Out of My Data - Episode #9 of CloudFocus Weekly

Machine transcript generated in 2026 from the episode audio (Whisper speech-to-text with automatic speaker separation). Speaker labels are automatic and may be wrong in places; unidentified voices are shown as "Speaker N". Timestamps shown every few minutes.

00:10 Jason Atwood: This is the ninth episode of CloudFocus Weekly for the third week of September 2010. This episode is titled, Out of My Data. CloudFocus Weekly is sponsored by Arkus, cloud computing experts. I'm your host, Jason Atwood, and joining me, my co-host, who should stay out of my data. Justin, Edelstein, how are you doing? Great. And promise you, I want nothing to do with your data. It's a little bit disturbing. I was just catching up on some of the articles and it's a great mix of two things with a lot of data. I don't want mixed together which is well actually we'll talk about it in a second. Me and your data? No, Google Health and Google Data.

Justin Edelstein: I was noticing our agenda has two very tied together items.

Jason Atwood: So we'll talk about, we had a couple things on the agenda today. We'll talk about the new Twitter interface, we got some new features. And then talk a little bit about some Google news. There's three pieces that we should probably connect up with. Google Me is coming out in the fall and how that might affect the other social networks. Google Health has some updates. Then following right along there, Google has fired its second employee for actually breaking into secure data and then using it for illicit purposes. Don't put your health data in Google. Let's get going. First, let's talk about the new Twitter. Actually I had a surprise. Unlike other releases of other types of services, usually there's a lot of talk before it happens, like Facebook does, it's coming, it's coming.

Justin Edelstein: Well that's because they got burned in the beginning.

Jason Atwood: By saying, thanks for coming.

Justin Edelstein: Well no, by just pushing them out there and getting backlash from people saying, why didn't you tell us? You have to tell us. I think it's one of those things that, in the beginning, Facebook was small and, well, Twitter's not very small. But they haven't changed the interface a whole lot since a long, long time ago. I mean, it's been virtually the same, just a news stream down the middle, in the box on the top and some stuff on the right.

Jason Atwood: What's interesting about this is it's moved much towards their applications. Yes. Clearly what's happening is that people are using the applications more and more. I'm sure they see through their APIs, whatever, it don't work for Twitter, so I don't know. But I guess as they see what percentage of users are using it through, I mean, you use Tweedy.

Justin Edelstein: Yeah, I very rarely go to Twitter.com, the website. Right. It's very rare.

Jason Atwood: The new, as I was one of the picks of the week a couple weeks ago, was the iPad app, which does a lot of crossovers. It basically leaves you in the version. And this new version of Twitter actually does that. You don't leave it. So you want to look at an article, it comes there, and everything pops over. A lot more jQuery type stuff, which is nice.

Justin Edelstein: Yeah, it looks a lot like the iPad application. It's like they took that design and said, all right, let's make this into a web app. And it really does feel now more of a app feel to it than it does a website. It really feels like there's moving pieces, and there's embedded videos, and embedded pictures, and better feature sets, and shortcut keys, and all sorts of things that apps have that make you feel comfortable in client apps. And with new technologies, in front end web technologies that allow for cooler manipulations of interfaces, it's cool to see Twitter not really play catch up, but bring some of those things that are now available on the web to their product.

03:41 Jason Atwood: Yeah, absolutely. I think it'll be interesting to see if people go back to Twitter because of it. I find. I can't. Well, I'll tell you one of the reasons, the one of the things that I didn't see in this release, which I'd love to know if they put in, if you know, tweet us up, which is that they, That the multiple counts very few people that I know well people who tweet Oh, I generally don't have one account you have a couple accounts and personas You know something so you might have a couple different accounts you might have more than one account I might have more than one account Twitter doesn't have the ability sort of you know it's all browser-based So you log into your account and that's it I would love for Twitter to Ability to jump between accounts like what the apps give you which is sort of what I think the killer part of the of the apps either Tweety or or Hootsuite or Seesmic desktop, they give you, I can have as many accounts as I want. And so if I were on Twitter, that'd be the next thing I'd be looking at, is how do I let people log into multiple accounts at the same time? Because that's sort of the one thing that's keeping me sort of not on the client. I don't have enough browsers.

Jason Atwood: Yeah. Any top feature, one feature that you thought was good, bad, indifferent?

Justin Edelstein: Well, I like shortcut keys, because especially for like refreshing your stream. I'm constantly like in tweeting, I'm constantly command shift R, right? To re-shift, to re-refresh. Because I follow so many people, it's just constant news cycle. That's one thing that I really liked. And I also like just, it has a subtle sort of minimalism look to it. It's always been very minimalistic, but they've even made it simpler and less in your face, like subtle moves to make it even more inviting for people who say, oh, I don't tweet. Well, that's okay. You could sort of come to Twitter and search through it or look for news because that's where people post a lot of news and breaking stuff happens on Twitter.

Jason Atwood: Twitter still suffers from, and maybe they'll figure it out in the next release, Twitter still suffers from me on the overload status. It's kind of the way I feel about Facebook. There becomes a level of I can't take any more information in and there's still no good way that I found to mitigate that information. So I feel like Twitter is one of the things, if you don't look for a day, you could have missed the entire, the best tweet of the world. You say it to me all the time, oh, did you see that thing I tweeted? I'm like, well, no, I didn't see it because I wasn't on for the 10 minutes that it would have been in my stream. Right? And yeah, I can put alerts on it, but then who am I going to put alerts on? Everybody then I just get an endangering. Yeah, just you, maybe I should do that. Yeah. So anyway, good stuff. Twitter, new look and feel, check it out. It hasn't actually populated all my accounts.

Justin Edelstein: So I haven't gotten it yet. I've just seen the videos and the screenshots and over people's shoulders. So looking forward to it when it comes. I am.

Jason Atwood: So let's talk about the Google news. I think probably let's get over the first one first and then move down the road because I think they make sense. First is that Google Me, the long talked about Facebook for Google. a lot of stuff that, you know, that, sorry, that they said they were going to move from Wave, which we've talked about the Google Wave before, is going to move into, they're saying move into Google Meet, a lot of lessons they learned. So Eric Schmidt sort of said it's coming this fall. Well, fall is really now. So, I mean, we'll talk a lot about it when it comes out because, again, anybody who's Google and does anything is going to be a massive play. Thoughts on it taking over? Would you be in on day one?

07:12 Justin Edelstein: Knowing myself, I'll be in on day one. Still haven't been in PING yet. That's because I haven't downloaded iTunes X, I'm a little lazy. But knowing me, I'll be in on day one, like I was with Buzz,

Jason Atwood: although I was opted into Buzz. Yeah. I didn't have to opt into it. But we've abandoned Buzz, yes.

Justin Edelstein: Huh? I totally abandoned Buzz. They don't seem to do social very well. They don't get it for some reason and it's weird because they should. You think that they would because they're very good at getting adoption on certain things but they don't have a lot of sticky social things and they seem to spread it really thin. There's Buzz, there's Reader which has an element of social. I mean there's Orkut which nobody uses outside of Brazil. And they seem to like spread it around and maybe this will be a more focused effort. You know, Picasa has an element of social in it. So I don't know, I'm very hesitant to say it'll be a success because I haven't seen them do this successfully in the past, but I will try it. I'll tell you the one thing that I

Jason Atwood: I think they're always going to fail at it. It's not for them, but it's that I think what makes social networks interesting, or at least the next social network interesting, is how it ties into the other social networks. And if you make one by yourself, and Google has a problem with Facebook, right? They don't get along, they're not friends. So they can't make the Facebook connector, and the Facebook incoder, and the- Right. You know, so- The friend feed. Yeah, all that kind of stuff becomes like, people I think are weary, the 500 million people that have gone into Facebook now, or whatever millions of people have gone into Twitter, getting kind of like, I don't want to go to the next one. I don't want to go to the next one. Even like Ping. Okay, it had a million users in the first day, but... That's because they had iTunes. Right.

Justin Edelstein: They just said, oh, look, here, press this button.

Jason Atwood: A million people could have clicked on the thing just to press on it and accept their profile. So I don't know. I mean, it's interesting. So the second thing that they came out with, Google Health, which I actually signed up for Google Health when it came out. Me too. Haven't used it. Hadn't touched it. It's not undermining my menus. I had no idea where it was. So Google Health came out. It's a...

Justin Edelstein: This is another reason why the social network could definitely flop. Because you have a Google account, and they don't do a great job of surfacing things that they want you to really use within that account. They have a little bar at the top of Google.com, but I don't even go to Google anymore. I just use my browser search bar, which is searching Google, and then I get my results and I'm off to the page that I find.

Jason Atwood: So they've integrated with other things. I actually went back and took a look, and you can set tracking goals. You can import all the stuff you could import before. OK, interesting update. I think it really moves more into this Google Me, Google Health move into the next article, which is that Google has for the second time now fired an employee who had access to data. And I know you're shaking your head. I thought maybe I got there all right. But not only is there access in data, because I'm sure the access in data happens more often than not, but then used it and went in and then against miners and was playing pranks and looking at people's Google voice. I think this is the stuff that, other than when we talk about Wave and putting on features and taking them away without consulting with people who pay you, this is the other thing that the cloud hitters don't like, which is to say, this is the problem. If you have all your information in the cloud, well, that's one cloud and one place to attack, as opposed to if it's all in 1,500 data centers around the country.

10:56 Jason Atwood: Well, yes, those 1,500 data centers might have bad security, but you still have to tackle all 1,500 of them. And it's still tougher to do than go for one, which might have the best security. So it's kind of like the Fort Knox.

Justin Edelstein: This was internal. Right. This wasn't an external person trying to hack into a company's data center. This is an internal person who had access to something that maybe they shouldn't have had access to in the first place. So maybe the right security protocols weren't in place inside. And that's something that I can see cloud haters or not cloud evangelists like ourselves talking about. They would say, well, look, you're trusting this other company to house data that should be extremely secure not accessible by an engineer. The fact of the matter is, when you're a large enterprise and you have developers on staff and you have your own data center, those people have access to that production data. Someone has access to it. It's just a matter of, those are your own employees versus that's a service provider that you're paying. It's the same problem.

Jason Atwood: But then you, as a company, always have someone else's data. So you have the client data. So we worked for an enterprise-class company that had client data. And if our employees messed up and got rid of their data, we always got in trouble. And there were times where tapes would fall off the trucks and FedEx wouldn't be delivered. And things happened that made our data exposed at the time I worked there. And they hit the news, and that's why you say you don't want to be on the front of the Wall Street Journal for this. Again, is it bad? Yes. Is it going to happen? Yes. Does being Google mean that it happens and blows up 10 times more than it would if you were some other little tiny social site with two pieces of data in it? Sure. Good that they found out, good that they got it. Bad that it's happened twice. Don't like things that happen twice.

Justin Edelstein: Yeah, bad that it's happened twice. I mean, it seems like they're even gonna put in more protocols and more checks to look at logs and et cetera. I mean, you have to. If you're gonna collect the world's information and organize it, or at least...

Jason Atwood: They know my blood pressure.

Justin Edelstein: They do. or at least charge companies money to put their data in your data center, then you have to be able to say that it's secure. And no one in here internally to Google is going to use it in any sort of way that would be malicious. They might have to have access to it to do some crazy patch maintenance work that you don't have to deal with, which is great. But still, the fact that they are able to access it and then have used it twice now is definitely a scar.

Jason Atwood: In malicious ways. I guess worse would be playing pranks and going after people's voicemail logs. Again, it does make you start to think- To get phone numbers, things like that. ... what stuff's in there. Oh gosh, there's so much stuff in there. We put a lot of- I mean, they have everything. They have your search history.

14:01 Justin Edelstein: They know what you're looking for. We were just talking about the other day how targeted the Google ads are getting on websites. We're both big Jets fans, we're both cloud computing people. A lot of the stuff that we're surfing on the web or searching for is related to a couple of different topics. I know the other day I was on a website, it was just a random sports website, but it had a Google ad on it for iSims, which is a cloud computing recruiting application that I am working on a project with and I was researching it online. I was like, whoa, that's amazing.

Jason Atwood: That's DoubleClick by the way.

Justin Edelstein: And it's really amazing because I was like, wow, how'd they do that?

Jason Atwood: It's funny because the technology has been around, like DoubleClick. I used to be into ad serving and stuff like that. DoubleClick had that technology. And what was the major complaint about them was that they have hooks into all these different websites and they can put a cookie on you and they can track you from website to website so they can do exactly what they're doing now. I mean, eight years ago it was a huge problem and people were all up in arms. I think everybody's idea of like privacy and cookies and whether websites are tracking them, everybody, to some degree no one cares anymore.

Justin Edelstein: Yeah, social networking has sort of thrown privacy and I know it's not the same thing, but it's sort of...

Jason Atwood: It's updated almost.

Justin Edelstein: Yeah, it's taken people's guard down for sure, because they are sharing more information than they've ever shared about themselves before in an open forum.

Jason Atwood: So they feel like they've put it in there, so then when it comes back in their face that there's stuff up there, they're like, well, it's OK, because I'm putting it there.

Justin Edelstein: I gave them that.

Jason Atwood: Interesting way of looking at it. So one little programming note. A programming note? A programming note.

Justin Edelstein: This is almost official. Do we have a note?

Jason Atwood: Do we have a, we need a sound for that. Do do do do. All right, programming note. Justin actually posted, or you posted a. That's me. Yeah, that's you. Posted a article on Winter 11 and stuff that's coming out for Salesforce for Winter 11. We are such a big Salesforce shop that we feel like we should do a full podcast just about Winter 11. So we're going to be doing that next week. So if you saw a blog post and then you're listening to the podcast and you're going, why isn't they talking about the blog post that he just posted about Winter 11? That is because we're talking about it in a full episode, probably a long one, you know, 30, 40 minutes. So I'll keep this one short just to offset.

Justin Edelstein: And we didn't talk about Salesforce today because of that. We're going to save it all up for next week. Right.

Jason Atwood: So let's get to the Cloud Focus app pick of the week.

Justin Edelstein: We need a sound effect for that too. We need another sound for that. We need a lot of sound effects. It rolls right off your tongue. It does. Cloud Focus app pick of the week.

Jason Atwood: I'll let you go first. No, you want me to go first? No, I want to go first. You're going to go first. I'm going to go first because it's right in line with what we're talking about. All right, go on. So something that we've actually been using and now is almost 100% adopted by Arcus, which is in terms of social networking. And I was talking about how people don't want to adopt the next social networking craze, as it were. So it was one craze that I'm probably way late on, but I was earlier than you, so I feel good about that. Which is called Foursquare. And if you haven't heard of Foursquare, basically it is a combination of a social network, a status update, and a game. And again, like most things, I never noticed about, I don't hear about these things until they kind of hit the iPhone or like it becomes an app and the app starts going crazy. I'm like, why am I, or I started seeing it on Facebook. A status is saying checked in with Foursquare. And I go, what's Foursquare? Oh, it's an app. That's the network effect. Yeah. That's what's so interesting about it. And what's good about, well, let's talk about what Foursquare does. So basically, using your whatever, your Blackberry or whatever, with GPS, you then go to an

17:57 Jason Atwood: area, you have a profile, you have friends, same stuff, you know, opt in, and then you check into places and you get points for checking in. If you check into a place that no one else has checked into for more times than not, you become the mayor of that place. And you get badges for checking in, so you get kind of funny. They have a lot of funny ones. There's actually a whole website that describes all of them and how you get them. Swarm, if you were the place with more than one. If you go to, we were at a Jets game in the pre-season, and we got Super Swarm. Actually, we were at a soccer game. We got Super Swarm, which is 250 people checked in, same place within a certain period of time. What's fun about it, what I like about it is because it is kind of a game. You get points, you get badges, that's fun.

Justin Edelstein: But there's also, they figured something out, which is the commerce side of it.

Jason Atwood: Right, which is when you check into a place, since it knows where you are, you can actually, it'll show you specials nearby, or things that are nearby, that are advertisements. And it's kind of, I think it's really.

Justin Edelstein: Or even at the place where you checked in. I've had that happen to me before, where I checked in at a bar. And the bar had a special on Foursquare where once you checked in there, they knew you were there. And the screen would pop up and say, walk over to the bartender and say this. And they give you a free shot. It was very interesting. And did you say it? I did. And did you get a free shot? I did. Excellent. It was really interesting. I've seen ones where if you're the mayor, I was up at a place up West Side.

Jason Atwood: If you're the mayor of a place, every time you go, if you're still the mayor, You get to have one free margarita of your choice. Like it was, I think that's. It's not all about drinking either. Yeah, no. No, there's stuff, we are in Times Square, the reci, I see stuff all the time. And what's interesting is it's overlying the place that you're at. So wherever you're at, you know, then say, look, there's something going on over here. So really good, foursquare, I'll say foursquare for the iPhone, but it's also the web app. And now with HTML5 and geolocation built into HTML5, which is interesting, I think this type of stuff could extend. It does a really good job of connecting with others. So you can check in and tweet and Facebook at the same time or not.

Justin Edelstein: I choose not to do that. You can do off the grid.

Jason Atwood: It's kind of fun if you're at a Jets game. You can check in on Facebook and everybody sees that you're there. You don't have to post your stats twice. Anyway, check it out. Foursquare.com, iPhone, Blackberry, Droid, I'm sure. Maybe not. And yours. What's yours? Well, you went fun. So I'm going to go business. Oh. Debbie Downer. Yeah, Debbie Downer.

Justin Edelstein: You guys can turn the podcast off now. I'm gonna choose a product called Tenrocks Time and Attendance. So Tenrocks is the name of the company and the product that I'm picking is the Time and Attendance solution. It is a cloud-based, basically a way for you to do time sheets in the cloud. You can have employees that have, full weekly time sheets, check in for hours, align those hours to different projects. It's good for a services organization that might have different projects that they have going on and they can book their time to different projects. The cool part about it is that it integrates with Salesforce really well. I've heard of this Salesforce thing. Yeah, so if you have a, just to dive into the weeds a little bit, if you have an opportunity that closes and it creates a record in Salesforce for that opportunity to

21:17 Justin Edelstein: book time against, but you're booking your time in Tenrock's time of attendance and then it brings that data back into Salesforce, which is actually a pretty cool little feature if you're running a sales and services organization where you have to, you know, whether you have part-time employees that needs to track their time. And the cool part is, even cooler part is, when you close that opportunity and you create the project, that goes into 10Rocks as an option to book your time against. So you don't have to double enter data in either place, it's just part of the workflow of how you run your business.

Jason Atwood: Does it work with custom objects?

Justin Edelstein: It works with the objects that they give you, which are custom objects. So the objects that are created are custom objects that hang off of an opportunity in Nice. Cost? It depends on how many users and which level of integration and I'm not even gonna give a ballpark because they probably wouldn't even want me to. I mean it really is all about, you know, if you're a... Is this start at something? $10 per user per month? You know what, you're gonna make me... You always ask me the cost and you always pick free stuff so it's easy for you, which is kind of lame. Super lame. Anyway, Four Squares Free. You're pretty lame. I'll jump in there for just a second and see what they have.

Jason Atwood: Ten Rocks Time and Attendance from Ten Rocks, I assume. Yeah, from Ten Rocks. And it's spelled, not said, and it's rocked with an O-X, not a C-K.

Justin Edelstein: Yeah, they have a Time and Attendance product. They have a Project Workforce Management product. You can go to their website and check it out. They even have a free demo and a free white paper that you can download.

Jason Atwood: Love softs at three, like foursquare, which is still free.

Justin Edelstein: I can't find a price, but give them a call. I'm sure someone will. Go on the app exchange and view the demo. They'll let you check it out.

Jason Atwood: Alrighty, well if you want to check out more, this is again a short podcast because next week will probably go long as it were. So if you want to check us out or follow us in any one of those social networks, including Foursquare, we actually have Arcus, our company has a... You can check in at Arcus. You can check in at Arcus. We do frequently. Yeah. I am still the mayor. And so you can always check us out on Twitter at twitter.com slash arcusinc or twitter.com slash jasonmattwood or twitter.com slash just edelstein. We're at Facebook, facebook.com slash arcusinc. That's A-R-K-U-S-I-N-C. And if you're a fan of the podcast, which we know you are because you're listening or this is the first time, welcome. A great way to stay on top of the podcast because we do record it different times during the weeks because we're busy individuals and maybe don't have time to check into other places. You know, go to iTunes and subscribe on iTunes. So go on iTunes, type in Cloud Focus Weekly and then subscribe there and that comes down instantly. So we publish it, whenever we publish it, it comes down, you can put it on your iPhone,

24:18 Jason Atwood: iPhone, your iPod touch, your new iPod Nano, whatever you want, your shuffle or your Zune player which I'm sure you have. And that's great. It's also a way to review them there. We love the reviews. Reviews are great. If you can leave a review, little quick thing, how much you like the podcast. Five stars or five stars? Five stars or above. Right. Only thing allowed. So that's it. So thank you for joining us for remember until next time, enjoy those cloudy days.