Posts tagged Private
Google to Talk Privacy Policy in Private with Congress
Feb 1st
The great Google privacy policy change freak out continues. In the latest developments, Google has defended its changes in a letter to Congress, and will send two Google reps to Washington, D.C., to give a “closed-door briefing” on the new policy.
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CA, VCE Private Cloud Package to Go Toe-to-Toe Against Exalogic, CloudBurst
Jan 31st
The latest release by CA Technologies of a product called Private Cloud Accelerator is being described, by folks who only read the press release and skipped the details, as a new catalog for rapidly provisioning and deploying services over a company’s private cloud. But what’s really nice for a prospective customer to have at a time like this, is a private cloud.
So the real news from CA today is actually this: By means of a partnership deal with Vblock infrastructure platform maker VCE, CA is making available an all-in-one, rapidly deployable private cloud package, both hardware and software, that competes directly with out-of-the-box solutions from IBM, HP and Oracle.
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“VCE is competing directly with Oracle’s Exadata and Exalogic offerings, the whole app-plus-hardware in a box. It’s competing with HP’s CloudSystem Matrix and IBM’s CloudBurst platform,” states Trevor Bunker, CA’s chief technology architect, in an interview with RWW. “And why CA’s partnered with VCE is, we’re the only software ISV at this point to have this level of software integration and partnership with VCE.”
Everybody, get in the box
VCE’s Vblock systems combine ready-to-deploy cloud infrastructure systems from multiple vendors, so specialists in their respective fields may participate in an all-in-one option. The hardware is provided by Cisco’s Unified Computing System with its Nexus brand switches; its storage is EMC Symmetrix VMAX and Symmetrix VNX; and its virtualization layer is based on VMware vSphere. What Private Cloud Accelerator adds to this mix is an almost turnkey approach to provisioning hardware for specific roles in just a few days’ time.
Bunker tells us that scalability is often the easy part. The hard part comes when an enterprise has to present a storefront for its customer. At that point, big or small doesn’t really matter so much as whether the service is available, reliable and personal.
“How can they put up a storefront – offer up services, charge for services, measure and manage the demand for those services? You can think of CA Private Cloud Accelerator as a sales office inside an apartment complex. We’re accelerating the deployment and the operation of the Vblock.”
Bunker’s company is known for advising customers on how to jump-start failed virtualization and cloud migration projects. So he notes that one of the problems CA has often helped customers face down is the lack of content – more specifically, the trouble with getting a working service started once the hardware is provisioned.
“We can show a customer all these great end-to-end workflows, these wonderful integrations that they can do. And they’d look at it and say, ‘I love it! I want that!’ They’d buy it. But what the industry would sell them is a big, blank canvas. And that upset customers, because they were engaged in months – if not years – of customization, professional services. They never really got what they want, so there was a sort of general dissatisfaction with a lot of automation solutions.”
Virtual portal
The system which CA jointly developed with VCE is centered around a self-service portal that CA demonstrates being used on an iPad rather than a PC. The portal serves as a simple catalog for spinning up a role, such as a database server, a test environment for SAP software, or a lab environment for Oracle E-Business suite. “We take all the processes of provisioning, configuration and automation all the way through the Vblock, and actually deploy those services,” says Bunker. “If you’re going to run a big platform like the Vblock that will run multiple applications or, if you’re a large enterprise, support multiple departments, there’s common tasks like creating virtual machines, provisioning storage, loading the software, setting up the storage, common, operational IT tasks that everyone has to do. We saw an opportunity to use our combined best practices and industry knowledge to embed those process workflows into the solution.”
Since CA expects its Accelerator customers to either immediately or eventually resell their services to their own clients, it integrates billing procedures and business services. “A lot of billing solutions out there typically tend to support one, and only one, approach to billing. But it’s not a one-size-fits-all world. We actually support both assets for resource-based billing and consumption-based billing,” the chief architect explains. One example of the difference involves a customer providing e-mail as part of its service. The customer could pay a flat fee per month for a given number of users, or subscribe to the service on a per-user, per-megabyte basis. The former involves pre-allocation and more conventional asset-based budgeting, which some customers prefer, and which quite a bit of legacy software still requires; the latter helps businesses move the billing process from capital to operating expenditures.
A few weeks ago, we reported on public sector entities, such as cities and municipalities, that are recouping their costs for cloud migration by pooling their resources for multi-tenancy, and also selling their over-provisioned services back to storage and compute pools for use by other agencies. We wondered, would CA’s billing system enable these cities to set themselves up as cloud service resellers more quickly?
“One of the things we designed into our system is the ability to take that apartment model that I mentioned before – like having multiple houses with a common water and electric supply, and be able to support n-tier tenancy,” answers Trevor Bunker. While some multi-tenancy models only support “parents” and “tenants,” the n-tier model enables “super-tenants” to lease services to other businesses, and also business divisions to lease services to other divisions within the same business. “We provide that visibility into the assets, the licensing, and support that from a provisioning and configuration perspective.”
The overarching point that Bunker makes here is that the CA system’s catalog, unlike others, offers services intended for use by administrators, not just by end customers, especially the newly-crowned IT managers who are scrambling to just get started. “How do I actually set this up, take this stand-alone application on the physical server, migrate it into the Vblock, virtualize it, and then make it ready for multiple people to consume? There’s not many others out there who are looking to help those people with content.”
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SEO Positive Gets Aristopaws Contract – Private Equity Hub (press release)
Jan 30th
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SEO Positive Gets Aristopaws Contract
Private Equity Hub (press release) SEO Positive has taken on a contract with Cheshire, UK-based online pet boutique Aristopaws. The team approached SEO Positive, as they were concerned about their presence within the major search engines and worried that their website wasn't converting … SEO Positive Extends Copywriting Team |
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PentOS “Just Add Water” Private Cloud Released, Dell Signs On as Partner
Jan 19th
The creator of the Piston Enterprise Operating System, or PentOS, was lauded for his contributions in helping to create cloud computing itself, through the pioneering NASA Nebula project. There, NASA first demonstrated how to fit a data center cluster in an ordinary shipping container, proving the space program can still produce benefits today.
But last year, Joshua McKenty one-upped himself. He fit an almost entirely self-provisioning cloud operating system for a common rack of servers, onto a USB thumb drive. You plug the thumb device into a PC, edit maybe three lines of a text configuration file, save it, unplug it, plug it into the main server in the rack, and turn it on.
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In a very clever demonstration video (above), McKenty demonstrates what I call the “Just Add Water” nature of the configuration process. On Wednesday, Piston Cloud’s PentOS – the first commercial implementation of OpenStack, born from NASA Nebula – emerged from public beta into general availability. In addition came news that Dell has signed on as a provider of Piston Cloud-certified hardware. (I remember the hoops Dell’s predecessor, PCs Limited, had to jump through to become DOS-certified.)
On the first birthday of Piston Cloud’s existence, in an effort to share news as to the progress of its efforts toward the goal of world domination, company officials have provided via Twitter this detailed glimpse of its own progress chart, shown here as originally depicted through the medium of frosting.
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Microsoft SC 2012 to Support Multi-Hypervisor Private Cloud for a Flat Fee
Jan 17th
In a move to stay competitive in a cloud landscape that looked to be blowing it away, Microsoft this morning is making important strategic shifts that could advance its position in a two-front war against both VMware and Amazon. Today the company is making available a release candidate for its System Center 2012 administrative suite, which will utilize a new fabric controller (FC) for private cloud architectures.
This new FC will be hypervisor-agnostic. Up until today, Microsoft’s private cloud product was called “Hyper-V Cloud,” and was centered around the Hyper-V hypervisor. Today, as the company’s corporate vice president tells ReadWriteWeb, the new SC 2012 Datacenter edition will feature a completely renovated, simplified licensing model, now supporting unlimited virtual machines for the same, flat fee.
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Trying to smash VMware flat
“The biggest innovation we did in System Center 2012 is, we dramatically simplified the licensing and pricing,” Microsoft CVP Brad Anderson tells RWW. The existing edition had eight different SKUs, enough to compel customers to literally attend seminars about which versions to purchase. With the 2012 edition, there will be the Standard and Datacenter SKUs, the only difference between them being the number of OS instances their licenses will allow. Standard will be limited to 4; Datacenter will be unlimited.
“One thing that we see every year, when we look at the reports, is the VM density-per-server continues to get higher and higher. It’s very common right now for us to see a single server hosting up to 20 VMs,” says Anderson. “As customers increase their use of virtualization, with SC 2012, their costs do not increase. If they’re using VMware, their costs go up linearly.”
Last August, VMware adjusted its virtual machine licensing model to one based on the amount of virtual machine memory, or vRAM, each instance consumed. These increments are multiplied by the number of VMs consuming the vRAM, so the result is a per-VM licensing fee.
Microsoft’s case is essentially this: As your VMware private cloud scales up, so do your fees. As Microsoft’s alternative scales up, its fees stay flat. Though consultants today still recommend a VM-to-processor ratio of about 4:1, arguably that number does tend to go much higher anyway. Microsoft’s estimate of the licensing costs an enterprise would incur for VMware vSphere 5 and related tools, for 42 2-way 6-core servers running Windows Server and a respectable 6:1 VM consolidation ratio over a three-year period, is $3,242,000. Microsoft says its alternative package, which incorporates the same functionality over the same three-year period, would be $424,704.
“With System Center Standard, it’s one price and you have the ability to manage 4 OS instances,” reiterates Anderson. “With System Center Datacenter, it’s one price independent of the number of VMs you put on that server.”
A tighter-knit fabric
It was Windows Azure, the company’s PaaS platform, whose architecture pioneered the concept of the fabric controller – a kind of overseer for cloud resources across servers, and in some respects the opposite of the hypervisor. Now, it’s a common part of private cloud architecture, with Nova serving as the compute FC, and Swift and Glance serving as the storage FCs, for OpenStack. That open source architecture has made significant headway, presenting more of a threat than Microsoft to VMware’s dominance during 2011.
Now, Microsoft’s System Center 2012 will integrate a fabric controller that enables administrators to pool compute, storage, and network switching capacities, and delegate segments of those pools to organizational units in Active Directory. Here is where Microsoft made a difficult decision, knowing that the size of the available market for potential hybrid cloud deployments where only Hyper-V is the hypervisor, is probably next to nil.
“As a design point, we specifically called out that customers will be using multiple hypervisors,” Anderson tells RWW, “from Microsoft, from VMware, from Xen, and with public cloud resources. So we’ve architected the product to be aware of that, but also to give visibility to IT to bring the capacity that is running on multiple virtualization infrastructures, together into one cloud.”
As we saw last year with OpenNebula, about the only way a VMware competitor is going to gain ground is by supporting multiple hypervisors.
Hosting persistently
As we reported last week, we expect Microsoft to soon make generally available a feature that entered public beta in early 2011, called VM roles. This feature would essentially enable Windows Azure to host an application, such as SharePoint or Lync, perpetually even as compute resources are managed and relocated.
One big indicator that this release may be imminent, as Brad Anderson tells us, is System Center 2012′s direct support for hosting applications as services through private or hybrid clouds. Although Azure has historically been perceived as a PaaS service for companies deploying .NET applications in the cloud, Anderson says SC 2012 may be utilized for both PaaS and IaaS hybrid deployments involving Azure. It’s on the IaaS layer that enterprises may host applications as services.
“You can actually create a model that says, ‘Here’s this three-tier application with a Web tier, a middle tier, a data tier, there’s this many servers, and this much capacity for each one of those tiers.’ That model will actually be consistent and applicable into that VM role kind of model in Azure as we go forward,” he states. “So the same model that you build in System Center for your private cloud will be able to run those VM roles in Azure as we move forward.”
As Anderson explained, there are certain “commonalities” in Microsoft’s models of the private and public cloud – components which the company will ensure can be reused in the same way when transitioning between private, hybrid, and public cloud architectures: 1) identities in Active Directory; 2) VM consistency (for easier replication); 3) management tools compatibility; and 4) development tools support.
The Release Candidate of SC 2012 is expected to be deployed among 100,000 servers. Once validation is complete, final release is expected to be within the first half of 2012. “What I’ve been telling people,” remarks Anderson, “is, that doesn’t mean June 32nd.”
VMware is a ReadWriteWeb sponsor.
Discuss
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Yobongo Opens Global Chat & Private Rooms, “iPhone Is Just The Start”
Jan 3rd
Friday night, New-Year’s-Eve Eve, I had just stepped away from my blogging station when Yobongo CEO Caleb Elston recommended I open the app. That’s interesting, I thought to myself. I never had to download an update. I’ve been watching Yobongo since it launched. It has only been open in Austin, New York and San Francisco since its debut, but I’ve kept my version updated, anyway. When it launched in my area, I didn’t want to miss it.
So when I opened Yobongo on Friday, my first thought was, There must be a Web app in here somewhere. My second thought was, Oh, wow! Global Yobongo chat and private rooms are open to everyone! So that’s the news. You can now use Yobongo no matter where you are, although the location-specific rooms are still only in select cities. But there’s more. As Caleb told me coyly, “iPhone is just the start” for Yobongo. “We want to help people communicate more efficiently,” Elston says, and that means everybody.
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I was wrong about the Web app part. Elston explained to me that they simply put some switches to enable the new functionality later. But I was barking up the right tree. Yobongo uses links sent via email and SMS to connect users. That makes it easy for Yobongans – a word I just made up – to communicate across different device platforms. For now, it’s still iPhone only, but Elston has given me the distinct impression that this won’t be the case for long.
The Transition From Texting
I’m home in Atlanta for the holidays, and, fortunately, so are tons of my friends. Now that I finally could, I decided to beta test Yobongo with them. When Elston contacted me, I was on my way to see those friends at the time, and a great many of them have iPhones. So I created a private chat room for us, invited them all via a Web link in an SMS message, and told them what Yobongo does.
“It’s a live, persistent chat room,” I told them. “There are public rooms and private rooms.” I was improvising based on the new version. “There’s a global room now, and soon, there will be local, neighborhood-based rooms, so you can meet people around you. We can use this private room I made, and it also has direct messages.” They got the idea.
We already used Apple’s native iMessage for this, but group texting is annoying. It’s hard to tell who sent the message, some people don’t have group messaging turned on, et cetera. The new Yobongo features made the transition easy. It just used the contacts on my phone. I could send them invitations via SMS or email, and when they clicked on the link and downloaded the free app, they were in.
A Sense of Place
My friends are geeks in that they are the kind of people who have smartphones. But they aren’t geek geeks. They consider my obsession with the details and minute improvements of applications to be somewhat embarrassing. For my part, I think that makes them perfect beta testers.
I brought in a Web designer, a pro photographer, a third-year medical student, a senior congressional staffer and an Interscope-signed rock drummer. That’s a pretty good range of the geek spectrum, and only one is as OCD about apps as I am.
To my delight, the adoption was instantaneous. Everyone remarked on how the faces and simple bios, as well as the graceful, in-line photos, created a feeling of being together. When I explained that the goal Yobongo declared at launch was to bring new people together based on location, they understood. You could meet people here and then keep in touch with them, as well as bring your outside friends into the conversation.
Some Compromises
I won’t overlook the negatives. Some of the less native-feeling functionality had downsides that put a few bumps in the road. All my guinea pigs friends were frustrated by the app’s tendency to refresh when launching instead of bringing you back to your last screen. This morning, I noticed that the performance was a bit faster, and I could leave the app briefly and get right back to where I was. It doesn’t feel all the way native yet – though Elston assures me it is – but it’s getting there.
Another feature we want is access to the address book on the front screen, so we can invite our friends straight into private messages. As it is, you have to invite them through a private room first, and then you can message them. Presumably, when the beta period is over, the prominent ‘Feedback’ button can be replaced with this. In the meantime, Yobongo feels like exactly what it is: a work in progress by creative people who are open to suggestions.
Beta, But Beautiful
The global Yobongo room is clearly labeled as a beta, and the local rooms for your location are still in the menu, even if they aren’t open yet. So Yobongo currently feels like a sandbox. That is to say, it’s childlike, a little messy, playful and fun. Meet people, mess around, take pictures of your burritos, who cares? Talking to strangers in IM is good practice for real life.
I met Elston for coffee in San Francisco last October, and we discussed awkwardness. That’s the problem he was talking about solving with Yobongo. Awkwardness is in the mind, we agreed, and communication is the cure. Text messaging is awkward. It’s hard to type with thumbs, auto-correct can be hilarious and embarrassing, and, with groups, it’s hard to tell who said what. The little touches of Yobongo warm up the medium.
My friends and I planned our whole New Year’s Eve in our Yobongo room. And now that we’re starting to fly back to our respective new homes, we’re still using it, sharing little updates and hanging out live with one another for a few minutes at a time. It’s almost like we never left.
iPhone Is Just The Start
Thanks to Yobongo, Twitter, Instagram and a little bit of real life, I’ve gotten to know some of this team. The Yobongo people care about quality. They meditate in the office. They wouldn’t make compromises without a reason. So I know there’s something behind this functionality, the reconnecting on launch, the email and SMS invitations, things that the iPhone can do more natively, but Yobongo doesn’t.
“I’m just going to ask this straight up,” I said to Elston. “Is all this Web and email and SMS stuff setting the stage for a cross-platform adventure?”
“iPhone is just the start,” he replied. He followed with the Yobongo mantra, “We want to help people communicate more efficiently,” and then he changed the subject. “Standing in line for a burrito,” he said, and he sent me a picture.
If you have an iPhone, visit the App Store and try out Yobongo with your iPhone-wielding friends. See if it’s as natural for you as it was for me and mine. And non-iPhone folks should stay tuned, because that burrito pic was some serious sleight of hand.
How do you communicate with groups of friends at once?
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Turn Your WiFi Network Into A Twitter-Like Private Messaging Platform
Jan 3rd
Internet users usually think of Wi-Fi networks as either open (hey, let’s steal Internet from our neighbor instead of paying for it!) or closed (only those with a password can access the Internet). If you leave your network open, how often do you actually know the people who are also logged on?
Wifis.org, a new site created and operated by Berlin-based Mathias Nitzsche and “Robert,” turns your WiFi network into a contact form of sorts, making you accessible to others via private messages that are transmitted through your WiFi network. To create an account on WiFis.org, login using your Facebook or Google account.
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After you have logged on account, go to your wireless router or modem and change your Wi-Fi network’s name (SSID). This won’t change anything about the service itself.
Should Wi-Fi networks be more social? WiFis.org seems like it might be more useful for a Wi-Fi network you would access while traveling. Take the case of hotel lobbies, for instance. If anything, you may want to stop sharing your files with others in the lobby, but you still may want to find some way to connect with people around you in a less-than-awkward fashion.
WiFis.org is not designed for the hotel experience, however. It’s best for the everyday home Wi-Fi user who might not know who their neighbors are, and might actually want to.
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Nexage Targets Mobile Ads to Premium Publishers With Private Exchange
Dec 14th
Mobile advertising platform Nexage is releasing a private exchange to enable premium publishers and developers to optimize advertising that best fits their businesses. Nexage believes it can help premium publishers make the most money off their mobile apps and games and by taking first-party publishing data and making it available to advertisers to help broaden the targeting and reach of its real-time-bidding platform.
Nexage’s private exchange is about monetizing app data straight from the publisher. The company’s goal is to make advertising the dominant form of application monetization by the end of 2012. Yet, Nexage is only shooting for the large publishers (it has Rovio’s business for ads in Angry Birds) meaning that the app publisher middle class will not be able to benefit from Nexage’s private exchange.
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The real-time-bidding exhange (RTB) will allow publishers to take advantage of dynamic price floors to optimize performance and screen ads that are being served to manage brand safety. For instance, a family oriented game probably does not want advertising for Cialis popping up without warning.
The Nexage Exchange has grown from 8 billion monthly impressions in August to more than 12 billion impressions as of this week. It has liquidity for more than 200 publishers and 125 demand resources. Bid volumes on the exchange are growing at 71% per month and revenues are growing along with the bid at 70% per month.
What this all means is that advertising is starting to become a viable source of revenue for premium publishers. Nexage defines premium publishers as those that do more than 10 million ad impressions a month (with exceptions). The company told ReadWriteMobile that there will be an announcement in early 2012 for a advertising vertical designed to help monetize the application and developer middle class. The private exchange is not the answer for the middling developers of the world.
The nature of an RTB platform is that there is no real notion of lost inventory. Nexage does not deal with the long tail of mobile advertising. Hence, fill rates are not a concern to the company. Nexage sees mobile advertising moving the way of the exchange, giving buyers the chance to bid on the ads that appear on their platform. Web advertisers are familiar with this concept as it is basically what Google has built its empire upon with AdWords and AdSense. Google serves mobile ads through its AdMob arm. In September, Google announced that it was separating its mobile advertising and Web advertising arms so that AdMob would be purely focused on mobile while AdSense remained a Web property.
“I do think this marks an important point of maturation for the industry, especially as it catalyzes premium publishers that have to work through how to (safely) scale and manage integrated channels with their direct sales force,” said Victor Milligan, the chief marketing officer at Nexage.
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Bottlenose Intelligent Social Dashboard Launches Private Beta
Dec 12th
In the words of Nova Spivack, we are approaching The Sharepocalypse. The real-time Web sounded like a great idea, but it has become impossible to manage. The success of social media has proven, ironically, to be its biggest challenge. The services we already use are getting busier, and whole new networks are popping up all the time. Email used to be the only problem. Today, the info streams are legion.
It’s hard enough being a normal user, but some have millions of people tweeting at them! How are they supposed to process all those messages? In the Information Age, you’d think more data would be a good thing, but on the social Web, the opposite is true. But the aforementioned Nova Spivack – along with co-founder Dominiek ter Heide – has just unveiled Bottlenose, and it could be the tool that helps us avert The Sharepocalypse in the nick of time.
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Stream Intelligence
Bottlenose is a new social media dashboard for influencers of all stripes. But it’s not just for posting and reading; it helps you filter and manage your networks with semantics and machine learning. It’s all Web-based, written in HTML 5 and Javascript. It does the data crunching on the browser side (for the non-pro users), so you get native performance behind these major operations reading and parsing your stream.
You log in to your social networks – Twitter and Facebook only at first – and Bottlenose begins crawling your stream. You can also add RSS/Atom feeds to bring in entries from websites. Other social networks are coming soon, and you’ll even be able to pull in email eventually.
You can view your full real-time feed and post to it as normal. Bottlenose knows how to filter the stream by media type, letting you pull out news, videos and pictures. You can add rules, just like Gmail filters or iTunes smart playlists, and save those searches. You can go even further with intelligent “assistants,” which provide suggestions based on your interests and social graph, which Bottlenose learns by itself.
Does “intelligent assistant” sound familiar? That’s no coincidence; Bottlenose co-founder Nova Spivack helped start the incubator that gave birth to Siri. This is an oversimplification, but think of the way Siri uses semantic processing to understand what you’re looking for and apply it to your entire social media stream. Bottlenose assistants can do that for you.
And that’s just the beginning.
Navigate By Sonar
With all these semantically loaded messages pouring in all the time, our social streams can reveal connections much more subtle and interesting than manual filters can provide. On Bottlenose, that’s where the Sonar feature comes in.
Every stream view on Bottlenose can be displayed as a Sonar view, which shows the relationships between the topics (or hashtags, or mentions) at which you’re looking. More relevant topics are displayed larger, and the web of connections can be zoomed into and explored.
Finding What’s Relevant
All these features are various ways of sorting your overloaded stream to pull out only the posts that are interesting. For example, if you get too many Twitter mentions to read every day, you can create a rule to show only mentions from people with more than 5,000 followers, or only with Klout scores above 40, and just read that stream.
Bottlenose can also provide rich information about a single user at a glance. In one screen, you can see a bio, follower stats, Klout score, and a Sonar view of all the various topics and people that person mentions.
Not enough features for you? Plug in a new one. A few plug-ins are available already, such as Bit.ly link shortening, but this platform is going to be totally extensible. The API isn’t open yet, but it will be.
Who Needs Bottlenose?
Bottlenose is freemium! Hooray! That means regular folks can use it for free. The pricing is based on storage, like Dropbox’s model, so the free account will be enough for most people. The consumer version does all its data processing at the edge – meaning, in your browser – so you get pretty good performance without putting too much strain on Bottlenose servers. The free version runs only when you’re logged in.
For the pro folks, a low monthly subscription model is coming in Q3 of 2012. That version will run in the cloud, crunching your streams 24/7, and it will offer as much storage as needed. Further down the road, there will be an enterprise version, offering centralized management, integration with other applications, and detailed analytics and reporting.
This kind of tool will only be more important in enterprise settings in the future. Gartner reports that, by 2014, social networking will replace email in 20% of enterprises as the main way to communicate. That shift is already taking place.
Stop The Streampocalypse
The Streampocalypse is inevitable without more intelligent ways to manage it. Bottlenose has built what it calls a “StreamOS,” an operating system of sorts for the way we manage the downpour of real-time messages. It’s positioned in the middle, more intelligent than basic consumer dashboards like TweetDeck and HootSuite, but more manageable, extensible and affordable than hardcore enterprise software.
So, do you want in? I thought so. Bottlenose is launching in private beta, but if your Klout score is high enough, you can walk right in. If not, we’ve got a few invites to give out. Visit Bottlenose.com and sign up with the code readwriteweb while supplies last.
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Facebook Testing Private Messages For Pages
Dec 12th
Facebook just confirmed with us that it’s testing a feature that would allow people and Pages to communicate privately. This update was first spotted by communications agency WeAreSocial.sg. The private messaging feature would give customers the opportunity to speak privately with page owners. This is actually another Twitter-like move by Facebook.
On Twitter, brands that follow their followers back can easily communicate through private DM messages. On Facebook, however, most of the conversation between brand and user takes place on the wall, something that not all customers may feel comfortable with.
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The other positive aspect of private messages for brand pages is that every comment doesn’t get swept into the Facebook news feed for all of a user’s friends to see. For brands that are looking to promote positive notes from fans, however, a positive message sent privately doesn’t help exposure.
Not all brands have to comply with private messages, however. Page owners will be given the option for private messages.
A visitor doesn’t even have to “Like” a brand’s page in order to send a private message. Every sent message ends up in the Messages inbox along with notes from Facebook friends. The page receives a notification once the message has been sent.
WeAreSocial.sg reports that this feature is only available in Asia, suggesting that this may be an East-to-West rollout like Facebook Timeline.
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