Account: cool

Sunday, 26 June 2011

Are Facebook and Twitter now too mainstream to be cool?

Everybody loves to get behind the hot young start up and embrace it as if it is the greatest thing in the world since sliced bread. Turntable.fm and Instagram are the latest examples with people in-the-know shouting and screaming from the rooftops about how amazing they are.

When you see something special for the first time you just get that feeling in your stomach that you are in at the ground level and you are bursting with excitement waiting for the rest of the world to find out. People used to have that same feeling with Twitter and before that with Facebook. For a couple of years the online geeky community (I don’t say geeky in a negative way because I was one) knew about Twitter, understood its power and every piece of news coverage or mainstream attention was cheered as if we all owned shares in the company. Facebook was exclusive at the start too. Only my young cool in the know friends were on it for a couple of years. Most people looked at us talking about Facebook as if we had two heads and presumed it was some passing trend for kids. We’ve hit a very different situation now where Facebook and Twitter have very much hit the mainstream and for the first time in my recollection the press is starting to turn a little on them both…

Bad Press

It’s only really started in the last couple of weeks but there have been examples like this one on CNN writing off Facebook and saying that Twitter is the new Facebook. Blogs like Techcrunch have also been ripping in to its PR department. The biggest article though was this one on Inside Facebook which claimed that Facebook’s numbers were on the wane for the first time ever and that they could struggle to grow much further. That one blog post was picked up on blogs all over the world and even made it in to the mainstream media with the picture below featuring a full page story in the Sunday Times about people leaving Facebook and it no longer being cool. Even the people who thought that Twitter was cool at the start are starting to get annoyed with it as you can see from this blog post and the excellent comments below.

No Longer The Underdogs

The problem here for Facebook and Twitter is that they are starting to become so ubiquitous that they are no longer exciting. I remember when mobile phones and SMS came on the scene it was the greatest thing we had ever seen at the time and there was endless buzz. We take SMS for granted now and there is nothing sexy about it and that is where Facebook and Twitter are headed. Ubiquity.

With revenues of over 2 billion and closing in on a billion users Facebook is no longer seen as a start up by some. No longer an underdog. At one stage a couple of years ago it could have gone the same way as a Myspace or a Friendster but it’s everywhere now including weaved in to the fabric of the web. If anything Facebook is the new Google, not in terms of what it does but in terms of a company that has transitioned from start up to big tech giant that makes lots of money. Twitter still has a slight tag of underdog about it but it is also too important as a communication tool to just fade away. Just look at the way that Apple is baking Twitter in to every single one of its mobile devices. Sure people will start to use it in a different way and it will evolve but it is certainly here to stay.

The Cool Start Ups Are Elsewhere

So Facebook and Twitter are here to stay and will continue to play an important part in all our lives for the next 5 years. When things hit the mainstream in such a way they tend to lose a certain audience. Some people don’t really want to hang around with their mums and family on Facebook and would rather be spinning tracks on Turntable.fm or sharing their drunken photos on something like Instagram with their young friends. Facebook and Twitter are so big now that they stifle any innovation and just copy features that work from around the web. The really cool things happening in social media are happening in small 10 people start ups which could see another break out success come soon along the lines of a Twitter or a Facebook.

Listen out for all the early adopters shouting about them but if it is a mainstream audience that you want the best bet is Twitter and Facebook.

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Forget cool, OpenFlow and networking is now hot!

Over a year ago on this blog, I posed the question, Can Networking Be Made Cool Again? A lot has changed since then. The pendulum has swung back, and now networking is hot. In the past year Cisco hit a major speed bump, the OpenFlow networking protocol has burst into the popular consciousness and the first new wave of startups has emerged to meet the changing requirements of the large-scale, highly virtualized data center network.

Many have been waiting for it, but this year, the cracks in Cisco’s dam finally burst open for all to see. The networking giant has lost $60 billion in market cap in the past year, hammered by Wall Street for its flirtations with consumer, collaboration and other noncore businesses. Simultaneously, Cisco flubbed the emergence of the web-scale data center customer. Its UCS servers and Nexus switches are out of touch with these customers’ performance requirements — laden with features they will never use yet must pay handsomely for.

The emergence of OpenFlow

In the same time period, OpenFlow has emerged from the Stanford labs and exploded on the scene. OpenFlow is a protocol that defines how external controllers communicate with switches to program their forwarding tables. The reaction of the networking industry reminds me a lot of what happens when I put a shiny new toy in front of my six-month-old daughter. First she stares at the toy intently, then bats at it a few times, ultimately succeeding in grabbing hold. Then she jams it straight into her mouth. We are currently still in the frantically swatting stage. You’ll know the industry has jammed OpenFlow into its mouth when you see Cisco supporting third-party controllers programming their switches.

Despite the purported revolutionary nature of OpenFlow, the concept of separating the control plane from forwarding is nothing new. One example of this architectural practice is the use of a parallel signaling network for call setup and teardown in the plain old telephone system. An OpenFlow control serves a conceptually similar function for packet switches. It’s ironic to see this decades-old voice concept now wreaking havoc in the data world.

But just because the concept isn’t new doesn’t mean this isn’t an important development. However, OpenFlow itself is just an interface protocol. As Nicira CTO Martin Casado put it, “OpenFlow is about as exciting as USB.” What matters is the value you can deliver in the controllers leveraging it and the potential change in industry structure enabled by the standardization of this interface. Standardization and abstractions allow the emergence of third-party controller vendors who don’t make switches. This is the truly exciting development and the one that scares the incumbent switch vendors, no matter how much lip service they pay to embracing OpenFlow.

Don’t look for the VMware of networking

In most of the discussion around OpenFlow the market seems infatuated with trying to identify the VMware of networking. This makes for splashy headlines but is a flawed analogy. What is really needed before that concept can take hold is the Linux of networking. I am sure that that won’t be the network operating systems from the major vendors, including Cisco’s NX-OS, Juniper’s JUNOS, or Arista’s EOS.

All of this virtualized software is great, but let’s show some respect to the physical layer. Web-scale data centers still need switches — big, dense switches to connect servers. Interop was the coming-out party for OpenFlow, and the number of vendors that showed up for the OpenFlow Lab at Interop this year was impressive. Cisco and Arista were conspicuously absent. Not surprising, since the whole concept behind OpenFlow — taking the control plane and routing computation physically out of the router — is a scary thought for them.

I suspect the next shoe to drop is that the networking industry gets Open Computed. It is inevitable that an open-source hardware architecture for the large chassis switch gets released, likely driven by a consortium of large customers. When combined with the external software control enabled by OpenFlow, this will really shake things up. Once this happens, it will be akin to the shift that took place in the server and database layers in the transition from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0. Early large-scale websites were built with Sun servers and Oracle databases, while today commodity servers and open-source databases are the norm in many environments.

Hurry up and wait

While the disruptions coming to the networking industry are real, it is important not to overhype the speed at which they will take place. These transitions take time, lots of time; Cisco and Juniper are amazing companies, full of world-class technologists and with massive installed bases of customers. They are not going out of business tomorrow because of OpenFlow, nor are they going to sit idly on the sidelines. This isn’t the first time a new technology emerged that purported to be a major threat to Cisco’s dominance. MPLS is a good example of a technology that was supposed to do serious damage to Cisco but that it ultimately embraced and came to lead.

It has been exciting to see networking back in the spotlight again, and I suspect the next year will be even more exciting and dynamic. Two promising startups, Big Switch and Vcider, launched this week at Structure 2011, and a number of others are still percolating in stealth mode.

Perhaps the most exciting promise of the software-defined networking movement is simply that it will increase the velocity of innovation in the industry. As the promise of these new technologies is delivered in the next 12–24 months, they will find use cases that are not restricted to the largest web properties but reach into other applications, including network security and potentially all the way down into the enterprise wiring closet. It has the potential to disrupt and reshape the industry. This means networking is cool again.

Alex Benik is a principal at Battery Ventures.

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