Last week on of my students --Chapin Kaynor-- asked me why Flickr occupies such a key position on this map. Once I looked at the numbers, I found that Flickr has has over 50 mashups with 27 other entities and hence the great position within the network diagram

Amazon has been very busy the last couple of months. First there was an announcement for dowloadable music. This was followed by downloadable video. John Musser at programmable web has written about the S3 (simple storage service) API from Amazon. This week it was the Fidelity Store service making Fidelity the first service provider on top of the Amazon platform. A pattern here is that Amazon is using its existing infrastructure to lauch many new services. Amazon is truly exploting the web services concept.It already has Alexa for providing an index to the web and many APIs are being used by other service providers.

 

On March 6th, Google acquired Upstartle the makers of Writely. This gives them one more product for the productivity stack. Google Desktop serves as the OS platform and with GDrive and Gmail Google provides some of the basic functions. Now with Writely and OpenOffice the stack is better integrated because Writely can be used to publish to websites, blogs and wikis. While addressing analysts recently, Eric Schmidt said that they make 1 to 2 acquisitions a week. In his mind this is a good way to hire talent that is committed to a project.

Recently news of a new service called GDrive leaked out from the Googleplex. This service would allow users to backup their data on to Google servers and can be accessed from any place. Given that most of us with important data on our desktops have some kind of backup device anyway, this would be a no-brainer. Google's desktop search  team has already announced an idea to allow users to store an index of their office and home machines on Google's servers. The GDrive idea dovetails well with that plan. Google's database of intentions is growing by the day! Now hackers needn't bother breaking into individual desktops, they can simply focus on Google's servers :-)

 

 

Oracle just annouced a plan to release a prodcut -- Secure Enterprise Search -- to compete in the enterprise search market. This product will be targeted at the "deep web" where Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, emails and database records reside. Oracle hopes to index these potential  knowledge sources and provide a Google like interface to mine through them. This product puts them on a collusion course with MSFT, YHOO and GOOG.