Facebook was down this morning for about an hour and a half. Don't know what the cause was yet, but it isn't like site outages are uncommon. Last week there was a power outage in San Francisco that knocked a bunch of prominent sites off-line, including Technorati, SixApart, CraigsList, Yelp and more. While power outages are to be expected, the original explanation for the outages was a lot more fun. None of this makes me feel better about Social Edge's unplanned outage a little while back, it just confirms the need for redundancy. I'll say it again, it confirms the need for redundancy.

Outages, crashes, lost data, downtime - they're as inevitable as death and taxes. If your ISP actually had to deliver on their 99.9% uptime promise, they would be structured a whole lot differently and charge you a heck of a lot more. Ideally, they would have your site running round-robin style on multiple servers in multiple cities on multiple continents. When one went down, traffic to that server would be redirected to the rest. You can do the same by having your site hosted in two places, and having a background task that backs up your primary live server and rebuilding it on your backup server. Then, if your primary crashes and is going to be down for a long time, you could redirect your traffic to the backup and only lose a maximum of a day's worth of data. Not optimal, however. Better to choose an ISP capable of hosting in multiple locations.

Secrets have been a big thing this year. The iPhone was simultaneously the best and worst kept secret in Apple's long history of secret-keeping. Microsoft's Surface slipped under the radar, was announced, and then has gone back into hibernation again. Maybe they're planning a dining room table version for the home. And of course, there's All this fuss over the end of the Harry Potter series. I have to admit that this was confusing to me, as I thought the series had been canceled way back in the seventies:

There is also the small matter of who the real Fake Steve Jobs is. Andy Ihnatko says it's not him. Most people have never heard of Andy, so that's fine. I'm not Fake Steve Jobs either, so there.

One thing that isn't a secret is that Fake Steve Jobs is no fan of OLPC. Fake Steve doesn't think the thing is attractive?

Has he forgotten about the old iBook?

Seperated at birth.

So the big, social entrepreneur related technology secret that ties all of this seemingly random flotsam together? OLPC might be available for sale by the end of the year at a retail outlet near you. See? Even the social sector can have a big secret to keep the world enthralled at the possibility of what might be next. Maybe we'll see an OLPC devcamp, akin to the iPhone Devcamp. Maybe there will be education geared apps made especially for the OLPC and its Opera based browser, akin to the plethora of iPhone web apps that have sprung up. Geeks love this kind of thing, really. If we can't get our hands on something it only makes us want it all the more. Then when we DO get our hands on it, we make all kinds of fun, interesting stuff happens, right up until the next whizbang gadget shows up.

Then we have to learn about recycling, and move on.

For a while there, it looked like Intel was committed to undercutting the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) effort with their own cheap PC. Now, Intel has joined the OLPC board, and will be working hand in hand with Negroponte's organization to further its goal of enabling better education by connecting kids to the outside world via technology. Intel competitor AMD welcomed the move. Which leads me to ask the question, can Intel be a social entrepreneur? What about Exxon?

Intel is going to get good press from this move - a heck of a lot better than they did for trashing the OLPC. From a marketing perspective, it is generally considered bad form to use your corporate girth to try and squash your civically minded 'competitor.' Yes, there is a huge market out there, and Intel would like to be at the forefront of exploiting - I'm sorry, I meant enabling, or maybe tapping into - people who aren't yet on the same economic playing field with folks who line up for a $600 phone.

It's possible that the Intel competitor machine, the Classmate, will be sold alongside the OLPC in order to meet the needs of different markets. Possible, yes, but I'm wondering how long before the Classmate disappears and there is a second OLPC form factor that fills the same niche, with Intel processors inside, while AMD powers the current model and its successors.

The OLPC is filled with innovations that are atypical of what you see come out of corporate environments. An example of this is the Sugar OS:



Why turn down Apple's offer of free Mac OS X? Principle is one thing, but they also wanted to make an interface that made sense for the purposes they envisioned the OLPC filling. By creating their own OS, they're following Steve Jobs' own oft stated (or quoted, paraphrased) mantra that in order to make great hardware you have to make great software.

It will be interesting to see what kind of impact Intel has on the project, outside of funding and any initial efforts at collaboration or development. My guess is that without a champion inside of Intel, their involvement will be finite as their interest falls prey to other, more immediately profitable distractions.

It's been a while since I was an unabashed FileMaker groupie. It's a database program for people who hate databases. Like me.

Yes, I admit it. I don't like databases. Tables, columns, structured queries, errors - blech! It's like working with DOS way back when. Shouldn't somebody throw a comprehensible UI on top of that thing?

They should and they did, years ago, with FileMaker. Alas, it's been a few years since I've used it, because my world turned towards more "powerful" backends. Production caliber Microsoft SQL, Oracle, and MySQL. FileMaker sacrificed speed in its quest for usability. It worked great for a small team or office, but if you ever wanted to take that data and share it out to the untethered masses? Fuhgeddaboutit, the thing just didn't scale.

Ah, but with version 9, that's supposedly all in the past. You can now read and write to external SQL databases - including FileMaker Server 9. And if you need your data to be accessible via a web interface, there is a PHP Site Assistant that'll walk you through creating that interface.

It just came out today, so I haven't tried it out yet, but you can bet that I will be soon. It's always been a great tool for quickly and easily setting up databases and intuitive interfaces into your data. Now it looks like they've made it easier to take that to a more robust and scalable end solution. If so, maybe I'll go back to being a FileMaker groupie again.

I just came across the news this morning that NetVibes is losing one of its CEOs. Came up when I visited my NetVibes page, which of course reminds me that the tech industry is one of the most navel-gazing enterprises on the planet. Some geek somewhere is watching the Macworld Keynote introducing the iPhone on their iPhone and giggling about it. (No, not me. Although this isn't the first time it has crossed my mind...)

More interesting, however, was finding out about the departing CEO's other company, Wikio. At first glance, it seems similar to NetVibes, except that it lets you create a page with a newsfeed based on keywords. That way if someone you've never heard of is blogging about something you care about (say, your organization) you would see it there. This isn't unique, of course, but it is an interesting implementation.

In a nice bit of circular reasoning, I created a feed on Social Entrepreneurship - and then added it to my NetVibes page. You could also add it to your Bloglines, Google Reader or other RSS feed aggregator. You can submit your blog to Wikio to be picked up, and you can add bookmarklets for Wikio to your site like the Digg, De.licio.us, etc. buttons we have in the lower right hand corner. Who knows, maybe we'll add Wikio to our crop of options there.

There is a nice feature that could be nicer - or maybe I just am not figuring it out. You can add Wikio news to your site, but it seems to just be the default news that you can post rather than a tag-feed that you set up. The site is still showing as Beta, so maybe this is still coming - or, like I said, I'm just a bit thick skulled today. Still, it's an interesting start, and might be of use to those who need to keep up with news about their organization or field of specialization while accessing the net on the road from cyber cafes.