Incredible Things That Happen Every 60 Seconds On The Internet

Wait a minute!

The infograph below depicts some very interesting facts about activities that occur every 60 seconds.

 It appears that email is still king. 

Incredible Things That Happen Every 60 Seconds On The Internet.

How To Integrate Social Media Into Your Wordpress Site

Integrating Wordpress and Social Media

I love WordPress.  Almost as much as I love Twitter.  So when it comes to combining the two, well, I'm interested.

This presentation I found on SlideShare covers more than just integrating WordPress and Twitter.  In it Kevin Palmer (@kevinpalmer) covers topics like comment system integration and customization of social media icons.

Enjoy the presentation!

[slideshare id=1546270&doc=wordcampchicago-090607194753-phpapp02]

via How To Integrate Social Media Into Your Wordpress Site.

New Twitter Design: Simplicity is again the key

New Twitter Design is a KISS of fresh air

On Thursday Twitter announced that there will be a radically new design coming that seems to be focused on making Twitter easier to use.  Immediately, I think of the essential principle of KISS, Keep It Simple Superstar. 

Too often software engineers, and even consultants, try to make their solution such a work of art and science that they are the only ones who can understand it.  I've seen this in software, written and oral presentations, just about every communication medium that exists.  I've been accused of being succinct and to the point before, so it appears even clients like more pages and words over deliberate clarity at times.  So it is encouraging to see such icon of software development institute the simplicity principle. 

The new design will be focused on making hashtags and other Twitter basics easier for new users to become acquinted with and use.  The new Twitter will have a special toolbar for the @ and # symbols.  It is labeling the @ symbol with the "connect" moniker and the # symbol with the "discover" moniker.

Focusing on the connect and discover functions, here are some details from Twitter ...

Connect: "Is your way to keep the conversation flowing"

Entering someone's Twitter handle on the Connect pane will enable the user to learn more and connect with that handle instantly.  The connect pane is also the place for a twitter user to view twitter mentions.  Currently these functions are available in three places, so the new design will reduce this two once location.  Good trade in my book.

Discover: "Let's you tap into a stream of useful and entertaining information, customized just for you"

The discover pane will aggregate your interests based on your location, what you follow and current events.  In my mind, the localization is a great feature although the implications of having to have geolocation enabled doesn't make overwhelmingly comfortable.

It will also be possible to enter hashtags into the discover pane and be delivered all the related stories and conversations tagged with that hash.  This feature brings to mind one of my favorite Twitter tools, Tweeted Times. 

Tweet Deck Effect

One thing that seems obvious is that Twitter's acquisition of Tweet Deck is driving some changes which seems to imply that Twitter is interested in learning from the market and ultimately its users.  This is a good sign of things to come for Twitter users and application developers alike. 

More details can be found at the Twitter blog.

Big Data ... Little Data Quality

[caption id="" align="alignleft" width="240"] Image by Marius B via Flickr[/caption]

Is Big Data better Data Quality?

Big Data is everywhere.  Chances are you've used a big data solution today.  However, are big data solutions delivering big data quality?

High Availability versus High Data Quality

Typically, Big Data solutions are designed to ensure high availability.  High availability is based on the concept that it is more important to collect and store data transactions than it is to determine the uniqueness or accuracy of the transaction.  Some common examples of big data / high availability solutions are Twitter and Facebook. 

It is possible to configure a big data solution to validate uniqueness and accuracy.  I want to make sure I state that clearly.  However, in order to do so you need to sacrifice some of the aspects of high availability to do so.  So, in some regard, big data and data quality are at odds.

This is because one of the fundamental aspects of high availability is to write transactions to whichever node is available.  In this model, consistency of transactional data is sacrificed in the name of data capture.  Most often, consistency is eventually configured on data inquiries, or on data reads as opposed to data writes.

In other words, at some given point in time you do not have consistency in a big data dataset.  Even more troubling is the fact that most transactional conflicts are resolved based on timestamps.  Which is to say that the most recently updated transaction is commonly regarded as the most accurate.  This approach is, obviously, an issue that requires further examination.

Room for improvement

As we examine big data solutions and learn more about implementing them, it is important to design more robust conflict resolution approaches that ensure that big data includes big data quality.

More on that to come ...