Crinket.com

And people are already starting to ask, “When can I just go to Rackspace and deploy a preconfigured Cassandra cluster?” It’s still early, but that’s definitely something we’re looking at.

This is something I would love to see. There are a variety of tools like Cassandra, Solr, and others I would love to see offered in an easy cloud package.

Also, as the article mentions, this is a nice way to reduce vendor lock in as well. If for whatever reason you decide Rackspace isn't for you, you could always take your Cassandra cluster somewhere else (or bring it in house).

I am really not sure how well this is going to work, but I have to say I am happy to see someone trying to actually improve IE6.

> "Today, we're releasing an early version of Google Chrome Frame, an open source plug-in that brings HTML5 and other open web technologies to Internet Explorer."

See more: http://googlecode.blogspot.com/2009/09/introducing-google-chrome-frame.html

Interesting, it appears this add-on will be a requirement to use Google Wave with IE: http://googlewavedev.blogspot.com/2009/09/google-wave-in-internet-explorer.html

Webhooks let applications talk to each other using very simple HTTP. Webhook enabled applications run (so far) on app hosting sites in the cloud.  What makes them different is that they constantly scan  for POSTS to a designated URL.   To use the application, you register your application with the other webhook enabled application and provide  a callback URL.  You POST   data from your app to the url of the receiving app, and monitor the callback URL for its response. Your app then takes the POST it received and processes it.

Mark Cuban has an interesting post on the importance of WebHooks and PubSubHubHub. http://www.slideshare.net/progrium/using-web-hooks

While pubsub is getting a lot of chatter recently, webhooks up to this point have not gained the same prominence, especially in the .NET world. I expect that to change in the coming months as they provide a really simple avenue for applications to integration across boundaries.

Side Note: If you have ever done any work with tasks on Google App Engine you have already seen how simple and powerful webhooks can be.

It is an attempt to loosen the mental blockages to recording information and to scrape away the tartar of convention that handicaps its retrieval. The solution is by nature nonconformist.

Notational Velocity is a super simple note application for OS X.

If I can get it to sync with http://www.simplenoteapp.com/ (see: http://www.simplenoteapp.com/extras.html) this might be a winner for me.

At its core, Wave is an extension to the XMPP protocol.  This is the REALLY important part.  Here I'll back up for a moment for a little background on XMPP.  

XMPP is a protocol which describes communication.  It models communication between two nodes on a network.

Now, communication can take many forms, and XMPP accommodates many of them.  It also supports different types of conversations:  presence, notifications, subscriptions, back-and-forth--these are all modeled by XMPP.  And it supports a wide variety of communication TYPES as well:  video, audio, text, and so on.

Pretty good write up on the importance of XMPP in Google Wave. I agree with the author of the post (Jason Kolb) that XMPP is going to be a vital communication protocol in the very near future.

This also starts to paint a clearer picture of the importance of Google App Engine to Google Wave story as well: http://crinket.com/xmpp-support-on-google-app-engine

Verizon was simply no longer concerned with telephones that are connected with wires.

Knowing when to quit is almost as important as the will to succeed. In this case, it seems like a very smart move by Verizon to move on.

I have been using their FIOS service for about 6 months now and there is no way I would go back.

Today, we are releasing a preview of the Windows Azure Service Management API to help you manage your deployments, hosted services and storage accounts. This is a REST-based API which users can code against in their toolset of choice to manage their services.

Automating deployments is an obvious use case. However, imagine being able to spin down instances at off peak time. Lots of possibilities here.

Of course if Azure did some of these for you that would be even better. :)

Today we are introducing a new upgrade mechanism, called “in-place upgrade,” which enables you to incrementally roll a new version of your service over the existing version without first deploying the new version to staging. With this new mechanism, you can upgrade your entire application or just a single role (e.g. web role) without disturbing the other roles in your application.

I really dig what Microsoft is doing in the Azure compute. They seem to be really addressing major pain points in windows hosting.

There are many variables that affect a site's performance. The tools listed below can help you discover those variables and improve your site. We recommend that you experiment with these tools. Multiple simple changes can improve the experience for your users around the world by several seconds.

Nice to see Google pulling together a list of tools/utilities which can be used to optimize your sites (browser experience) performance.