The social network problem

Social networks like Facebook and Google+ have always been known as huge data mining machines and that they don’t have very strict privacy policies, meaning that:

• you are not informed what happens with your data (what it is used for) when you enter it,
• you don’t have full control over your data (deletion is very hard to impossible, you can’t rely that “deleted” data is really erased etc.),
• data may be given to third parties (like application providers) or wrong people without your (explicit) consent.

“Don’t use social networks” is not a solution in my opinion because social networks are media like any other media, and they have advantages (that’s why they shall – and will – be used) and dangers (that’s what should be minimized).

Diaspora – a solution?

So, I was very happy when I heard the first announcement of …

Just yesterday, I’m sure many saw Twitter opensourcing their MySQL implementation. It is based on MySQL 5.5 and the code is on Github.

For reference, the database team at Facebook has always been actively blogging, and keeping up their code available on Launchpad. Its worth noting that the implementation there is based on MySQL 5.0.84 and 5.1.

At Twitter, most of everything persistent is stored in MySQL – interest graphs, timelines, user data and those precious tweets themselves! At Facebook, its pretty similar – all user interactions like likes, shares, status updates, requests, etc. are all stored in MySQL ( …

Funding for BlazeMeter and Digital Reasoning. Red Hat goes unstructured. And more.

# BlazeMeter announced $1.2m in Series A funding and launched the a cloud service for load and performance testing.

# Digital Reasoning announced a second round of funding to help develop its Hadoop-based analytics offering.

# Red Hat announced the availability of Red Hat Storage Software Appliance, based on its recent acquisition of Gluster.

# Red Hat also …