On the insignificance of (Re)tweets to a post

In a discussion about blindly ReTweeting yesterday, I remembered that I once did a short analysis on auto-tweets.
An auto-tweet is a schedule you set up against an RSS-feed or any other trigger, which tweets the URL with a title, some of the post itself, a fixed word or hashtag, etc. Some "thought-leaders" use it to ditch all attribution and pretend the tweet originated from themselves. Usually, their Twitter bio then also says "I tweet interesting links" - well, now you know how they do it and how original and carefully curated these are...

I wondered about the current state of affairs - and did a deep analysis this time, the results of which are depicted above

Read before you share - otherwise it's gossip

A rubbish post by business insider titled "This Survey Is Devastating For Microsoft: 42% Of Windows Users Plan To Switch To Apple" and a very dubious post by the New York Times titled "The Tablet Market Grows Cluttered" drew my attention today - the latter claimed that

About 98 percent of Web traffic from tablets comes from iPads, according to Onswipe, a digital publishing company

The answer to the first riddle lies in the post itself, the other answer is just a few clicks away. The verdict: bogus anal-ysis. Which doesn't matter to the authors, because the shares came in by the hundreds of course. Amazing facts!

What drives IT failure? Ignorance and Greed

It was an interesting question Charles Storm posed the other day: was I saying that solutions are primarily driven by ignorance and greed? I wasn't, but he made me think:

• Every solution is driven by need, or want, and some lack of knowledge.
• Every failure is caused by ignorance and greed

Let's see whether I can find good arguments for that, and where the twain meet

GoDaddy... Go... Gone

Tonight the Godaddy servers have been hit by a simple DDOS - a distributed denial of service involving a few dozen clients or servers that fire off hundreds or even thousands of requests a second at their servers. It's a simple attack, and very effective. It's like Arnold Schwarzenegger in Kindergarten Cop, standing in the middle of the classroom and getting all those toddler questions fired off at him. The inevitable result: he breaks down

Resource identification is not a REST invention

An article on programmable web - pointed out to me by Fred Verheul (thanks Fred!) - gave me an adrenaline rush.
It was so full of bollox that I almost started to hyperventilate - which is a pun on the abundant use of the word hypermedia in that same post

Let me just quote one part of the post:

This subtle shift in the source of application control information makes it possible for the same client code to recognize and execute new features as they appear over time without the need for patches or downloads

The post contains more nonsense like this. Let me quote yet another brilliant piece, and be done with quoting:

Twitter is NOT where the party is at

You couldn't possible have missed the messy story around NBC and Twitter, resulting in suspension of Guy Adams' Twitter account. Guy's latest reaction on that is here, and contains the concise version.

Update July 31st 21:15 GMT+2: Guy Adam's account has been unsuspended:

Oh. My Twitter account appears to have been un-suspended. Did I miss much while I was away?
— Guy Adams (@guyadams) July 31, 2012

I do have to say that "which is widely listed online" is an exaggeration for sure, as it's only to be found on one site

I remember that it was also in a comment to a 2008 post on that same site, but can't possibly find that anymore now the web has been littered with Gary Zenkel's email address. In an action that started 10 hours ago, people have been tweeting and blogging the email address and since then it's been mentioned over a thousand times on Twitter, and if you Google for it you'll currently get close to ten thousand results

How CEP will make SaaS the killer app

I got the insight at TIBCO's Transform event I blogged about yesterday - how we can finally solve the Customisation Riddle we've been unsuccessfully combating in IT for decades.
Software as a Service is breathing down our necks and guaranteed to replace quite a few on-premise apps in this decade alone. Starting with your tertiary (cleaning, reception, catering, leasing) applications and also your secondary ones (reporting, payroll, timesheets and maybe even some HR), it is likely to halt at your primary systems that support your core business

Why? Because the need for exceptions increases between the three types. Yes you can customise your SaaS and many will do so in the beginning, but it will only make your SaaS more expensive in the end - someone has to foot that bill.

TIBCO Transform - it says it all

I attended TIBCO's Transform event in London.
Located at the Westminster Bridge Park Plaza hotel, around 600 people were there. Kicked off by Raj Verma, Senior VP of worldwide Marketing, a 2 hour session started that never bored for a minute. Very smoothly Raj led us through a full history of TIBCO, showing impressive figures like a 21% CAGR over the last 15 years, reaching almost a billion dollars in revenue with currently 3,000 employees

Having spent $130 million in R&D last year, the total R&D sum over the years accounted to $1 billion - a huge amount that proves how serious TIBCO is about innovation and fulfilling their goal of "making this world a better place"

REST definition and its place within Enterprise Integration

In a previous post I explained why REST is useless when it comes to Enterprise Integration. Even though at the very beginning I explicitly stated that

Roy Fielding wrote his dissertation entirely in the context of Web

and that

REST has absolutely no business benefits whatsoever with regards to Enterprise Integration

I got surprised to say the least by comments in various channels, most from professionals, even vendor representatives. Tech people, but nonetheless

Why management rocks, and leadership sucks

[Image by _MG_5503]

The past 24 hours I had a fierce conversation on leadership and management, and I love how just everyone joined in on Twitter; especially those that disagree with me because they teach me most in the shortest amount of time

I started it with

Every one wants to be a leader, but no one wants to be led #leadership
- Martijn Linssen (@MartijnLinssen) April 22, 2012

By the way, that picture of the Redskins cheerleaders is just there to spice up my blog and the post. Might lead your eyes astray for a moment, but no pun intended. I had a very hard time to select photographs that weren't shot at some battlefield or military institution, seems like the US army keeps their men happy that way. Now that is what I call management par example...

80-20: the deadly cause of IT project failure

There seems to be a rush of IT failure topics these days, all trying to find the Holy Grail of project failure. While I hold that this is a world of AND and AND, not OR and OR, I do see a major cause for project failure for the last decade: shifting from serial processing (waterfall) to parallel (Agile, Scrum, and so on)

Apart from the fact that Agile is solely focused on delivering a project rather than a product, this is not an Agile-bashing post: it is intended to show a very weak spot of contemporary IT projects

The benefits and concerns of Social

This post is the last in a series of six that deals with Social Business and Social Enterprise. The goal of the series: to explore the pros and cons of Social Business and Social Enterprise, given the current odds, and fast-forwarding to business opportunities now and in the near future

Well, this is it.

1. A small recap

The concerns of Social Enterprise

This post is the fifth in a series of six that deals with Social Business and Social Enterprise. The goal of the series: to explore the pros and cons of Social Business and Social Enterprise, given the current odds, and fast-forwarding to business opportunities now and in the near future

This post is about the concerns of Social Enterprise. While yesterday's was all about the concerns of Social Business, this one will take those concerns and apply them to Social Enterprise. An enterprise is a company with 10,000 employees or more, regardless of geographical dispersal (my definition)

The concerns of Social Business

[Image by Diego Cupolo]

This post is the fourth in a series of six that deals with Social Business and Social Enterprise. The goal of the series: to explore the pros and cons of Social Business and Social Enterprise, given the current odds, and fast-forwarding to business opportunities now and in the near future

This post is about the concerns of Social Business. While yesterday's was all about the benefits of Social Enterprise, this one will take concerns and apply them to Social Business

The benefits of Social Enterprise

This post is the third in a series of six that deals with Social Business and Social Enterprise. The goal of the series: to explore the pros and cons of Social Business and Social Enterprise, given the current odds, and fast-forwarding to business opportunities now and in the near future

This post is about the benefits of Social Enterprise. While yesterday's was all about the benefits of Social Business, this one will take those benefits and apply them to the Enterprise. An enterprise is a company with 10,000 employees or more, regardless of geographical dispersal (my definition)

So let's take all the Social we can imagine, and throw that to the current enterprise, and see where the benefits are. By the way, the drawing above is my favourite from Hugh MacLeod, and I got one in my office

The benefits of Social Business 2/2

This post is the second in a series of six that deals with Social Business and Social Enterprise. The goal of the series: to explore the pros and cons of Social Business and Social Enterprise, given the current odds, and fast-forwarding to business opportunities now and in the near future

This post is about the benefits of Social Business, part two of two. While yesterday's was all about the history of Business, this one will fill in the gaps left by it - it will deal with the present and the future

The benefits of Social Business 1/2

This post is the first in a series of six that deals with Social Business and Social Enterprise. The goal of the series: to explore the pros and cons of Social Business and Social Enterprise, given the current odds, and fast-forwarding to business opportunities now and in the near future

This post is about the benefits of Social Business, part one of two. It will relate the history of Business, and I'm sorry but that does take up an entire blog post - ask Socrates.
The definition of Social Business is this:

Social Business deals with business exceptions rather than rules, requiring flexible answers to complex questions in dynamic environments. As such, it isn't about giving predefined answers to predictable questions, it is about giving unpredictable answers to undefined questions.
Social Business serves best where an increased distance between people on all sides is negatively affecting business as a whole.
Social Business is best for establishing ties between unknown people.
As such, it will gradually replace distance by proximity, thus swapping anonymity for intimacy

Where will the social developers code? And what?

Dion Hinchcliffe wrote a very interesting piece, and I missed it. But thanks to John Rymer I picked it up.
John shared an interesting question indeed:

Client gives up on enterprise PaaS deal with #Salesforce.com, asks me for options. Focus is "systems of engagement." Interesting question.
— John Rymer (@johnrrymer) February 16, 2012

We had a small conversation on that and I read Dion's post.
While I disagree with some statements like

Wanted dead or alive: any Facebook user, $ 125 reward

With the upcoming IPO of Facebook this week, I got a little worried. I told a few people "Mark my words, this IPO is going to blow the Social Media bubble once and for all" and even "Wouldn't be surprised if FB's IPO is going to start the final leg of this crisis and finish everything off".
A bit gloomy, I admit. But I really need to get something off my chest here: you could put a value on people, but not in this context, and certainly not at a price like this

Amounts have been predicted as low (yes, "low") as $ 10 billion, and as high as $ 100 billion for Facebook's IPO. At their claimed amount of 800 million users, who miraculously seem to be logging on every second day at the least, that would mean at least $ 12.5 per user, at maximum $ 125.
A maximum amount of one hundred and twenty five dollars per Facebook user, dead or alive - would you offer such a ridiculous amount of money if it were your own? Of course not

The Law of the Handicap of a Headstart

In discussions about SAP's new stealth weapon, HANA, I have come to become a wee weary. At SAP Inside Track NL we joked about it:

@jonerp @dahowlett @ragtag @applebyj like we said at #sitNL "When lost for words, just end your sentence with HANA and you'll be fine"

What is HANA? In short, it uses SSD storage combined with a lot of in-memory to speed up results. SAP's claim is 3600 times faster results achieved with SAP HANA 1.0 with one 4-way, 8 core server (2.27 GHz clock speed) with 0.5 TB of Main Memory, 2 TB of SSD storage, 1Gb Ethernet running on an open source operating system.