The beta has been out for a couple weeks but the upgraded FriendFeed site went live today. Details are available on their official blog. I just started into the social networking thing in the last couple weeks. Scoble has been raving about FriendFeed for a while now. I’ve also started using Twitter, and LinkedIn.
So far I like FriendFeed quite a bit. I’ve subscribed to a couple high volume people like Scoble, Arrington, and O’reilly to get a feel for the service. There can be some quite good conversation around the posts. What I like the most is the ability to pull in multiple feeds, the bookmarklet which makes it easy to post interesting sites, and the “like” functionality to rate content and posts. The main reason I stayed away from social networking for a while was I was afraid that being active and providing value would be a major time commitment. On the contrary, since FriendFeed pulls in all my blog and Twitter activity (and nearly any other source I may get into) as well as allowing me to post with one click using the bookmarklet, it doesn’t take too much effort to provide a fairly steady stream of content. You can see to the right of this post what my FriendFeed looks like.
On the receive side, its a different story because if you subscribe to a lot of folks or even just a few high volume folks, it is a fire hose of content and comments. Though I haven’t spent much time with it yet, between groups and saved searches, FriendFeed provides some fairly powerful filtering tools.
So if you find the content of this blog interesting, use the links below to join me over on FriendFeed and Twitter for related topics and content. I’m also looking for folks with similar interests on these services to engage with.
The New York Times magazine has a very interesting article by Tom Vanderbilt on datacenters and the infrastructures that power today’s online services. Several Microsoft (and former Microsoft) execs were interviewed including Mike Manos, Debra Chrapaty, Daniel Costello, etc.
The article ends with a very insightful comment by Mike Manos:
“We’re at the beginning of the information utility,” he said. “The past is big monolithic buildings. The future looks more like a substation — the data center represents the information substation of tomorrow.”
The links below lead to a series of technical whitepapers on DirectAccess, BranchCache, and Remote Desktop Services in Windows Server 2008 R2.
Networking Resources: DirectAccess and BranchCache
Remote Desktop Resources: Kerberos, User Profiles, RemoteApp
The Exchange team has published a whitepaper on TechNet comparing the power utilization of a typical 8 server physical Exchange environment compared to a a virtualized environment using the same number of logical processors but on only two Hyper-V host servers. The result: a 50% reduction in power usage (excluding storage). If storage is included it was a 37% reduction.
The purpose of the test was to isolate on power consumption scenarios so other things like cooling and space savings weren’t considered but would also be measurable benefits. There is also a link to general guidance on virtualizing Exchange as it makes sense in a lot of scenarios but not all.