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Technology buzzwords come and go…virtualization, green, SaaS…and after sitting through the Google Friend Connect announcement, reading about Facebook’s Connect service and writing about last week’s MySpace Data Availability launch, “open” appears to be just the latest. But open is one of those words whose definition can be spun into a variety of meanings.

While Facebook isn’t yet releasing much detail on its efforts and may completely surprise me, Google’s Friend Connect program today highlights how open standards such as OpenID, OAuth and OpenSocial can be used to create a platform that’s pretty closed. The service, which will launch tonight and only expects to have between 12 and 24 sites participating while it’s in preview mode over the next few months, will allow site publishers to put some code on their sites. If a user visits a site with the appropriate code, she can get access, via an IFrame, to applications built in OpenSocial. A user can also share her activities on a participating site with her contacts, as well as through her news feeds on participating social networking sites.

Last week, I pointed out that MySpace’s Data Availability efforts were welcome in that they expand the number of sites on which a user can use her MySpace data, but that MySpace still had a lock on the user data since it hosted and determined who could display that data by approving site partners. If MySpace’s efforts were three steps forward in opening up user profiles, then Google’s Friend Connect represents two steps back.

The use of the IFrame means that site owners have no way to change or work with user data, they can only display it. MySpace doesn’t allow sites to store user data on anyone’s servers other than its own, but it does allow that data to be used directly in the outside site. For more differences among the three services, please check out the chart below.

While none of these services are entirely open yet — and may never be, given security and data abuse problems — the trend toward a more social web is clear. With broadband more prevalent than ever and voice fading as the primary means of communicating with people who aren’t in the room, enabling a truly open social web is the next big step in communication. But in order for that to happen, the user needs to be able to reach across walled gardens and gain granular control as to what he or she shares and with whom.

There’s open source (really open in that anyone with knowledge can participate in how the code evolves), open standards (open only in that anyone can participate using a pre-defined version of the standard), and open APIs (open in that anyone can take the pre-defined standard and build something for a closed platform such as Facebook). Knowing this, the efforts to open up a user’s data on a social network (their social graph, if you will) by these three companies falls somewhere between an open platform and an open standard.

Google acquired JotSpot eons ago, so long ago that one almost forgets about the wiki company and its founder, Joe Krause. Apparently Google didn’t let it go to waste. It is now the underpinning of Google Sites, a web-based collaboration software service that is going to be part of the Google Apps and will be available later on Thursday.

It is a simple and easy way to build a web site where you can share information with your team, including files, calendars and presentations. You can put content from other Google products, including YouTube, Google Calendar and Picasa. Google hopes that small business, wide-spread teams, classrooms and even political organizations would use this new offering in tandem with its current Google App offerings.

Google is not the first one to make a collaboration available — 37Signals’ Basecamp, Microsoft ’s Office Live WorkSpace, Zoho and GoPlan come to mind — but it has come up a pretty compelling offering that is going to challenge competitors.

“Creating a team web site has always been too complicated, requiring dedicated hardware and software as well as programming skills,” said Dave Girouard, vice president and general manager of enterprise, Google.

I was pleasantly surprised by new offerings’ ease of use. Sure, some power users are going to be disappointed but I suspect a majority will find its simplicity appealing. Moreover, it is tightly integrated with Google Apps, which would make its adoption easier, just like Google Docs and Google Talk.

I bet like me, no one wants to deal with another wiki. Funny how Google is taking a page out of Microsoft’s playbook, and offering an “integrated suite.”

WebWorkerDaily, which follows collaboration software quite closely had outlined similar approach.

Take GMail, GCal, plus Google Docs & Spreadsheets and you could manage a project reasonably well…If you wanted dashboard or notification-type features, you’d probably have to custom-build them yourself, though, and that’s a serious undertaking.

Looks like Google fixed that problem. My initial enthusiasm aside, I am still withholding final judgement on this product for now. Like most Google apps, the limitations become obvious after one has had a week or two and real-work situations to put the service through, a case in point being the marginal IMAP experience on GMail.

Related Post: An in-depth review of Google Sites over on WebWorkerDaily

Written by Thomas Howe, co-founder and CEO of The Thomas Howe Company, winners of the 2007 O’Reilly Emerging Communications Mashup Competition. His blog is about voice mashups and communication-enhanced business processes.

Far from being science experiments, open-source projects are powerful forces in both technology and business, especially when they are commercially supported and community-backed. Android is the Open Handset Alliance’s open and free mobile platform, backed by Google and 30 other technology and mobile companies, and for good reason will be a major player in the mobile world for some time to come.

Open-source efforts have many fundamental advantages. Over time, they produce higher-quality code than proprietary efforts, and they reduce the costs of development. They also speed up schedules, lower the barriers to entry for many service providers and vendors, and level the playing field for all. The mobile world needs an open-source platform in which it can invest, and not only is it here, but it’s backed by the best.

So given all this, what’s not to like?

As Dr. Phil would say, even the thinnest pancake still has two sides. Even though Android will be important for technical reasons — and these may have secondary effects in the marketplace — whether or not Android will really solve the problems that currently beset mobile carriers is up for debate. Will Android provide mobile application developers with a revenue-sharing model that carriers will support? Unlikely. Will Android’s open software usher in a world in which carriers tear down their walled gardens? No, probably not.

Even though many developers and enterprise IT shops will profit from Android, many others won’t have such a positive experience. From where I sit, here’s my list of unfortunates who find themselves on the frying-pan side of the Android pancake:

1. The 110 million U.S. mobile subscribers that currently have contracts with AT&T and Verizon. AT&T and Verizon are not currently members of the Open Handset Alliance, nor are numerous other large wireless carriers worldwide.

2. Nokia, Microsoft, Palm, RIMM and Qualcomm, who now have to fight against yet another smart phone OS, further fracturing the market. It’s difficult to see the benefit of OS proliferation to anyone, especially to consumers and carriers. It’s possible that Android becomes the platform of choice, but I seem to remember hearing the same story about Linux.

3. Android developers, who don’t have a single handset on which to deploy their applications, and will have to debug the application on each new handset as it comes out. Fellow blogger Alec Saunders tells me that his recent engineering study identified over 30 realistic combinations of handset, OS and carrier for the North American market alone. Perhaps a side benefit of Android to the larger economy is a future increase in the homologation workforce, and probably just in time to catch all those ISDN dialect jocks. (This might be a good time to remind ourselves that the customer experience successes of Apple can be directly tied to the fact that they don’t have to contend with variations in hardware or platform.)

4. The support departments of Sprint and T-Mobile, who will get calls from customers when some unauthorized program doesn’t work. See previous point. I wonder if the practical nature of Android development might in some way parallel PBX development, where even though the basic problem is quite simple, the practical realities of 400 features, or in this case 30 handsets from numerous carriers, bars very small companies from success.

5. Everybody else in the world, because the problem in mobile application innovation is not a dearth of compelling mobile applications. The problem is that people don’t know these great applications exist, and it’s hard to see how an open mobile framework solves this problem. Even if it did, most mobile applications face another barrier: they force the user to change their habits. Unfortunately, the proliferation of user interfaces and frameworks exacerbates this problem, and yet another framework like Android is not the solution.

In some strange, twisted sort of a way, Google’s foray into social content, aka Knols, is a tip of the hat to entities whose results have started to show up really high in the search results — Wikipedia and Mahalo, for example. Mathew Ingram points out this can hurt not only them, but others as well. It is also a sign that Google (GOOG) is finally beginning to show its monopolist claws.

It is also a tactical admission by a company that believed that the machine was more powerful than the “human” that it isn’t the case. First, what are knols? Udi Manber, Google’s VP of Engineering describes knols as …

…a new, free tool that we are calling “knol”, which stands for a unit of knowledge. Our goal is to encourage people who know a particular subject to write an authoritative article about it…A knol on a particular topic is meant to be the first thing someone who searches for this topic for the first time will want to read.

He goes on to extoll the virtues of authors, and how they need to be highlighted. This is a smackdown on Wikipedia, where the individual contributions remain part of the collective and are not the focus — and rightfully so. As Nick Carr writes,

For the past year, Chief Wikipedian Jimmy Wales has been doing a lot of trash-talking about taking on Google in the search business. Now Google’s striking back.

Whether it will be successful or not remains to be seen. Now if you think about it, the knol, despite its fancy name, is nothing but a classic move by a quasi-monopolist that wants to ensure it keeps getting the raw material (in this case, content on knols) for free, so that it can keep selling it at a premium. I stopped believing in Google’s “do no evil” ethos a long time ago, so that is why I am worried by comments this like from Manber:

Our job in Search Quality will be to rank the knols appropriately when they appear in Google search results.

Which is to say that they won’t start making knols appear higher in the search results. Maybe it is the jet lag, but I don’t see knols as revolutionary as others are making them out to be. After all, you can set up a blog, make an expert page, maintain it and even put Google Ad Sense to monetize it. So how does this make knols special?

Sure there are APIs that allow knols to be shared with others, and Google maintains that it won’t give special weight to the knols, but who’s to know what they do inside their four walls. Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan, who has the single best post on this subject, is a bit disconcerted by knols, it seems.

Google using its page rank system to its own benefit. Think of it this way: Google’s mysterious Page Rank system is what Internet Explorer was to Microsoft in the late 1990s: a way to control the destiny of others.

(Check out my interview with Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia)

Back in the day, when PC stocks were kings on Wall Street, a pesky college kid named Michael Dell figured out that he could do an end run around the then-established PC makers by developing a smarter way of making and selling boxes. His strategy was simple: get components and PCs from the factories in Asia to the U.S. as fast as possible, but only after he had charged for the machine.

By squeezing the supply chain as hard as he could, he turned Dell into a fearsome (and loathsome) competitor. With his help, the supply chain for the PC era came to consist of foundries, ships, U.S. assembly plants and UPS trucks. Google (GOOG), with over $200 billion in market capitalization, is following a similar strategy, fine tuning and adapting it for the Web & broadband.

Instead of trucks and assembly plants, however, Google’s supply chain is made up of fiber networks, data centers, switches, servers and storage devices. From that perspective, its business model is no different than that of Dell’s (DELL): Google has to deliver search results (information, if you want to be generous about their other projects) as fast as possible at as low a cost as possible.

To better understand Google and its business model, one needs to break it down into three data inputs.

• Relevancy of results.
• Speed of search.
• Cost of executing a search query.

While their results aren’t optimal, they are good enough. Just like Microsoft Windows was good enough to dominate the market. Google, according to Hitwise, now has 64 percent of the total search market. And although a typical Google query can often be an act of futility, we put up with it because the results are fast. If they’re wrong, we can just start all over again.

The faster the results show up on our browsers, the less inclined we’ll be to switch to a rival search engine, no matter how great the rival’s search methodology may be. The faster (and more efficient) its infrastructure, the more easily Google can keep serving the ad-based money machine.

In other words, the company has to make sure that the speed of its search is really, really fast. Any random search on Google these days takes between 0.12 to 0.06 seconds. Now that is really, really fast. Google does this by indexing the Internet quite well. The magic is in delivering the search results from this index at lightening speed, and that requires an infrastructure — oodles of bandwidth and specialized hardware — that is finely tuned, much like a Formula One Car.

Against this backdrop, it makes perfect sense for Google to build their own servers, storage systems, Internet switches and perhaps, sometime in the future, even optical transport systems. Let me rephrase that: Imagine connecting thousands of hosts (storage and server systems) at speeds of, say, 10 gigabits per second, in a manner that allows any-to-any connections.

The number of racks, fiber, routers and everything in between is mind-boggling. If this system were built using gear from established hardware makers, it would take a superhuman effort to make it all work together. In other words, the sheer cost to keep such a beast going would suck up a major component of the infrastructure.

A better option is to have gear that is customized for your processes, ones in which you have a major operational expenditure advantage. In the telecom bubble, large service providers were brought to their knees by operational expenditures.

With the exception of optical systems, Google has built or is building the gear. It has been rumored to be a big buyer of dark fiber to connect its data centers, which helps explain why the company spent nearly $3.8 billion over the past seven quarters on capital expenditures.

You can argue that building customized gear is an expensive strategy, but when you are the scale of Google, it starts to become less of an issue. Why? Because process-optimized infrastructure ensures that Google’s cost of executing a query keep going down.

To sum it up, Google’s gigantic infrastructure is the big barrier to entry for its rivals, and will remain so, as long as the company keeps spending billions on it. That said, there’s another thing Google could learn from Dell: Maintain the quality of your search results — customers will only put up with shoddiness for so long.

Note #1: Ethan, you are absolutely right about the software aspect of Google architecture, and I was going to do a separate post. This one is already 750 words.

Note #2: Earth2Tech has a post about Google’s vertically integrated green energy strategy.

Written by Baris Karadogan, a partner at Comventures

“I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.”

This is a famous misquote attributed to Thomas J. Watson Sr., then-president of IBM, in an apparent misjudgment of the PC market’s potential. As the story goes, under Watson’s leadership, IBM — which invented the PC — didn’t have a vision as to how big the market could become and let others, especially Microsoft, get the lion’s share of the value creation.

But maybe five computers are all we need. My friend Ray Conley, of Palo Alto Investors, made a good case over lunch one day that the statement could indeed be true if you think of the computer in the cloud sense. Could five computer “clouds” really allow us to do everything we want? The answer is yes, and they can already be found with Google; Amazon; Salesforce.com; either Sun Microsystems or VMWare; and Akamai.

First up is Google (GOOG), for consumer apps. Google can not only take care of all our email, social networking, sharing and blogging needs, but has the means to offer these apps online. Incidentally, Facebook can offer all of these apps as well, save for search. A 2008 prediction could be that they actually do something big on the search front, but I digress.

Next up is Amazon (AMZN) — not for their ecommerce solutions, but for their web services, which I’ve previously compared to semiconductor fabs. They represent the consumer infrastructure cloud. Any consumer Internet app first needs to be hosted somewhere, whether it be on Google or Facebook. Very few companies have the ability to build a big, global data center, but Amazon has one you can use, and pay for by the byte.

With the consumer apps and infrastructure clouds covered, let’s turn to the enterprise side. After all, anybody in front of a PC looks either like an employee or a consumer.

No. 3, therefore, is Salesforce.com (CRM). Just as Google gives you your consumer apps, Salesforce gives you your enterprise apps. Their cloud takes care of all the things you need to get your job done. And just like Google, they are open to third parties who will develop on their platform.

The fourth slot belongs to the enabler of the enterprise infrastructure via control of servers, storage, etc. The owner of this cloud is nebulous. Sun Microsystems (JAVAD) has products and solutions for backend infrastructure, while VMWare is taking care of servers on the front end. I am leaning towards VMWare (VMW), but there is a good case to be made for Sun as well. You take your pick.

The final spot is reserved for the one that gets all the bits to you — the cloud that has the intelligence to move things around. None of the other four work without it. It’s a CDN, and is best represented by Akamai (AKAM).

There you have it. If these companies could completely dominate their spaces, and kill every competitor, you’d be fine doing what you are doing on only five clouds.

OK, so who cares?

Well, from a venture capital investment perspective, if your company can knock out any one of these five, you have estate-making potential on your hands. Even if your company merely complements one of these clouds, you can still do well — either ride their platform or become one of their takeover targets. If you are trying to create a new kind of cloud, however, you may have a problem.

There is a public company investment angle here, too. These companies — call them the “T.J. Watson Portfolio” — are very well-positioned to win over the long term. Just to show you guys I am willing to put my money where my mouth is, follow my profile on zecco.com (covestor version coming soon), and let’s see if I’m right.

Google’s mobile ambitions have by now been widely articulated in the media, and after my initial post, I spent some time on the phone with various people discussing whether or not it made any financial sense for Google to be chasing the wireless dream. Many of the folks I chatted with expressed reservations about Google actually building a network, and felt that the company is using a big stick to get U.S. carriers to get a move on.

The FCC, for instance, has offered Google (GOOG) some measured encouragement in the hopes that the firm’s involvement in the wireless auctions would help push the prices up past the $10 billion mark. Google is, after all, obligated to make at least a minimum bid of $4.6 billion since the FCC agreed to their “Open Access” requirements for the C Block.

Secondly, this is going to be one expensive exercise for them. Assuming they win the 700 MHz auction and it costs them about $5 billion and another $2 billion in network buildout costs — that means a little less than $1 per share in lost income. Of course there is also the question of management focus, something that is much more difficult to quantify. By the way, our good friend, Ben Schacter who follows Google for UBS Research helped with the math here:

Think of it as not getting the interest on $7b and then tax affect it. So assume $7b multiplied by 5% (interest rate), then a 26% tax rate = about $260 million a year in lost income, or well less than $1.00 per share.

I think I am being conservative here. According to UBS estimates, the cost to build out the network is going to be about $25 a pop in urban markets and as much as $40 a pop in suburban markets, adding up to a total of between $8 billion and $10 billion. Of course, the operational costs of maintaining a nationwide network are humungous, never mind the service-support infrastructure.

The more I think about it, the less likely it seems that Google is going to build their own network. My guess is that they are going to try and participate via investments in other efforts. I had outlined one crazy scenario last week. Nevertheless, it is fun to see Google drive the wireless carriers batty with its posturing, and at the same time get what it really wants.

The time has finally come for the world to migrate to IPv6 from IPv4 -– or at least that was the message delivered by a collection of networking experts at the RIPE 55 conference late last month in Amsterdam. Out of this conference came a hilarious and very geeky song about how this change to IPv6 will more than likely cause operations and routing issues for network operators throughout the Internet. Regardless, it appears that the addressing scheme for every device on the Internet may finally be set for a transition — and the networking issues that may ensue could be far-reaching.

Taking a step back, it is absolutely clear that IPv6 offers significant networking advances, such as the ability to provide more addresses for devices on the Internet (3.4×1038 addresses total as compared to IPv4’s 4.2 billion address), an easier way for devices to autoconfigure their own addresses, a built-in mechanism for multicast and data security using IPsec. All of the IPv6 features promise to make the Internet scale better, support new services and have tighter security.

And while that is a good thing for the Internet, what is not so good is the probable pain of transition. After 20 years of building, running and fixing issues on networks running IPv4, moving onto IPv6 for a network operator is like ending of a relationship – painful but inevitable, and with the promise of meeting someone even better right around the corner.

As a simple example, according to a RIPE 55 presentation on the global state of IPv6, the number of prefixes (networks or portions of networks) running the new protocol is close to 1,000. Compare that to the number of global IPv4 prefixes — upwards of 200,000 and counting (and to the networking experts out there, I am aware that the addressing allocations and mechanisms in IPv6 allow for greater aggregation, thus reducing the overall number of global prefixes). Even with the number of prefixes on IPv6 an order of magnitude less on IPv4, there are routing issues that network operators will need to deal with on a daily basis. Those routing problems lead to packets that travel in loops, disappear into routing black holes and are hard for experts to diagnose because of the lack of operations tools and experience. And that is without the widespread use of IPv6 multihoming, the ability for an organization to use two different network operators for connectivity and not commit to a monogamous relationship. Like dating two different people, splitting your packets between two network operators can cause problems as well.

Even vendors that have had IPv6 support in their products for years, such as Juniper (JNPR), still see significant issues on their firewalls and need to resolve them. In fairness, all networking vendors have bugs in nearly every networking protocol — including IPv4 — but the lack of operational experience by the network operators makes debugging these issues harder and more time-consuming. It is clear to everyone that IPv6 is still in its infancy when it comes to global scale and operations. That translates into slower web sites, more downtime and fewer Google (GOOG) ads delivered.

So what is a typical organization to do? If you’ve been focusing on your web 2.0 application and ignoring the network as technology that just works, the time has come to learn about networking and IPv6. If you’re going to have a significant web presence in the next few years, you will want to use more than one network operator for Internet connectivity and that will undoubtedly result in new operational issues as IPv6 networks interconnect, the prefix counts increase and more multihoming gets put to use.

There is a new girl in town, her name is IPv6 and she’s clearly better than your old flame. Yet, like all relationships, there will be some bumps along the way and it will take some time for you to get used to each other. I suspect that we’ll be hearing a few new songs from the networking geeks in the near future, perhaps this time with a tune that you can dance to.