The study, which MIT’s Technology Review highlighted in a recent post by the Physics arXiv blog, was done by a pair of researchers in Virginia, Hany SalahEldeen and Michael Nelson. They took a number of recent major news events over the past three years — including the Egyptian revolution, Michael Jackson’s death, the elections and related protests in Iran and the outbreak of the H1N1 virus — and tracked the links that were shared on Twitter about each. Following the links to their ultimate source showed that an alarming number of them had simply vanished.

After two and a half years, 30 percent had disappeared

In fact, the researchers said that within a year of these events, an average of 11 percent of the material that was linked to had disappeared completely (and another 20 percent had been archived), and after two-and-a-half years, close to 30 percent had been lost altogether and 41 percent had been archived. Based on this rate of information decay, the authors predicted that more than 10 percent of the information about a major news event will likely be gone within a year, and the remainder will continue to vanish at the rate of .02 percent per day.

It’s not clear from the research why the missing information disappeared, but it’s likely that in many cases blogs have simply shut down or moved, or news stories have been archived by providers who charge for access (something that many newspapers and other media outlets do to generate revenue). But as the Technology Review post points out, this kind of information can be extremely valuable in tracking how historical events developed, such as the Arab Spring revolutions — which the researchers note was the original impetus for their study, since they were trying to collect as much data as possible for the one-year anniversary of the uprisings.

Other scientists, and particularly librarians, have also raised red flags in the past about the rate at which digital data is disappearing. The National Library of Scotland, for example, recently warned that key elements of Scottish digital life were vanishing into a “black hole,” and asked the government to fast-track legislation that would allow libraries to store copies of websites. Web pioneer Brewster Kahle is probably the best known digital archivist as a result of his Internet Archive project, which keeps copies of websites dating back to the early days of the web (Kahle also has a related project called the Open Library).

Getting access to social data is not easy

Although the Virginia researchers didn’t deal with it as part of their study, a related problem is that much of the content that gets distributed through Twitter — not just websites that are linked to in Twitter posts, but the content of the posts themselves — is difficult and/or expensive to get to. Twitter’s search is notoriously unreliable for anything older than about a week, and access to the complete archive of your tweets is only provided to those who can make a special case for needing it, such as Andy Carvin of National Public Radio (who is writing a book about the way he chronicled the Arab Spring revolutions).

As my colleague Eliza Kern noted in a recent post, an external service called Gnip now has access to the full archive of Twitter content, which it will provide to companies for a fee. And Twitter-based search and discovery engine Topsy also has an archive of most of the full “firehose” of tweets — although it focuses primarily on content that is retweeted a lot — and provides that to companies for analytical purposes. But neither can be linked to easily for research or historical archiving purposes. The Library of Congress also has an archive of Twitter’s content, but it isn’t easily accessible and it’s not clear whether new content is being added or not.

Twitter has talked about providing a service that would let users download their tweets at some point, but it hasn’t said when such a thing would be available — and even if users did create their own archive in this way (or by using tools like Thinkup from former Lifehacker editor Gina Trapani) it would be difficult to link those in a way that would provide the kind of connected historical information the Virginia study is describing. And it’s not just Twitter: there is no easy way to get access to an archive of Facebook posts either, although users in Europe can request access to their own archive as a result of a legal ruling there.

For better or worse, much of the content flowing around us seems to be just as insubstantial as the clouds that it is hosted in, and the existing tools we have for trying to capture and make sense of it simply aren’t up to the task. The long-term social effects of this digital amnesia remain to be seen.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Shutterstock user Ribah and Flickr user See-ming Lee

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Informa Telecoms & Media analyst Giles Cottle, in this new report on subscription music bundling, writes:

“Despite its promising start, Deezer’s growth has been flat for the past six months, with the service stuck at 1.5 million subscriptions.

“This suggests that some users who initially signed up to Orange to get Deezer free might have been tempted onto other packages once their Deezer/Orange contracts expired. It also suggests that Deezer has had relatively little impact in the UK, where it is up against the much-hyped Spotify.”

Informa says its numbers are estimates, but 1.5 million is the number Deezer itself has been using for a few months now.

Cottle does credit Deezer with growing its subscriber base a little after its UK launch in September, but says it has remained mostly static since the start of the year.

Its previous growth was the result of a domestic French deal in which Orange began bundling Deezer service for its mobile subscribers.

Orange invested in Deezer for 10 percent of the firm in 2010 and found success for both sides by bundling – a strategy it is trying to repeat in the UK and other territories, including Poland, Mauritius and Ivory Coast.

But doing so in some of the less-developed markets where Deezer is trying to gain traction may prove more difficult.

Deezer tells paidContent:

“Deezer is made up of a community of over 20 million users, 1.5 million of whom are paying subscribers. In addition, Deezer has more than 800,000 Facebook fans and 350,000 Twitter followers.”

Spotify has added around 500,000 paying subscribers in around the same period, according to company statements:

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A recent survey by Enterprise Strategy Group found that more than a third of retailers surveyed deploy more than 200 production databases. Across the rest of the industries surveyed, only 15 percent could make that claim.

Steve Stone, former CIO of Lowe’s Home Improvement, can vouch for that abundance of data. Lowe’s processed “something like 46 million line items per week as well as 15 to 16 million unique invoices, he said. “Retailers [do] tremendous analysis around inventory. That isn’t as intuitive — with invoices you can see a sale or transaction but with inventory you need to track it over time to understand if you’re running out of stock. Inventory is probably the largest data set.”

A return of RFID?

Now, as more stores want to allow unattended check-outs a la Apple, they will need better loss prevention, which could mean a resurgence of radio frequency identification (RFID) technology. RFID was one of those next-big things in IT that didn’t really pan out because the readers were expensive and the read-rate failure was high. (The reader had to be really close to the tag). But with stakes getting higher, that calculus might change as retailers revisit the idea of tagging merchandise to enable easy payment and inventory monitoring.

More RFID tags and readers mean even more data. Those tags contain information that can be incorporated into store analysis, said Stone, who is now SVP of cloud intelligence at MicroStrategy. The business intelligence company brought Stone, a former customer, aboard to build out its cloud infrastructure to enable analytics on big data.

Big-box stores may well mimic the Apple model to enable this frictionless commerce. A consumer could use her smartphone to find a leaf blower or washing machine at the store, scan it with the phone for payment and schlep it to the car — all without waiting in a checkout line (or an unpleasant encounter with store security).

Analyzing customer scans in real time, a store could make sure the customer found and accessed the product before leaving in frustration. “If you’re a big store with high racks, and they scan the item they want, you want the item to tell you ‘I’ve been scanned and paid for,’” Stone said. “There’s no other way to do it.”

That information also tells the retailer what products are selling in real time so they can be restocked.

More big data tricks for retailers

Most companies dip their toe into big data when they start analyzing traffic patterns and behaviors on their web sites, Stone said. The next step is usually to run text analytics against Twitter to find and interact with customers who had a bad experience with the business. But Facebook is the motherload of data for retailers.

Facebook gives a retailer all sorts of affinity information about Facebook users who like or follow the company. “You get real tokens for the likes/dislikes of your followers and their friends’ likes and dislikes,” Stone said. All that psychographic (likes and dislikes) and demographic data (location, age, etc.) is invaluable. (MicroStrategy fields a Facebook Gateway analytics tool that runs against that Facebook data.)

“If you know how many of those who like Lowe’s love music, or that 95 percent of them love NASCAR, that’s the kind of thing marketers love. They can use that to target advertising. If you spend your ad dollars on Everyone Loves Raymond and no one watches it, that’s wasted money,” he said.

Steve Stone, SVP of cloud intelligence for MicroStrategy

Jeff Bedell, CTO of MicroStrategy, also sees huge opportunity in Facebook for retail customers: “Twitter is fine for straight sentiment analysis, but what you get with Facebook is [things like] what colleges [your followers] were most likely to attend, the top books read by your people who read The New York Times … it’s very much about the network, analyzing the network versus analyzing the feed. The bulk of marketing activity now is happening through Facebook on the social networking side.”

Stone’s first Facebook promotion for Lowe’s was a huge success as gauged by customer reaction, although it wasn’t without problems. “We did it last year as a precursor to [Black] Friday [and] it nearly brought down our system.” But the net result was positive: Lowes.com business rose a whopping 600 to 700 percent compared to the previous year. That uptick gave it plenty more data to analyze and feed future promotions.

Featured photo courtesy of  Flickr user joiseyshowaa.

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The idea of a stream of constantly changing real-time information wasn’t invented by Twitter, but it’s probably one of the closest approximations of that idea for many users. To some extent, the appeal is the same as any stream: to watch it flow by, to step into it now and then. But there’s also a lot of potential value in that stream if you could capture it and analyze it, and that ‘s where a number of startups and services are focusing their gaze, including ThinkUp — which just launched a 1.0 version — and DataSift, which also just launched. And Gnip plans to sell data from the Twitter firehose to analysts and traders who want to tap into the zeitgeist of the Twitter-sphere.

ThinkUp is an app designed by former Lifehacker editor Gina Trapani, and comes from Expert Labs, the non-profit technology incubator and advisory group run by Anil Dash that has helped the Obama administration (among others) figure out how to use digital technology for social purposes (Dash also runs a consulting firm called Activate media). When installed by an individual user or company, it takes in data from Twitter accounts — as well as Facebook pages and Google+ accounts — then makes it easy to see patterns or to analyze the effectiveness of certain tweets or updates.

ThinkUp tracks and analyzes, but also archives

I’ve been using the app for several months now, and it’s quite fascinating to see the amount of data available. (You can see some of my data here if you are interested.) The dashboard shows the most retweeted content, the times of day when tweets get the most activity, the individual users who respond most, and provides all kinds of charts and graphs for presenting that information visually. For me it’s mostly curiosity, but if you’re running a corporate account, I can see how this kind of data would be hugely useful (the White House has been using it for some time) — and you can export and even embed it easily, since ThinkUp has an open API.

Although the information and insights are important, both Dash and Trapani also mentioned another potential benefit of ThinkUp: It acts as an ongoing archive of all your content, whether it’s tweets or retweets or status updates or even photos and videos. As Dash points out, with any content you upload to a social network of some kind, there’s a very real risk it will one day disappear. And while Facebook and Google let you download your data, Twitter doesn’t provide any way of getting tweets you might have posted in the past. The company’s search only goes back about a week, and even services like Topsy are less than perfect if you want to find a specific message. Says Dash:

The companies behind these networks can, and someday will, destroy all of those moments. Delete them from the record. Forever. With no advance notice… history shows us that it happens. Over and over and over. The clips uploaded to Google Videos, the sites published to Geocities, the entire relationships that began and ended on Friendster: They’re all gone.

In addition to the archiving aspect, however, the really powerful feature that services like ThinkUp can offer is the ability to spot patterns in your Twitter or other social-networking activity. Looking at this data over time could help identify all kinds of different things, particularly for corporate users — what content produced a response and when, who the influencers with respect to your content are. (In what seems to be a veiled reference to Klout’s ranking of users, Dash also said ThinkUp “does not, and will never display some arbitrary score to your profile.”)

DataSift and Gnip also filter and resell the firehose

That’s also the idea behind more ambitious data-filtering services such as DataSift, which was started by British programmer Nick Halstead, which got access to the Twitter firehose as part of a deal with Twitter when it took over the retweet button he created as part of his startup Tweetmeme. DataSift uses semantic filtering to detect patterns in the Twitter stream and is aiming its service at corporations and brands that want to see what kind of reaction their content is getting in social networks (DataSift currently filters just Twitter, but plans to add Facebook and Google+). DataSift launched on Thursday, and is backed by GRP Partners and IA Ventures.

The other company that has access to the full Twitter firehose of data is Gnip, which signed a deal with Twitter to resell that data to companies last year. And Gnip on Thursday announced a partnership with StockTwits (see disclosure below) to provide a feed of both Twitter data and related information from the StockTwits investment community to traders and venture funds who are trying to find patterns in that social activity around stocks or companies. At least one hedge fund has an entire trading strategy that is based on an analysis of Twitter and sentiment related to stocks and the markets.

Not that long ago, Twitter was seen as mostly a social plaything, but as it has become a crucial player in everything from the revolutions of the Arab Spring to the planning and scheduling of television events like the Oscars, it has become more obvious that there is value in that stream, provided you have the right filters.

Disclosure: StockTwits is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Luc Legay

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Stock traders are constantly looking for ways to figure out what the markets are going to do so they can get an edge on everyone else — some even track seemingly unrelated factors like the weather to see which way the wind is blowing when it comes to the stock market. So it’s probably no surprise that now traders are trying to track the giant global conversation known as Twitter in order to figure out which stocks are becoming popular. But is there any evidence that this actually works? A German PhD student says that his analysis shows it can, and he has set up a website called TweetTrader.net to put his theories to the test.

The idea behind tracking Twitter is an appealing one: if millions of people are talking about the things they like or dislike via the service — whether those things are movies, books, food or celebrities — then it’s likely that some proportion of those tweets will be about stocks. Since “sentiment indicators” compiled by brokerage-firm research departments and economists are a big factor in the analysis done by many professional stock traders, the theory is that tracking the comments of individual investors and other observers in real time could provide similar kinds of information.

Timm Sprenger, a doctoral student in the school of management at the Technical University of Munich, recently published a research paper called “Tweets and Trades: The Information Content of Stock Microblogs,” in which he looked at the predictive value of tweets that mention stocks or the overall market. Sprenger and his research partner tracked and analyzed 250,000 tweets a day — over a six-month period — that fit that description, using semantic analysis to try and determine whether they were positive or negative (bullish or bearish, in stock-market terms).

According to Sprenger’s research, the sentiment rankings that his system extracted matched the ebb and flow of the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index fairly closely, and appeared to predict movements in the market by more than a day. The researchers said that any investor who bought or sold using their analysis in the first half of 2010 would have achieved an average rate of return as high as 15 percent. At TweetTrader, which Sprenger set up recently with some fellow students, investors can track the sentiment rankings of various stocks and indexes based on the systems used in his research.

Sprenger’s paper is just the latest study to try and establish a connection between sentiment analysis of Twitter and the movements of the stock market. Last year, researchers from the University of Manchester and Indiana University published a report that looked at the predictive value of sentiment analysis extracted from Twitter (PDF link) compared to the movements of the Dow Jones Industrial Average. The study said that its system could predict the market index with 87-percent accuracy — and not long after the research was published, a hedge fund called Derwent Capital Markets announced that it was launching a fund that would trade based on these kinds of analysis.

The idea behind TweetTrader is similar to StockTwits.com, a service co-founded by entrepreneur Soren Macbeth and venture investor Howard Lindzon (see disclaimer below) as a way to track stock-related commentary and analysis. The site has progressed beyond just tracking or aggregating tweets with stock symbols, however, and has become what Lindzon calls a “social Bloomberg” or a “Facebook for finance” — a social network for those interested in stocks and trading. StockTwits also runs its own platform, something it decided to do after growing dissatisfied with Twitter’s repeated outages.

As I pointed out in my last post on Twitter-based stock analysis, the risk with Sprenger’s approach is that any open system such as Twitter can be “gamed” by those who want to promote certain stocks, just as message boards were in the early days of web-based investing — and just as Google’s search results are by SEO engineers. Anyone pursuing that kind of approach to investing is going to have to take that into account.

Disclosure: StockTwits is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Zach Supancic

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It’s free and easy to get started with Analytics, but there are also a lot of advanced features that can make it even more useful. I’m sometimes surprised by how many people only look at their dashboard page and never really drill down into some of the more interesting details and features. I thought it might be time to do post with a few quick tips for getting more out of Google Analytics.

1. Alerts. If you want to keep on top of your sites and know when something out of the ordinary is happening, you should visit the “Intelligence” section and set up a few alerts. You can configure the service to email or text you when something specific happens. For example, on one of my websites, I have it set to alert me when the number of visitors goes over a certain threshold on any one day. Alerts can be set using most of the many different metrics available in the various reports. You can also apply your alerts to multiple profiles and use them on several different websites.
2. Custom Reports. Don’t just use the built-in reports; create your own custom reports (available in the “My Customizations” menu). Spend a few minutes thinking about what you really want to know, and create a custom report that you can view every time you log in. For example, I have a custom report that shows the unique visitors, new visits, time on page and pageviews for each blog post, and when I drill down into a single blog post, I can see which keywords people used to arrive at the page from search engines. The best thing about these custom reports is that you can share them across your Analytics accounts and use them on multiple blogs.
3. Export. Most of us would probably think about exporting our data as a CSV or XML file that we could use to crunch the numbers in some other application, and Google Analytics can certainly do that. However, it can also be used to create some nicely formatted PDFs of your data that you can send to your manager or your clients. This is a great way to quickly give someone who isn’t familiar with Google Analytics an overview of some specific event or a monthly analytics report with little extra work on your part. My favorite is to create a report by exporting from the dashboard, which gives you a multiple page file with overview numbers and graphs for visitors, traffic sources, maps, content and anything else you’ve added to your dashboard. You can get PDF exports by using the “Export” drop-down menu of any report; you can even export your custom reports.
4. Customize Your Dashboard. You should also take the time to customize your dashboard. First, add any frequently-used reports to your dashboard using the “Add to Dashboard’ button at the top of any report. You can even add your custom reports to the dashboard. Each box on your dashboard also has a very faint and tiny “x” in the upper-right corner that you can use to remove any unwanted information. Now that you have the right information on your dashboard, you can use the upper-left corner of each box to drag the components around to put the ones you want to see first near the top of the page. and less frequently-used items further down the page.
5. In-Page Analytics. I saved the best for last. In-page Analytics is one of my favorite features, since it lets you see where people actually click on your pages. You can find In-Page Analytics under the “Content” section in the left-hand navigation. You can navigate to various pages on your website to get a different view of where people are clicking on your subpages. You can also use the drop-down filter at the top to hide any clicks below a certain percentage to focus on where most people are clicking, or you can create your own filters to only see clicks from new or returning visitors, certain geographies, or based on almost any other available metric.

What are your favorite tips and tricks for squeezing more out of Google Analytics?

The Early Days

Trism: One of the better early entries in iPhone gaming

When the iPhone first arrived on the scene, the quality of games available for the platform varied wildly. It was the wild west of gaming development, and many didn’t know what to do with this new device beyond replicating gaming experiences they’d had in other arenas. So we saw Tetris clones, Bejeweled, and ports of Java games aimed at traditional cellular handsets.

One of our articles about the must-have games for the iPhone near the launch of the App Store tells a tale of kart racers, puzzle games, and clones of popular franchises. Gameloft was in the business of churning out retitled and rebranded versions of console and PC classics, and it was a formula that worked so well major developers like EA took note and started getting in on the action.

How Far We’ve Come

While some things haven’t changed (physics games still show off the real power of the platform), others have. Derivative titles are still successful (look at Gameloft’s Gangstar: Miami Vindication, for instance), but consumers are also clearly rewarding those developers who are focusing on experiences tailored specifically to what the iPhone and iPad bring to gaming.

Angry Birds Sets the Pace

Angry Birds represents everything that's good about iOS gaming.

I mentioned the example of Angry Birds, but it’s hard to overemphasize the effect the Rovio Mobile-developed title has had on the state of iOS gaming. The physics-based puzzle game has dominated the paid App Store charts, and though it recently slipped from the number one spot, it often finds its way back. One reason is the attractive price tag ($0.99), but another is the unique experience it provides, which clones so far haven’t been able to match or capitalize upon.

Other gaming stars of late include Cut the Rope by Chillingo, another physics-based puzzler that takes a cue from Angry Birds but doesn’t feel derivative. If you haven’t tried it, and you like Angry Birds, I highly recommend it. It also uses the $0.99 pice point, as do Fruit Ninja, Doodle Jump and Flight Control. These stars all provide uniquely iOS-enhanced gaming experiences, and they all enjoy consistent, healthy sales.

The Big Fish Adapt

More expensive games are also doing well, though they’re offered by larger studios and probably reflect development budgets. These games, too, released by major studios like EA, Sega and 2K Sports still often have ties to major franchises designed for other platforms, but it’s obvious more attention is being paid to tailoring game experience for iOS.

Instead of getting repackaged versions of games we’ve already seen elsewhere, iOS games are themselves getting the cross-platform treatment and arriving on other devices via things like the PlayStation Store and DSiWare.

A Bright Future Ahead

Cut the Rope: A promising example of things to come.

The iPhone was good for gaming because it presented a challenge to developers. How do you create satisfying experiences for a gaming device that lacks physical controls? It wasn’t a question anyone had really asked before, and there wasn’t a clear answer. Now, there isn’t only one clear answer, but instead a variety of exciting ones that each provide an original, satisfying take.

While the iPad isn’t a brand new challenge, it definitely requires developers to come up with additional, unique answers to new game design questions. The success of universal apps like Cut the Rope, and of fairly straightforward big-screen translations like Angry Birds is a good starting point, but the iPad will have its own maturation process when it comes to gaming above and beyond these kinds of efforts.

Small and Clever Will Supercede Big and Flashy

Despite its current success, the App Store’s gaming section still has a long way to go before it catches up with dedicated gaming companies like Nintendo, at least in terms of revenue. Gamasutra recently estimated that Apple has made around $210 million from game sales in total. Nintendo makes in the ballpark of $400 million on one of its top games alone.

Of course, Apple wants to sell hardware, not software, and games are simply a means to help it do that. That means it will continue to be an appealing choice for developers, because Apple will go out of its way to make sure that it is. As the iPad boosts the already huge pool of iOS users, we’ll see more and more small, agile development firms spring up to fill the demand for games on the platform, leaving major studios to continue to develop major franchises for consoles.

I’m willing to bet that the development cycles and fanfare associated with those games will start to look pretty old-fashioned in tomorrow’s gaming economy, especially when, from a user experience perspective, the enjoyment derived from a well-designed, highly replayable iOS game isn’t that much different from that derived from a complex, lengthy RPG.

The iOS Exclusive

With Android and now, Windows Phone 7 set to become major players in mobile entertainment, we’ll probably see Apple make some moves to keep its lead in smartphone gaming. One way they could do this is by encouraging and promoting iOS exclusives, the same way Sony and Microsoft do now with home console titles.

Even if Apple doesn’t try to arrange agreements with developers to keep titles exclusive, it may do so indirectly by introducing hardware and API features that make exclusivity (of features at least) a byproduct of design. The gyroscope in the new iPhone 4 is one example of that kind of tactic, and if RFID makes its way into the iPhone 5, that may be another.

Competition Opens Up the Possibilities

For both developers and iOS device owners alike, the next few years should prove an exciting time for gaming. Apple will have to provide more and more access to device features via the iOS API to keep things feeling new and fresh, and introduce new hardware with better capabilities to keep buyers interested. That’ll translate to more opportunities and challenges to spur iOS gaming to even greater heights. Even though the scene’s matured, there’s still plenty of room to grow.

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In order to give buyers visibility into the relative performance levels of different cloud providers, a number of groups have developed tools to measure and compare performance under different scenarios. While individual vendors have begun to provide their own monitoring dashboards (Salesforce has its Trust Dashboard while Amazon has its CloudWatch dashboard, for example), buyers are increasingly looking for third-party tools that give a neutral insight into vendor performance.

Some interesting players in the space include:

CloudKick

Supporting Rackspace, Amazon EC2, Linode, GoGrid, Slicehost, RimuHosting, and VPS.NET, CloudKick enables users to control cloud infrastructure from multiple different vendors from one dashboard which allows both monitoring and management of an infrastructure setup.

Built upon the open-source Libcloud API that CloudKick also helped develop under the guidance of the Apache Software Foundation Incubator, CloudKick’s commercial services range from $99 to $599/month depending on the number of servers. Cloudkick also offers customized packages for customers with larger or more specific needs.

CloudSleuth

Still in beta, CloudSleuth is a cloud performance visualization tool that runs a benchmark Java e-commerce application to measure response time across various cloud providers.It deploys the identical application to different cloud providers and then measures performance from locations across the U.S. and internationally. CloudSleuth returns metrics about both response time and availability.

CloudHarmony

CloudHarmony is another beta product that provides what it calls a Cloud Speedtest to provide a benchmark performance figure for various cloud providers.

Cloudstone

Cloudstone is a tool that spun out of a research project at UC Berkeley. More than a benchmarking service itself, it has created an open-source framework for testing cloud performance. The research team built a selection of tools for generating various load levels and testing the performance under those loads across various cloud providers.

ServerDensity

More than a benchmarking tool, ServerDensity is a product that offers the ability to measure CPU load, memory, processes, disk usage, network traffic. Using a generic application or workload bundle, however, one could use ServerDensity’s reporting engine to run comparative tests across multiple cloud providers.

Cloud CMP

CloudCMP was developed jointly by Duke University and Microsoft Research. The Cloud CMP project developed a number of measurement areas and assessed different cloud vendors against those tests. In doing so, it has produced both empirical bottom line performance results as well as an interesting cost/performance measure for different applications deployed across different providers. So far, the research team has produced a single report covering several cloud providers.

CloudStatus

CloudStatus is a VMware company that aims to “provide an independent view of the health and performance of the most popular cloud services on the web.” Currently in beta, CloudStatus thus far measures only Amazon Web Services and Google App Engine for both availability and performance.

BitCurrent

BitCurrent performed a benchmarking study in late June. The study measured Amazon, Rackspace and Terremark’s IaaS offerings and force.com and Google App Engine at he platform level. As a one-time only study, it’s primarily of academic interest, as cloud performance is a changing area and near real time status is the only real way to monitor performance on an ongoing basis.

Doubt remains as to how cloud performance offerings will fulfill the dual needs of remaining independent to ensure neutrality while still building a viable and profitable business. The existence of several University-created tools in this list indicates that it may well be from the research perspective that most of the independent performance metrics come.

Ben Kepes is an independent consultant and contributing writer for GigaOM. Please see his disclosure statement in his bio.

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The iPod dominated. It became synonymous with “MP3 player” in the mind of the buying public. And that would start in motion the rise of Apple into the tech giant it is today. A tech giant, might I add, that as of yesterday is worth more in terms of market value than Microsoft.

At the close of Wednesday’s trading, Apple was valued at $222 billion, while Microsoft was worth $219 billion. Apple’s shares ended the day at $244.11, while Microsoft’s finished at a seven-month low of $25.01. And it isn’t only Cupertino’s successes, but also Redmond’s failures that are responsible for the new power dynamic between the two companies. Overall, Microsoft stock is down 20 percent compared to 10 years ago, while the value of Apple’s has grown tenfold over the same period.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer appears to have his head in the sand regarding the significance of this moment in terms of the two companies. When asked for comment, he told Reuters news service:

It’s a long game, we have good competitors…we too are a very good competitor. We are executing very well and that is going to lead to great products and great success. I’m optimistic.

It sounds like Ballmer, once an outspoken and not very cautious CEO, has checked out, or is downright unwilling to look at the consequences of Apple’s success with the iPhone and now the iPad. Microsoft will continue to drift toward irrelevance as long as the attitude of business-as-usual prevails there. To quote Ballmer once again, “I won’t predict some massive change,” he said. “I don’t sort of foreshadow any change in direction. We just have to accelerate plans.”

I’m less concerned with what happens to Microsoft now, though, then I am with what happens to Apple. Unlike Microsoft, I think Apple has at its core a commitment to ongoing innovation, woven into the very fabric of the company by the strong oversight of Steve Jobs. And that will persist after he’s gone. But ongoing battles with Google and Adobe tell a tale of a company whose industry agenda may still be geared towards being a niche player.

Apple is about control, even though Steve Jobs says quite the opposite in his open letter to Flash. Don’t get me wrong, I’m no big fan of Flash myself, but I do think that Apple’s intentions have more to do with controlling the nature and delivery vehicle of content than with encouraging openness. Otherwise it’d have backed Google’s VP8 open web video standard from the start. The kind of control Apple exerts works well for it as a niche player, but now that it’s arguably the most important tech company in the world, the same rules don’t apply.

Big stays big by being inclusive and cooperative, to a degree. Take Google, which works with so many partners it’s hard to keep track of, with the end goal of satisfied customers in mind. Microsoft, too, works with others more than it shuts them down, as long as the terms are favorable. Apple seems content to remain largely sheltered, even when it would be easier and more expedient to work with a partner. In fact, since the company started making its own chips with the iPad, it looks to be shutting down even further still.

Such an approach may provide some short-term gains, but rising competitors like Google will take advantage of the general bad feeling it will generate among other tech firms to form the kind of partnerships that helped elevate Microsoft to its loftiest heights 10 years ago. And Apple will still be at base camp, stubbornly refusing the aid of other climbers.

Related GigaOM Pro Research: How Microsoft Can Win Back the Tablet Market

Firefox may have been getting a lot more competition lately from Google’s Chrome browser, but the open-source offering from the Mozilla Foundation still has close to 30 percent market share, according to Mozilla’s first-ever State of the Internet report. The survey also found that the country with the fastest growth in usage or adoption of Firefox during the most recent quarter was Russia (where usage grew about 20 percent). Mozilla describes the report (its official name is the Mozilla Quarterly Analyst Report), as an “ongoing report capturing the state of the internet as seen through Mozilla’s eyes,” and says that it plans to release a similar at the end of each calendar quarter.

Firefox has been under increasingly competitive pressure from Google’s Chrome browser, and some estimates of its market share are substantially lower than what Mozilla came up with in its quarterly survey — closer to around 24 percent, with Google Chrome coming on strong at about 5 percent (Mozilla says its figures came from an average of four separate sources, including StatCounter, Quantcast, Net Applications, and Gemius). Here’s a cool visualization of browser market share, although it’s only current as of last August.

In part to help deal with the need to keep pace in the browser game, Mozilla recently appointed Aza Raskin as the design lead for the browser (Raskin, the son of legendary Apple designer Jef Raskin, joined Mozilla when it acquired his startup Humanized in 2008). Raskin wrote about his new position on his blog, saying, “The average web user spends more time with their browser than with their family,” and noting that he wanted Firefox to evolve to the point where it could incorporate the “user-experience paradigm shifts that gives users the new tools they need to accommodate the new web’s work flows.”

In addition to launching its first State of the Internet report, Mozilla also said today that it’s rolling out a fix to a privacy leak (which is common to all browsers) known as the “CSS history leak.” In a nutshell, sites can determine which web sites you’ve visited before by looking at how the browser has changed the color of links for visited and non-visited sites. This is described in more detail on the Mozilla blog, and the foundation says it hopes that its fix is adopted by other browsers as well.

Related content from GigaOM Pro: What Does The Future Hold For Browsers?

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Thanh