Cloud Computing Bible (2011)

Part IV: Understanding Services and Applications

Chapter 18: Communicating with the Cloud

IN THIS CHAPTER

Using Instant Messaging

Exploring SMS or micro-blogs

Learning about collaboration software

Exploring the world of social networking

In this chapter, you learn about some of the cloud-based messaging and social interaction services that have greatly affected the use of the Internet for many people. The sites described in this chapter are among the most heavily visited in the world. The names of the services—Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace, Facebook, and others—are so well known that the services they perform will enter the vocabulary of users as common verbs.

Instant messaging has been a product category for a long time. The cloud has made these services more numerous, easier to access, and much more popular. AOL Instant Messenger was a pioneer in this category, but now IM is integrated into all the major Webmail platforms. This chapter describes some IM services, along with how to get some of them to interoperate with one another.

Small Message Service (SMS) systems allow short text messages to be exchanged. Twitter was described as the prototypical example of this type of service.

Social networks arise from the desire to share personal information with others. These services provide the means to create a mini-personal Web site and your profile. There are tools to share resources, join groups, follow people, e-mail and IM, and more from these sites. Literally hundreds of these sites are devoted to all manner of activities, and many are listed here.

Because working in multiple sites and following many people can be a major chore, a number of services that perform site aggregation are described. These sites let you add feeds from other sites and view them together.

Exploring Instant Messaging

Instant messaging (IM) is a software category that has benefited greatly from the growth of large user communities. Instant messaging builds on the older concept of Internet chat to add a more immediate response to text messages between individuals and groups. Whereas online chat is aimed at exchanging information between people in a forum or multiuser environment, instant messaging is most often a peer-to-peer communication.

Instant messaging fills the gap between e-mail, which is asynchronous, and telephony, which is synchronous communication. A good description of IM is that it is “near-real-time” communications.

In the preceding chapter, you saw that each Webmail service offers its own IM client in its Webmail interface. While IM is meant to be instant communication between people, the merger of Webmail and IM means that many systems support sending messages to other people who are not currently logged into the system. This form of offline messaging blurs the differences between IM and regular e-mail.

Instant messaging clients

It is difficult to avoid exposure to instant messaging applications: Operating systems, Webmail services, video games, enterprise messaging systems, and many other applications install IM clients. Any application that wants to foster a sense of community can benefit from instant messaging.

Instant messaging applications have the following forms:

• Discrete instant messaging desktop clients

• Enterprise messaging services with IM capabilities

• Browser-based IM clients (often in conjunction with Webmail)

• Mobile device clients, either embedded and client specific or mobile browser-based

You can get some sense of the diversity of instant messaging clients by looking at the home page for AOL Instant Messenger (http://www.aim.com), shown in Figure 18.1. AIM comes in desktop, browser, and native client formats on multiple platforms. The tendency recently has been to connect instant messaging systems to social media sites.

For a long time, AIM was the undisputed leader of IM with a dominant market share on the desktop. AIM is still is a heavily used service, but Yahoo! Instant Messenger (http://messenger.yahoo.com/) and to a lesser extent Windows Live Instant Messenger (http://messenger.live.com/) have eclipsed AIM. The popularity of Gmail has helped to make Gmail's embedded IM client widely used as well.

FIGURE 18.1

The AIM (AOL Instant Messenger) home page emphasizes the range of client types and interconnections to which products in this category aspire.

IM is a very rich product category that adds the following to the older concept of Internet chat:

• Directed messages

• Rich contact management

• Message logging and archiving

• File transfers

• E-mail integration

• Voice and video feeds

• Connections to social media

Shown in Figure 18.2 is Windows Live Messenger's main window, which lists contacts by categories and groups. These dialog boxes are often referred to as buddy lists, a phrase that was popularized by AIM. You can set options and use the icons to link to other social networking services. To send a message to someone, you click the name. The system opens a window with a text box for you to enter your message. When messages arrive, the system shows an alert over the System Tray icon, sounds a bell, or performs other actions to let you know.

FIGURE 18.2

The Windows Live Messenger native client contact or “buddy” list

Instant messaging is as popular in business as it is in personal communications. Many organizations use it as a second kind of e-mail. That's the main reason you find IM clients embedded in the major Webmail services, as well as in the clients of messenger servers such as these:

• Cisco Jabber XCP (http://www.cisco.com/web/about/ac49/ac0/ac1/ac258/JabberInc.html), part of Cisco Unified Presences Server and Personal Communicator

• IBM Lotus Sametime (http://www.ibm.com/software/lotus/sametime/)

• Microsoft Office Communications Server (http://www.microsoft.com/communicationsserver/en/us/default.aspx)

• Oracle Beehive (http://www.oracle.com/products/middleware/beehive/index.html)

This category of software is sometimes referred to as Enterprise Instant Messaging (EIM) and is part of a unified collaboration software suite. Servers of this type support IM, e-mail, document stores, and other features.

Instant messaging interoperability

Some IM clients use peer-to-peer messaging, but not all. IM software aimed at businesses such as XMPP, Lotus Sametime, and Microsoft Office Communicator use a client/server architecture based on their message server products such as Domino and Exchange. Early developers in this field have tended to create their own proprietary messaging standards, which has made communications between different IM clients difficult or impossible.

Interoperability between different instant messaging clients has been a major area of contention. In an effort to create an interoperability standard between different IM clients, several instant messaging protocols have been created. The most important are the three IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) standards: Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), SIP for Instant Messaging and Presence Leveraging (SIMPLE), and Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP). The Open Mobile Alliance also has an IM communications standard called IMPS (Internet Messaging and Presence Service) for cell phones.

For a long time, each of the top IM services was locked into its own proprietary protocol. However, there has been some movement in this area over the last several years. The top three IM service providers (AOL, Microsoft, and Yahoo!) have adopted SIP/SIMPLE as their interoperability protocol, and they allow their users to connect with the other services' public users for a fee.

Several third-party IM clients aim to allow their users to connect to the different major IM services, including these:

• Adium (http://www.adium.im/)

• Digsby (http://www.digsby.com/)

• Meebo (http://www.meebo.com/)

• Miranda IM (http://www.miranda-im.org/)

• Pidgin (http://pidgin.im/)

• Trillian (http://www.trillian.im/)

Most notable among these is Trillian, which runs on Windows, Macintosh, IOS (iPhone OS), Android, Blackberry, and inside browsers. Trillian connects to the IM services AIM, ICQ, Windows Live Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger, IRC, Novell GroupWise Messenger, Bonjour, XMPP, and Skype. Additionally, Trillian can be used to send and receive messages from Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter.

BigBlueBall.com, a site that follows instant messaging and social networking, has published a chart with the current state of IM interoperability as of March 8, 2009. That chart is shown in Figure 18.3.

As a general rule, Enterprise IM software has been much more accommodating to the notion of interoperability than the large consumer IM networks have been. Microsoft and Lotus Enterprise IM products not only talk to one another, but also to public services such as AOL, Windows Live Messenger, and Yahoo! Instant Messenger.

FIGURE 18.3

BigBlueBall.com's published list of instant messaging clients interoperability is found at http://www.bigblueball.com/im/interoperability/.

A number of IM services available are aimed at specific industries. Bloomberg Messaging (http://www.bloomberg.com/professional/communities/) and Thomson Reuters Messaging (http://thomsonreuters.com/products_services/financial/financial_products/products_az/messenger) are two examples that provide IM services for the financial industry. Often these services are private, but they are set up to interoperate with the other public services in some way. Figure 18.4 shows a screen from the Thomson Reuters service.

Micro-blogs or Short Message Services

The form of text messaging most widely used today is SMS, which stands for Short Message Service. When a service collects your messages in a conversation, it is called a micro-blog. Nearly all cell phones come with an SMS client, putting the capabilities of SMS in the hands of billions of users. SMS limits the size of messages sent to around 150 characters. SMS was originally developed as part of GSM networks, but it's now in use on CDMA, 3G, and a variety of other proprietary networks. SMS clients also appear on desktops and, in the case of Twitter, a combination of all platforms.

FIGURE 18.4

A sample session in Thomson Reuters Messaging shows how financial companies can integrate IM into their daily information flow.

Cross-Ref

Because the bulk of SMS usage is on cell phones, a fuller discussion of the topic may be found in Chapter 21, “Working with Mobile Web Services.”

Twitter is a good example of an SMS service organized into a social network and blog. It is sometimes referred to as the SMS of the Internet or as a form of Internet Relay Chat (IRC). Users send messages of up to 140 characters called tweets, which are displayed on the user's page. The system is opted out so messages you send are shown by default unless you mark the option to show them only to your friends. Although the service is free to use, when you send a tweet over a cell phone, your service provider may attach its normal SMS message fees for sending it.

Your friends are subscribers to your tweets; they are called followers. When you create tweets, they are sent to your followers and posted in reverse chronological order on your user profile page. If you are a follower of multiple people, their tweets appear in reverse chronological order in your Twitter client. There are also lists belonging to people such as Oprah Winfrey that you can join; these lists have tens to hundreds of thousands of followers.

Twitter has published an API that allows developers to add the ability to send and receive SMS messages on the Twitter system. According to Twitter, there are now over 70,000 applications that incorporate the Twitter SMS system. The Twitter Web client was built using Ruby on Rails and deployed on the Ruby Enterprise Edition, with the message queue server written in Scala. Wikipedia maintains a jump page of Twitter clients that you can download and install at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Twitter_services_and_applications. A set of reviews of Twitter clients may be found also at http://alltwitterapps.com/. The Twitter app for the iPhone is shown in Figure 18.5.

Twitter has had an enormous impact, even though it was only launched in 2006. Often the first indications of news stories such as the earthquake in Haiti were tweets. Several people in that disaster were rescued from collapsed buildings because they could tweet their location.

People and businesses use Twitter to publicize their work, and the ability to search content by keywords offers insight into real-time trends that have considerable value. People tweet about almost anything, and you often get a faster answer to a question like “what's the best Chinese restaurant near me” from your followers at Twitter than you can from books or an Internet search.

FIGURE 18.5

The Twitter app on the iPhone (from Twitter, Inc.) has real-time search and can display trends, topics, maps, and location-aware messaging.

The rapid growth of the service has led to some embarrassing outages in its early years. Twitter's popularity in foreign countries led to the system being attacked at times of conflict. Of more concern is the fact that Twitter collects your personal information and sells the information to interested third parties. Twitter's service has no advertising, but the practice of sharing data allows companies to advertise directly to users based on their tweets. There have been several break-ins on Twitter accounts, which has led to the Federal Trade Commission charging Twitter with lax security in a recent lawsuit. The settlement in June 2010 requires Twitter to add more layers of security and undergo audits biannually.

Twitter has proved itself to be immensely popular, with over 190 million accounts. Twitter doesn't release its traffic figures, but in 2009 it was estimated that the site got over 2 million page views per day, putting it in the top 50 of all Web sites worldwide. According to Alexa.com, Twitter is the 11th ranked Web site worldwide. To give you some idea of Twitter's popularity, the Library of Congress recently announced that every public message ever sent over Twitter will be archived in the library's collection.

Exploring Collaboration Technologies

The emergence of cloud networks, the lowered cost of computing, and the high cost of travel also have helped spur the popularity of collaborative software for conferencing and workgroup support. You could define collaborative software as software that enables real-time or near-real-time communication, and that definition could include many of the applications described in this chapter. In this section, the focus is on groupware and collaborative work systems.

Collaborative software is an old concept with roots in many different types of systems. The first true collaboration platform that I recognized was Lotus Notes, which appeared as an enhanced form of client/server e-mail. Lotus Notes added document management, content management, and groups, and it supported mobile users. Lotus Notes actually predates the Internet, but its impact on the market has been significant. Microsoft's Exchange platform added features to compete with Notes. As the Internet matured, companies added the ability to perform Voice over IP telephony and video streaming either point-to-point or multicast. These tools have been migrated to the Web and are being migrated to the cloud.

Citrix GoToMeeting (http://www.gotomeeting.com/) is one of the best-known collaboration software products because the company heavily advertises the service. It also has a strong feature set and is very reliable. The service installs an address book that you use to initiate meetings and control attendance. When the service is connected, users see the portion of your desktop that you allow them to see. It is usually the entire desktop, but it can be a particular window such as a browser.

The product allows users to share their desktop, do presentations, and even let a user remotely take over another user's computer in real time. Meetings can be scheduled and recorded for later playback. You can use the service to work on documents cooperatively and annotate them with drawing tools.

The Zimbra Collaboration Suite (ZCS; http://www.zimbra.com/) is another groupware product that provides e-mail, calendar, and content management support. ZCS can synchronize e-mail, contacts, and calendars with a number of mail services, including mobile phones. Yahoo!, the owner of ZCS, makes the source code available under their Yahoo! Public License (YPL), which is a form of open-source arrangement.

For conferencing that requires a richer multimedia collaboration, Dimdim (http://www.dimdim.com/) offers a service that is a strong Web conferencing platform. You can give presentations, talk, chat, and show video feeds from Webcams to users. DimDim is a direct competitor to GoToMeeting.

Although this section presents three examples of this type of software, it is anticipated that there will be many more services like these three that will be supported by the cloud in the years to come.

Using Social Networks

The rise of low-cost commodity computing has fostered a number of large social networking services that are having great impact in the world. The recent use of Twitter and Facebook by opposition parties in Iran is a good example of the power of these social networks.

The SMS service Twitter can be considered a social network, but it's as much a telephony service as it is a Web service. Some of the largest Web sites now operating are dedicated to social networking and use the full power of Web 2.0 to allow people to communicate in a number of ways. According to Alexa.com, Facebook is the second most heavily visited Web site on the Internet, with Google being first. On August 3, 2010, Alexa.com had Blogger as 8th, Twitter as 11th, Wordpress as 19th, LinkedIn as 28th, MySpace as 29th, Flickr as 34th, Vkontakte.ru as 38th, and Google's Orkut as 69th. By any measure, this kind of media penetration for any one category of Web site is astonishing.

Friendster, MySpace, and Facebook represent one category of social networks. These sites let you create your own small personal Web site, which you give people access to view. Information on these pages is of the nature of personal profile. There are tools for leaving comments, chats, alerts when new information is listed, and many other features.

Friendster was the earliest of these three services, followed by MySpace, which was more successful, and then Facebook, which is truly a phenomenon. Facebook claims to have recently created its 500 millionth user account. Figure 18.6 shows the Facebook page for Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook.

Messaging between people is an important part of social networking. The success of services like Facebook has encouraged all Webmail providers to create personal profile sites of their own. Examples of this trend are Google Buzz and Windows Live Spaces.

FIGURE 18.6

Shown here is Facebook's founder Mark Zuckerberg's wall page where people can post comments.

Features

These are the central elements of social networking sites:

• Personal profile: In this section, you enter your biographical data, your likes and dislikes, personality traits, and whatever else you want to share with your friends and the world. With certain sites that specialize in a theme such as job networking, as Linked In does, your profile contains information relating to your career and skills.

• Friends, buddies, or connections: These are people who are allowed to view your site and post comments to your profile. They can also send you e-mail. Most social networking sites require that you be a member in order to use their site. Friends are designated within the service, with some control over the level of trust afforded.

• Groups: Nearly all social networks have a feature called groups where people interested in a similar topic can post messages to one another. Groups can be related to your high school classmates, a topic of interest, or just about anything you can think of.

• Discussions: Discussions are message boards where people who are usually in a group post messages on a topic. The conversation, referred to as “the thread,” represents the evolved thinking of two or more people. You often see discussions with useful links and media.

Discussions are often indexed by the major search engines, so it is often the case that when I'm trying to solve a technical problem, I find my answer in a discussion on one of these social network sites.

• Blogs: Blogs are personal Web logs, collections of journal entries you make, shown in reverse chronological order. Most social networking sites have the ability to create blogs and either show them on your pages or post them to one of the leading blog hosts, such as Blogger or Wordpress.

• Widgets: A widget is a small utility that you can add to your page. Many social networking sites have widget galleries that contain clocks, calendars, animations, weather information, electronic Post-It notes, and many more. The use of Ajax as a programming medium for these types of sites makes the use of widgets even more prevalent than in the past.

List of social networking sites

Table 18.1 lists some of the more well-known social networking sites.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_social_networking_websites.

Privacy and security

When you place so much personal information into the hands of a third party, you are always at risk should the information be compromised. Social networks have had the normal history of infrequent break-ins by hackers, often because a person's password isn't set to a strong one. Because many of these sites are free, their business model must use advertisement or the sale of user demographics or information to monetize themselves. That puts lots of pressure on social networks to disclose information in aggregate or by individual.

However, two other aspects of security are more troubling: privacy rights and the fungibility of the data over a long time period. Ideally, social networking sites should be opt-in systems. When you sign up, you are presented with a list of options that you select to belong to. Unfortunately, these networks often have lots of options, so some sites set their accounts to be opt-out by default. That is, the site itself determines the default options and assigns those options to any new account. If you want out of an option, you need to change the setting in your profile's settings. For a site like Facebook with many options, this has been a problem, and it has caused an uproar. Facebook has had to change its privacy policy several times over the last couple of years.

When you post data on a social network, you have to realize that the data may have a long lifecycle. A picture or story you post on your page as a teenager might influence your candidacy for a job a few years later. So it is very important to protect your data and retain your privacy rights. One of the issues encountered is the ownership of the data; do you or does the Web site have ownership rights? This is an evolving area of law.

Interaction and interoperability

Participating in multiple social networks is a major chore, and it is easy to be overwhelmed. Not only do you have to manage the data you are entering into the system, but if you are following or subscribing to different individuals on different services, you may find yourself logging into each of those services separately during your day or week.

As the sites get bigger and their technologies get better defined, there has been a trend in the industry to get different sites to interoperate with one another. One imitative to create a common API is the OpenSocial (http://www.opensocial.org/) API that Google and MySpace support. OpenSocial has yet to achieve critical mass in the industry, but is indicative of the direction of this technology to interoperate.

A new class of social network aggregators has appeared that collects information from other sites into a consolidated data store. Some of these sites also allow you to create a universal personal profile that can be shared with several social networks.

In order to perform aggregation, these applications have to tap into the social network's API, provided that the service is given consent by the user in the form of supplying his username and password for the social networking service. This is similar to OpenID, and in fact several of the major sites are adopting OpenID as their authentication.

These are the best known of the social network aggregators:

• ContextMine (http://www.contextmine.com/): This site monitors brand presence.

• FriendFeed (http://friendfeed.com/): This site is a real-time aggregator of social networking, blogging, and RSS/Atom feeds. It is one of the more heavily used aggregators.

• Gathera (http://www.gathera.com/): Gathera offers a desktop application or browser add-in for aggregating Webmail and social network accounts.

• Gnip (http://www.gnip.com/): Gnip offers an aggregation API for developers.

• Mybloglog (http://www.mybloglog.com/). This Yahoo! service provides a record of the people visiting your blog.

• myZuzu (http://www.myzazu.com/): This site allows you to create and manage the information you send or get from multiple sites.

• Network Insights (http://www.networkedinsights.com/): Network Insights offers an SaaS service that provides online analysis and measurement of social media tools.

• NutshellMail (http://nutshellmail.com/): This site aggregates social networks into your own personal e-mail systems from multiple sources.

• OrSiSo (http://www.orsiso.com/): This really pretty aggregator creates multiple channels for incoming content organized by the people you follow from different services. Figure 18.7 shows the OrSiSo Web site.

• Plaxo (http://www.plaxo.com/): This online address book and content management service can be shared with other services.

• Plocky (http://plocky.com/): This is an e-mail and social networking service aggregator.

Figure 18.7

OrSiSo is an aggregator that takes content from multiple sources and lets you organize it as channels in a very visual way.

Aggregator sites may offer some of the following features:

• Search across multiple sites

• Tools for managing messages

• RSS readers for social networking feeds

• Tools to manage bookmark from multiple sites

• Tools to track friends, buddies, or connections over time

For the more capable of these aggregators, the term lifestream management has been applied by the digerati who see their digital output as the complete total sum of their existence. The addition of real-time feeds and location-based information are two trends that are shaping the features that social networking services are developing. The notion of a lifestream may be fanciful, but perhaps that is where this technology is leading us.

Summary

In this chapter, you learned about a variety of communications and social services that you can access over the Web, most of which already follow the cloud computing. The first of these services are the Instant Messaging applications such as Windows Live Messenger, Yahoo! Instant Messenger, and AIM. IM is a valuable adjunct to e-mail, which is why you find many vendors offering the two services within the same interface.

A subset of IM is the Small Message Service (SMS) exemplified by Twitter. Growing out of telephony, Twitter creates a stream of messages that can be followed, and it's indexed and searchable. Twitter provides a unique way of accessing the knowledge of a community in real time. For that reason, many people find it invaluable.

A major portion of this chapter was dedicated to social networking sites. The best known of these sites—Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, and others—are household names. Social networking sites let you share personal information with others and create and manage a community of your own. There are so many sites of this type and they are so popular that it is hard to keep up with this area of technology. The emerging category of social network aggregators is a helpful way of managing information coming from multiple streams that you follow.

In Chapter 19, “Using Media and Streaming,” you learn about Web-enabled telephony and video streaming services.