may not materialize because the underlying technology is not reliable or generally compatible with industry standards; there are changes in technology that adversely affect the adoption of the standards, and other risks that are described in Rackspace Hosting’s Form 10-Q for the quarter ended March 31, 2010, filed with the SEC on May 6, 2010. Except as required by law, Rackspace Hosting assumes no obligation to update these forward-looking statements publicly, or to update the reasons actual results could differ materially from those anticipated in these forward-looking statements, even if new information becomes available in the future.

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UPDATE: Here’s some blog posts about this:

Techcrunch. “OpenStack.org: Rackspace Open Sources Their Cloud Services Platform, and Gets NASA On Board.”
The Next Web. “Rackspace issues a challenge to the cloud industry; goes open-source with OpenStack.”
RWW: “OpenStack: Rackspace and NASA Nebula Join Forces for Open Cloud Ecosystem.”
GigaOm: “OpenStack: An Open Source Cloud Project Emerges.”

It’s clear you are having some PR issues with the changes you’ve made to Facebook.

Folks like Leo Laporte deleted their accounts. Jason Calacanis is making page view budgets because of these problems. Jeff Jarvis is taunting you on Twitter. People are posting your supposedly private texts from when you were a teenager (I don’t even know if those are real, but they are getting reported as if they are).

You can ignore these issues. They will go away, especially next week when Google gets aggressive at its I/O event and releases a ton of stuff that shifts the pundits attention back to Google’s real market power.

The ones you can’t ignore?

The common feeling that we can’t trust Facebook anymore.

See, I don’t have that problem. I never +did+ trust Facebook, especially after your systems deleted my account a couple of years back. I knew then that we were buying into a system that was not trustworthy. Or, at least, not trustworthy in the way we’ve come to trust software and companies in the past.

That said, I still use Facebook. Most of the people I’ve friended over the years are still using it. And I keep putting more data into it. 400+ million people do. And more, I bet, are coming every day.

Here’s what I would do:

1. Split Facebook into two pieces: one private, one public. We already sort of have that. My private Facebook account is at http://facebook.com/robertscoble while my public one is at http://facebook.com/scobleizer
2. Make the private piece much easier to understand and setup. The New York Times actually exposed something gone very wrong at Facebook: you have too many privacy settings and too many choices. Boil them down to a few choices.
3. Put a third party in charge of “verifying” that privacy settings actually work. For instance, I’m pretty sure you are getting bashed for privacy in some areas wrongly. But the market simply doesn’t believe you on privacy, so get someone who can verify for us that when you set something to be seen only by your mom that it, indeed, is only viewable by your mom.
4. Do a better job of explaining why you are putting more and more emphasis on the public part of Facebook. I know that you get a lot of cool new features when you share your life with people, but most people don’t understand that because most people have never lived in public view before. So, SHOW THEM and show them better than you have been to date. For instance, what happens if you click “like” on a restaurant on Yelp? What does that enable? Or, what happens when you listen to music on Pandora and let your friends see that?
5. Use video to explain what Facebook is. Video is harder to read, yes, but it’s more emotional and it’s easier for you to explain and show some of these features. It’s amazing to me that you haven’t been in the public view since you’ve made these announcements. Get onto Techcrunch TV. Have lunch with Kara Swisher and Om Malik Invite me over your house. Demonstrate that you are public yourself and willing to stand up for the changes you’ve made. VentureBeat is giving you some similar advice.

Or, well, you can just ignore them all. I don’t think it will slow down Facebook at all. Most of the people I’ve talked with really don’t care about this issue or have already figured out what they are going to do about it (I handled it by changing all my privacy settings to as public as possible, others by deleting their accounts, yet others, like my wife, carefully went through the privacy settings and changed them to what they wanted).

Anyway, good luck, I’ll be in Omaha interviewing Matt Mullenweg about the future of WordPress at the Big Omaha conference and maybe I’ll ask him what his advice for you is.

OK, I’ve given you the reasons why Google will be successful this time, but why won’t what they announce tomorrow give Twitter or Facebook a buzz cut? Funny aside, I found this photo of Matt Mullenweg (the entrepreneur behind WordPress) getting a buzz cut by using Google’s Social Circles search.

Some things that will keep Google from giving either Twitter or Facebook a buzz cut tomorrow (yes, I’ve been leaked some info about what’s coming tomorrow, so you gotta read in between the lines here):

1. Facebook has a defensible position in identity. Visit Huffington Post, or tons of other sites, and you’ll see the hooks that Facebook has that Google is NOT going to be able to rip out tomorrow, even if they have a really great offering.
2. Google isn’t trusted socially. Google is so large and has so much of our data that lots of us really don’t want Google to beat up on Facebook or Twitter.
3. Google doesn’t have Mark Zuckerberg. Mark gets how to hook people in through social tricks that very few people understand. FriendFeed, for instance, didn’t get it. Neither does Twitter. Most people think of Mark as an awesome businessperson or a tech genius (his major at Harvard was computer science), but most people don’t know his minor was Psychology. He studies how people work and how they get addicted to things at a level that Google’s founders struggle to understand. Google’s founders are also not nearly as comfortable around other people as Mark is. Everytime I meet Larry Page or Sergey Brin it’s tough to get them to talk socially. Mark, on the other hand, hugs people and is easier to just hang around and be personable with. That difference translates into the software that Facebook makes and how it hooks people in. Look at the tags on photos in Facebook, for instance. They hook people in in a way that no other service has yet.
4. Google has big company disease that Twitter never had. Watch Google tomorrow to integrate tons of services together in a way that looks like FriendFeed or Facebook. Of course YouTube videos, Google Maps, Picasa, and other things will be linked together in an aggregated feed. Now compare to Twitter. Twitter doesn’t have these “strategy taxes.” For all its sins (and Twitter has many sins) it has stayed pure and hasn’t strayed from 140-characters of text only.
5. Google doesn’t have developers that Facebook has. Facebook has a whole industry of folks who’ve made tons of applications for its users. Many of these are lame, yes, but others integrate Facebook with outside services and, better yet, hook you in to play games or do other things. Think about how Zynga got so big by selling virtual tractors inside a game on Facebook. That won’t exist on Google’s platform. At least not tomorrow. Tomorrow’s announcement is another platform move, look for the developer-centric stuff to come at its I/O Conference in April.
6. Google isn’t willing to piss its users off to get to the next level. Zuckerberg is willing to piss off Facebook’s users by changing the platform. He is in the midst of changing his platform once again from something that was only for private friends and family to something that’s more public so that Facebook can effectively compete in search (or, at least, be like Twitter and sell its feeds to Google or Microsoft). Google just isn’t willing to do that over and over.

Anyway, what will the Google service do? It’ll put a final nail into FriendFeed. Not that it needed it, that service is on its way down anyway, because its team has been focusing almost wholly on the larger Facebook service, but it will take the real time aggregated feed I liked there and bring it to Google in a nicer way.

What else will the Google service do? Build expectations around real time search. Mike Arrington was right when he said he needs much better filtering last night.

So, look for a neat system to come out that will be useful for many of us, but don’t look for it to take much buzz away from Twitter or Facebook.

I’ve been taking lots of bashing for not backing up my blog. I deserved that. Or did I? Several people this weekend have been sending me all the posts that have been deleted. How did they do that, I asked a couple. “RSS,” was the answer. In other words, I had been backing up my blog all along without thinking about it.

“Huh?”

I hurried off to Google Reader, clicked on my folder, and sure enough, there were all my posts.

RSS was automatically backing up my blog to thousands of people’s accounts. Oh, dummy! I’m now rebuilding my posts from those.

This is why I’m excited by another trend I’m seeing happen. RSSCloud. Turns out that WordPress turned on this infrastructure today. Yes, Matt Mullenweg is working on his day off. So is Dave Winer. Geeks! Dave Winer is showing off what happened today on his blog.

Anyway, what is this doing? Well, Dave Winer showed it to me the other day. He’s backing up all my Tweets (here’s my Tweets in XML from today on his server). So, if something goes wrong it’s stored on his server. In a decentralized way. All in real time, or nearly so (at oldest each item is a minute old due to the decentralized ping architecture that RSS Cloud uses, but I’ll let Dave Winer explain more about that.

Now this doesn’t look very important today. But, it’s an interesting building block for a new world where EVERYTHING Tweets.

Don’t believe me that everything will Tweet?

We have buoys in the ocean that Tweet. London’s Tower Bridge Tweets. The US-Canada border crossing Tweets.

Imagine a world where everything Tweets. Now, why do they need to Tweet on Twitter? Aren’t we rebuilding the same world we had in 1993 when lots of us were on CompuServe, Prodigy, or AOL? What came along next? The open web.

So, let’s think about CNN. Why is CNN giving Twitter millions of dollars in free advertising? I keep hearing that we should “follow CNN on Twitter.” Why not “follow CNN’s Tweets at cnn.com/twitter?” Instead of the current “follow CNN on http://twitter.com/cnn.”

Why do we need to care? Well, we’ve already seen what happens when we have a single point of failure: when Twitter is down everything is down. Have you ever seen the entire web go down? I haven’t. Even in high flow events like 9/11, where lots of “professional news sites” were unreachable for a few hours there were lots of other sites with the news that were reachable.

Imagine if emergency resources weren’t available because Twitter’s data center got hit by a huge earthquake? Now you are getting to the core of one of my fears. During the 1989 earthquake KGO Radio went down, but the net stayed up. Centralized resources aren’t the way to go. We saw this when the plane fell into the Hudson, too. We couldn’t get to Janis Krums’ picture, but because his picture was copied by a bunch of different servers we were able to see it other places.

Does CNN serve itself well by not having a backup of its Tweets? No.

Why not?

1. Because right now all the branding power of CNN is being gifted to another brand.
2. Because right now all the Google juice behind twitter.com/cnn is being gifted to another URL that might not be there when CNN needs it to be (during a high-flow event).
3. Because right now Twitter search is inconsistent at best, and doesn’t show Tweets older than a few weeks at worst. So, any useful stuff in CNN’s Twitter account isn’t searchable. If they built their own Twitter they would be able to build their own search that worked the way they wanted it to.
4. Because Twitter has proven that it is perfectly willing to kick accounts off. And sometimes things get hacked. My friend Fred Davis, who is one of the co-founders of Wired Magazine, recently had his Twitter account hacked and had his account closed down. This is why he now Tweets on a vulgar account here. Can CNN or the New York Times afford to let some other organization have that power?
5. Because anything that CNN types into Twitter now becomes subject to Twitter’s Terms of Service. It spells out the potential danger right here: “We reserve the right, in accordance with any applicable laws, to refuse service to anyone for any reason at any time.” What happens if Twitter gets bought by Fox News and Rupert Murdoch wants to charge CNN for its Twitter account? This COULD happen. If CNN built its own Twitter on its own servers then that danger would go away.

But, maybe I’m being alarmist. Either way, I’ve learned a lot this weekend of the power of decentralized distribution. My words are safe. Because they were automatically backed up and distributed to thousands of people and their own accounts. Some people used Google Reader. Other people used RSS aggregators that stored my words on their local computers, like FeedDemon.

Now, what’s stopping us from distributing Tweets this way?

Yes, I know of Twistory, which backs up your Tweets. But here’s the rub, it will only back up the last 3,000 Tweets. I’ve already done many times that. Plus, your backup doesn’t help the ecosystem the way that RSS does. You can’t build search on top of the datastore that Twistory does. You can’t distribute your Tweetstore to everyone else who’s interested, at least not easily.

Anyway, now you know that RSS=Robert’s Stuff is Saved. Today, thanks to RSS Cloud, everyone on WordPress will be safe in a whole new way.

A few weeks ago some hackers broke into my blog here (this was before 2.8.4 was released). At first I thought they just left some porn sites in a couple of blog entries. So we upgraded WordPress (I was on 2.7x back then). Deleted a fake admin account. Deleted the porn sites. And thought we had solved the problem. We didn’t.

They broke back in, but this time they did a lot more damage. They deleted about two months of my blog. Yes, I didn’t have a backup. I should learn to do backups (we’re doing them now). Life has a way of beating you if you don’t have backups.

Anyway, this time they also put some malicious code on my archive pages. Google sent me an email saying they had removed my blog from its index. That got a whole team to look into how they broke in. Now thanks to TechCrunch and Mashable you know there was a vulnerability in WordPress which let them break in. Even more good details on Lorelle’s blog.

We’ve done some other things now to make it harder for them to break in (for instance, my admin account has been deleted and a new one doesn’t use the name “admin”), but the damage is done and I feel the same way when our childhood home was broken into. I don’t feel safe here, which might explain why I’ve been posting more over on a new Posterous blog I’ve setup.

Hopefully we’ve caught all the damage and hopefully other WordPress users haven’t had worse damage happen to them. Have you been hit by WordPress vulnerabilities? If so, what did you do to lock down the system?

Oh, and please upgrade your WordPress immediately to the latest version. That seems to have fixed the hole that the jerks got in through on my blog. Knock on wood.

So, once this happens, how do you feel safe again?

UPDATE: Matt Mullenweg, who is the guy who runs Automattic, the company that produces WordPress, wrote that I never had the problem on WordPress.com (hosted version of WordPress). That’s true. Interesting conversation going on over there with Matt.

I’ve been playing around with Posterous, which is a hot new blogging service. Matt Mullenweg better watch out for this one. It’s nicer to use than WordPress.com. Way nicer. Especially if you are a 2010 web guy like me who carries an iPhone everywhere (that’s why I’ve been more into Twitter and FriendFeed over the past year and less into doing my blog).

Anyway, I just wrote a long post about the upcoming social wars over there that you might like. I explain why Yelp has figured out how to monetize all these things but why Facebook, in my opinion, will win the overall war.

Subscribe to my Posterous, because I’m about to upload a ton of videos from interesting startups and people I’ve met in Boulder and Seattle.