Ah, I am back from a much needed, non-technical vacation and ready to make a mark in 2009.  To that end, I started catching up on some recent tweets and found, as always, a rich assortment of Awesome.

1. First, @elsua called my attention to two essential reads by @stoweboyd, “Nature Or Nurture In Social Networking,” and @valdiskrebs, “So many people, So little time.” Both may change the way we think about social networking.  Boyd’s post is essentially a warning to associate with those you wish to emulate, and not with those you do not.  Seemingly obvious advice, but as a I walked through some of those I was following in Twitter, I confess to having removed a few. Krebs’ post crystalized some of my own fleeting thoughts, as will often happen when I see good data visualizations. First, when we strive for simple metrics of human behavior, we often cannot capture the real value we deliver through interaction.  Either the metrics are wrong, people are gaming them, or they simply do not tell the whole story. So, can we just stop trying for a bit, thus freeing up time to see if the value becomes more obvious to more people. (I mean I don’t remember anyone counting how many emails I sent or how long they were or who forwarded them when that was new tech.) Second, as I began to discover late last year, the number of people you follow and the value you gain are rarely related.  As in all networks, it is the quality of the nodes and relationships between them which delivers value, not merely the quantity of them.  Finally, keeping those you follow to <= 100 is sage advice.
2. @dhinchcliffe then referred me to a great “list of seven reasons why cloud computing works ‘in a tough economy’.” This was also something that’s been rattling around in my brain before the holidays. Though IT is still being looked at to reduce even more costs, in many enterprises with whom I work, it is no longer an answer of headcount reductions or outsourcing efforts. They have already gone down that particular path and trimmed the fat to the extent they are now cutting into muscle. IT must, therefore, begin to do things differently, more innovatively, more effectively, in order to continuously remove costs and still enable enterprise and customer capabilities. Cloud computing in many cases could be that answer. Coincidentally, I perused Carr’s blog and found his recent post, The Cloud 20.  A list of the companies he profiles in his new book showing the current breadth of services offered in the cloud.
3. Finally, as in my answer to @MelKirk’s depressed tweet, this always makes me giggle when I’m grumbly. I aim to whistle all through 2009, please join in! (if you’re easily offended, don’t watch this):

Cloud computing has been steadily gaining momentum and validity in meeting enterprise needs and this latest global experiment from HP, Yahoo, Intel, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (US), Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (DE) and Infocomm Development Authority (SG) should prove interesting to watch.

The ambitious six-site project is aimed at developing an Internet-based computer infrastructure stable enough to host companies’ most critical data-processing tasks. The project also holds an unusual promise for advances in fields as diverse as climate change modeling and molecular biology.

The project’s large scope will allow researchers to test and develop security, networking, and infrastructure components on a large scale simulating an open Internet environment. But to test this infrastructure, academic researchers will also run real-world, data-intensive projects that, in their own right, could yield advances in fields as varied as data mining, context-sensitive Web search, and communication in virtual-reality environments.

Tim O’Reilly is concerned that though we may move into the cloud for all the right reasons, we will still use the old architectures and lock everyone in as we did with ERPs and other proprietary applications.

…the success of the internet as a non-proprietary platform built largely on commodity open source software could lead to a new kind of proprietary lock-in in the cloud. What good are free and open source licenses, all based on the act of software distribution, when software is no longer distributed but merely performed on the global network stage? How can we preserve freedom to innovate when the competitive advantage of online players comes from massive databases created via user contribution, which literally get better the more people use them, raising seemingly insuperable barriers to new competition?

The “internet operating system” that I’m hoping to see evolve over the next few years will require developers to move away from thinking of their applications as endpoints, and more as re-usable components. For example, why does every application have to try to recreate its own social network? Shouldn’t social networking be a system service?

This isn’t just a “moral” appeal, but strategic advice. The first provider to build a reasonably open, re-usable system service in any particular area is going to get the biggest uptake. Right now, there’s a lot of focus on low level platform subsystems like storage and computation, but I continue to believe that many of the key subsystems in this evolving OS will be data subsystems, like identity, location, payment, product catalogs, music, etc.

How do we ensure openness and interoperability prevail at the end of the day?  Seemingly irrelevant for something referring to clouds, but no less important to cloud computing’s success, how too do we ensure the right locations for the physical manefestations of the cloud?