Web 2.0 Watch

Retailers Get Some Early Help Ahead of Black Friday

As we approach Thanksgiving week here in the U.S., much is riding on the outcome of the year's busiest shopping season. Retailers have been preparing all year and started holiday promotions early to get a jump start on holiday shopping. Focus has especially been paid to online shopping where convenience and predictions of special offers are forecast to send a record number of consumers - retailers will certainly need it.

One new source of customers for U.S. and UK retailers is going to be cross-border shoppers. Retailers in these 2 countries have been willing to deeply discount merchandise and U.S. retailers have the added advantage of a weaker dollar.  

So this week we announced 2 free offers to help retailers get ready and be successful throughout the 2009 holiday shopping season:

•  Free Monitoring for Retailers  - From now until the end of the year retailers can qualify for free monitoring of their Web sites and, for the most innovate retailers, for their mobile sites as well.  We'll handle all on-boarding and we're even making our performance experts available to help with troubleshooting.   This year, there's no reason to be surprised by a Web site outage or slowdown.

• Free Retailer Index - Over the years we've found that there's no better indicator for retail executives to know how well they are prepared for the holiday rush than our retail performance benchmarks.  These indices provide a clear measure of site responsiveness and stability in each retail segment.  This year we're offering free automatic alerts for 3 retail categories: apparel, books/music/video, and electronics.

Page B11, A Footnote to Internet History

You'd be forgiven if you missed the footnote published in yesterday's New York Times Business Day marking the end of AOL Time Warner.  On December 9, 2009, 9 years after AOL acquired Time Warner, it will be spun off to shareholders at a valuation of $3.5 billion.

When the merger was announced on January 10, 2000 the combined companies were valued at $350 billion.  Analysts and gurus of all stripes heralded it with much fanfare.  Here's a look back at what they said:

• "It is probably the most significant development in the Internet business world to date."

                    - Phil Leigh, Raymond James

• "Together, they represent an unprecedented powerhouse. If their mantra is content, this alliance is unbeatable. Now they have this great platform they can cross-fertilize with content and redistribute.” 

                    - Scott Ehrens, Bear Stearns

• "Today’s announcement really does change the tectonic plates in this world.”

                    - Christopher Dixon, PaineWebber

• "I don’t think this is too much to say this really is a historic merger; a time when we’ve transformed the landscape of media and the Internet.”

                    - Steve Case, former AOL chairman and chief executive officer

Much has transpired in the past decade and while AOL Time Warner could not live up to the hyperbole heaped upon it (which company can?) it has survived and at $3.5 billion is still valued higher than other heroes of the dot-com era, many of whom no longer exist.

While the AOL Time Warner merger was a reminder that all such deals are about salesmanship, the enduring AOL brand and traffic it garners (ranked #4 as of Sept. according to comScore) is a reminder that brands are built over years and can sustain all kinds of bad, discredited ideas.

AOL continues to be an innovative destination site relied on by many and continues to be a stalwart of its industry. (Not true for many of the institutions quoted above.)

Options, Derivatives, and Clouds - Oh my...

One industry that makes for interesting cloud projection is the financial services industry. Consider the amount of trading data that flies back and forth through cyberspace. Buys, sells, swaps, settlements, what-if scenarios and so on – millions of transactions a second – and that is just a small part of investment banking. With so much data comes of course a huge need for storage, backup, and disaster recovery (DR).

Recently, I had a very enlightening conversation with a few people, including an executive director (ED) at UBS in charge of supporting the Derivatives trading business, along with the middle and back office. It made for an interesting cloud case study if you will.  Here's the setup:

• Currently, the bank oversees a mixed environment supporting approximately 1400 servers. These multi-core servers (almost 900 are a dedicated internal cloud) are used for two things: 
• To store data and run the core business, which involves reporting and scenario development of equity trades. 
• Most of this operation isn’t in an organization-wide multipurpose cloud, it is on several dedicated sets of servers. But insiders see a real future for taking large parts of the current operation there.

This was a conventional data shop that originally resided in Zurich, Switzerland. In 2008, the operations were moved to New Jersey to be closer to the trading floor groups and their support teams. The next step of the evolution appears to be to a cloud environment that ensures data security. This will likely be a two-pronged approach:

• The first is how to replace the 1000's of mostly self-contained workstations that sit on the desks of employees. Answer: A staged transition to thin clients with the applications in the cloud. The advantages are costs are lower (far fewer licenses are needed), ease of upgrade (instead of support teams having to individually upgrade/service each desktop with its individual quirks, a simple upgrade can take place in the cloud at the source, then this is propagated to users quickly. There is precedent here: According to my contact, in the very near future, “…Royal Bank of Scotland is going 100% to thin clients with applications in the cloud.” 

UBS is not slated to go thin client on a corporate basis right away, but as various environments are due for major upgrades, they will be replaced by thin clients. All of the desktop applications go to the cloud. As a matter of fact, overall network performance is actually improved because there is an improved ease of load balancing.

Another “hidden” savings are the savings on UPS (Uninterrupted Power Supplies) units. A loss of power on a floor, or even the entire complex - is that crippling? Not really, as long as the server has a UPS there are no worries. Instead of restarting thousands of systems and support dealing with lost data from potentially thousands of users, the data can be recovered quickly from the cloud, in theory. And as an aside, the fewer power consuming appliances you have, the easier it is to develop a green environment.

• The second front will of course be with the data center and core business applications. Here is where things will be interesting. One possibility is a future cloud environment will feature a 3^rd party vendor setting up a private cloud – but one that is managed internally. Security for this set up will be two part: i) Human (UBS employees managing it), and ii) Multi-tiered in that security will be embedded in the API level. (Example: A token is required from anyone requesting a service, which will then be validated, plus authentication keys for users.)

I know what you're thinking: Can a scenario where the client is involved in the infrastructure be a "true" cloud infrastructure?

The answer is yes - in that the vendor will handle setup and any dynamic upgrades, maintenance and overhauls of the system. As far as a UBS is concerned, the hardware is invisible. As long as computing power and storage is there when needed and seamlessly, the rest is somewhat irrelevant.

In the words of my contact: “The third party will be responsible for all infrastructure issues, we give them our specifications for memory, and number of blade servers needed, etc…any hardware maintenance issues is for them to deal with. But UBS personnel will be the only ones handling the data and maintaining the software. When there are upgrades needed in the hardware, the vendor will be called in.”

From personal experience, I know that in a conventional environment, there is an expectation that you use the storage space allocated to you. Under-utilization is an inefficient use of resources, and almost as bad as not having enough space and having performance suffer. A flexible, but secure private cloud can potentially save millions of dollars hardware savings, infrastructure costs, reduced security issues, smoother performance and man-hours of maintenance time.

More later on the security aspects of a potential hybrid private cloud.

 

What Every Retailers Wants for Christmas and Why Many Won't Get It

Black Friday is less than a month away. In the run up to the end-of-year shopping frenzy we've just published an article on the state of online retail preparedness. You would think that all retailers have by now gotten their Web sites ready to handle the coming traffic deluge, right?  But many retailers don't know how their Web site is performing nor how it is experienced by their customers.

Ben Rushlo, a consultant who works with Keynote customers to help them get their Web sites in shape, puts it this way: “Some big players — I won’t mention any names — still have no external monitoring in place. They have a mentality that ‘we don’t need that piece,’ believing that internal monitoring and instrumentation can handle it and give them the data they need. But nothing can stand in for measuring your user experience from out in the Internet where customers live.” 

One of the companies that is doing it right is Sears and you can read an interview with their online executive on his approach for holiday preparedness and about new Web 2.0 features they are rolling out.

The Sidekick, Disaster Recovery and a Cloud Opportunity

File this blog under “serendipity”. 

At the time of this writing, I’m sure we have all heard about the data disaster concerning the Sidekick cellphone. The Sidekick may have the distinction of being the first cloud cellphone, and while never a threat to the BlackBerry or iPhone, had a loyal customer base and a solid following in the under-25 market, the barometer of hip.

All user data was stored by T-Mobile (working with Microsoft subsidiary Danger) in the cloud, it does not sync with a PC - an interesting feature of the Sidekick as well as other smart phones such as the Palm Pre. Last week, Sidekick users started suffering from outages, and then seeing their contact information disappear. Passwords, contact lists, pictures, you name it – gone. Microsoft is working to see if the deleted data can be restored, and after a few tense moments earlier this week, it now looks promising.

When defining the cloud (and believe me, every day on my Twitter account at least two people ask that question) there are as many definitions as there are people to describe it. I believe the common feature is that the primary software and storage is stored remotely from the users, and is effectively black boxed from those who are using it. We don’t care that there are 1,000 servers or 3,000 servers – or (for the most part) where they are. As a cloud customer, I care only that my storage capability is available when needed. And for goodness sake, make sure that the data is secure and if it is damaged for some reason, well, I shouldn’t know the difference.

The bigger question here for the future of services tied to cloud computing is disaster recovery (DR). It would seem to me a natural use of the cloud if there ever was one. Catastrophic loss of data due to an act of God (think earthquake), or man (think September 11) takes out your server farm - your customers still need their data.  I’ve worked all over the US and it's pretty clear that 9/11 did a lot for the DR evangelists among us.  The Sidekick incident might be the rallying cry for the mobile ecosystem.

In California, companies I’ve worked for have been planning disaster recovery since probably the day after the 1906 Earthquake. Several CIOs have told me that it wasn’t a major priority on the East Coast, but 9/11 changed all of that forever. The need to have your backup data stored in a physically removed location from your production data is crucial, and the cloud is perfect for that. The advantages are clear: no/low equipment and maintenance costs, a potentially vendor agnostic hardware setup, and the ability to conduct full testing performance or load testing without impacting your production environment.

However, a recent Symantec survey of 1000 IT managers and came up with some stunning facts, including this one: 35% - yes, over one in three - of an organization's servers are not included in a DR plan. No performance or disaster recovery testing. The news for the systems that are tested isn’t going to prompt parades. In the same survey, 30% of the respondents reported failure in their testing, whether it be incomplete backups or slow performance. This led Internet News to proclaim “DR testing is a mess”.

I could be on an island on this one, but think that performance testing should be considered an aspect of DR (or vice-versa). Imagine the scenario that your servers are disrupted by a 6.0 quake - known in California as a minor shake up (smile) - I would expect my DR planning to demand fast on-boarding of the backups and the performance of the cloud servers should be (ideally) as fast as the primary in-house servers. 

Risk management has always been a concern for cloud advocates and others see this as the hype bubble being pricked. But as in many cases in life, trouble can be opportunity in work clothes. Time will tell, but I don't see this as a case to be made against using the cloud for data storage. Rather this is a good reason why a solid, risk-managed cloud strategy for rapid, high-performance disaster recovery spells can spell opportunity for businesses and enhance consumer confidence. 

More on this the next post.

Taking Your Web Performance Lab to the Cloud

Once upon a time, with a client far, far, away, I ran the QA Lab (when I wasn't testing) for a company that among other things, sold ISP services. Since this company derived a good amount of revenue from dial-up services, we had to have an array of setups that simulated the potential environments of the customer base. That meant boxes for every operating system from Windows 95 thru Windows XP. Before you ask, yes the environment included a box running the much-maligned Windows Me (no truth to the rumor that "Me" stood for Maligned Endlessly).

Oh yes, there was an Apple box (a beautiful G2), and a couple of boxes that ran VMware. I had to set up and maintain 20 boxes. Ever loaded and debugged device drivers for ONE machine? Now try doing it for at least a dozen of them. I always thought then that it was a special form of hazing.

The moral to the above is this: there is a financial and psychic cost to maintaining a QA environment. There is an extra cost if the environment is especially fluid. Infrastructure costs, labor costs to maintain, and more costs to adapt existing hardware. As a result, some are looking to the cloud to provide answers.

For a company that does not have the money or physical space to maintain a full-blown QA environment, and here I'm taking specifically about Web performance load testing, there are alternatives that may be a good fit. Let's take a look at 3.

One solution is CloudTest. This application touts itself as load-testing solution that combines performance and load testing leveraging Amazon's EC2 environment to be used as an on-demand service. That last bit is important. You have to be certain you understand how the EC2 environment is impacting the load testing.  As I mentioned in my last post, there are peculiarities of cloud service providers that need be carefully examined or you maybe left in the dark when problems arise.

Another is crowd sourcing as opposed to outsourcing. This somewhat controversial approach is the engine driving uTest.  This is an application that calls upon a group of professional testers to test the performance for your Web application. There is a real issue with repeatability and subjectivity of issues found. As many battles as I've had in my life over whether a bug is severe or minor - or even a bug to begin with - well, I wouldn't want my paycheck to ride on that.

Keynote attacks the issue from a couple of different angles. LoadPro is a variant of outsourcing -  and a better one I might add. You get the benefit of working with expert consultants but also retain control of the what, when and from where issues.  And rather than soliciting strangers (insert your own punch line here), Keynote generates real load from its dedicated network (and from outside your firewall) and performs a complete load testing analysis. The advantage over a typical crowd-sourcing approach is clear - quality of testing results can vary wildly in the crowd-source (or as a friend of mine put it "mob-source") approach.

The other important component is that Keynote not only handles the testing, but manages the testing environment. And unlike a cloud service provider approach, you are not dependent on the vagaries of how a cloud service provider has implemented its network - for legitimate reasons to be sure, but not beneficial for real world load testing.  Keynote's load generation is directly attached, if you will, to the Web just like your customers are.

Do you want to see what happens to your site when one million (1,000,000) concurrent users are hitting it? LoadPro allows you to do that, and at this time seems to be the only product on the market that does. Having scalable severs that you are not responsible for comes in very handy when there is a need to test asynchronous demand. Foxsports.com uses LoadPro to successfully load test their Web site as does BestBuy. 

Among Keynote's other tools is KITE (Keynote Internet Testing Environment) which allows a tester to create their own path through a Web site and then run a performance test in the cloud simulating the performance from cities around globe - great if your business has global reach.  And you do not need to host your own internal server farm. In a couple of previous columns, I've made use of KITE to get a sense of website performance on various sites. Cost of server usage? Zero.

In nutshell it's the question that was posed to me last week: "How intensive are the applications you are testing and how reliable is the service?" Before selecting your Web performance load testing solution do your diligence so you won't get caught flat-footed when your Web site goes down.

Confessions of a Cloud CTO...

“Bob” (not his real name), is a CTO of a small, but very promising Internet startup that is developing an application that leverages the power of social marketing in a unique way – a cutting edge e-commerce Web 2.0 company.

As a small company (roughly a dozen developers and testers on staff), this Bob’s company is using a popular cloud service (let’s call them Acme) for their development and testing environments, as well as proof of concept web sites.

In a very interesting talk with Bob and his colleagues, I was surprised to find them ambivalent about a full time commitment to the cloud. “Acme’s” cloud environment is scalable and flexible in terms of computing power. For a startup that does not have unlimited resources, it is a godsend – on paper. But there were three big issues that troubled the CTO.

• Reliability – Acme’s cloud system suffered three different outages over a year. Two were relatively minor, the third lasted nine hours. NINE hours – on a weekend. The lead developer wound up having to rebuild an instance on the server altogether – not a pleasant experience. Imagine a Proof of Concept site that expects heavy retail traffic going out for hours. 

I know what you’re thinking – what about the ability of certain cloud applications to auto-scale and switch over to backup servers? Well, it is not included in the “basic” package if you will, it costs extra. As a senior developer (who had been working on the project for a year) explained to me – Acme works with flat rates. Cost can become an issue once computing expands beyond a certain point. An suitable analogy is to think of the Acme model as being charged as if you were taking a ride in a taxi, a constant charge no matter what the usage. Small companies want to be charged as if they were using a cell phone, with price breaks for heavy usage or multiple features. I found it a bit odd that Acme’s marketing people couldn’t cobble together a deal of that nature.

• Security – Acme is not PCI complaint. Hence, that can make a CTO queasy and potential client CTOs positively nervous. Granted, security issues should always be assumed to be your personal responsibility. I’ve often thought that cloud security is an issue that often has the onus solely misplaced on the cloud provider. , I believe that companies should always take full responsibility for their security.  I’m reminded of my last trip to a parking garage:  It was well-lit, there was conspicuous security – and there was a very large sign that read, “We are not responsible for your valuables – please lock them away.” Sound advice. Bob and his team decided to develop a protocol to deal with denial of service attacks, among other issues.

• Flexibility – Call it a tipping point. Bob’s team was involved in the analysis of a defect tracking system. Three viable candidates were indentified and installed in the cloud. The applications worked, except for one rather significant feature - Email notification. You see, any competent defect tracking tool provides email notification – vital to developers and QA personnel alike, and provides a tight SDLC. It is possible to send mail from Acme’s environment, but since spammers sometimes find cloud environments hospitable to mail spam to you and I, mail from Acme is rejected by many mail servers as a cautionary measure. The routing of Bugzilla email went through a Yahoo server, and surprise – no email was received by anyone. With each application unable to send any mail, another environment had to be found.

As "Tom", a veteran developer told me, “If I need 100 servers and their computing power for a month for some interesting research I do, renting space in the cloud makes a hell of a lot of sense. But if I need computing power for a prolonged period of time…man, that’s too much money.”

Security, Cost-effectiveness, and the ability to accommodate communications in the cloud between 3^rd parties. This doesn’t mean that The Cloud is in trouble with small businesses – but it does highlight issues that must be met head on as small businesses become larger and demand more communications between customers and the business, as well as internally. 

A new 2 second rule

2 seconds is some kind of unique period of time in our lives.  It is used so often, it's got to be.  For example, there's the 2 second rule for keeping distance from the motorcycle in front of you when riding in a group. Then there's the 2 second rule computer scientists use for maximum amount of time computer system responses should take (yeah right). And there's the 2 second rule on how much time to let elapse to avoid talking over someone (especially useful for men or so I'm told).

Out today is a new rule to add to the list: half of all Internet users surveyed by Forrester say they expect a Web page to load in 2 seconds . . . one-one-thousand-two-one-thousand . . . boy have we come a long way!

In 2001 Zona Research teamed up with Keynote to study how retailer home pages were performing.  Can you guess what the average page load time was in January 2001? (Answer below.) It was an ugly picture and the trend was getting worse.  

That was before widespread broadband adoption took hold which interestingly didn't happen until the years after the dot-com crash.

So how are retailer sites doing today with over 70% broadband adoption in the U.S. (and higher in parts of Western Europe and Asia)?  Looking at the latest Keynote Performance Index for Retailers for the week starting Sept. 7th, the average home page performance is 1.91 seconds. But there are 20 companies above 2 seconds. The worst performer clocks in at 4 seconds (which while twice the average is far better than the worst performer in the Keynote Business 40 which for this past week was 8.32 seconds).

Forrester's survey also found that 40% of Internet travelers will give a Web site 3 seconds to load before abandoning it.  I guess I could have called it the 3 second rule . . . one-one-thousand-two-one-thousand . . . nah, 2 seconds just sounds better.  Oh and the answer to how retailer home pages were performing in 2001 is 17.63 seconds.

Cloud Performance - In Four Part Harmony.

Warning: If in the last few days, you happened to hear an unearthly wail of pain, followed by a rather unprofessional string of profanity, I humbly ask your forgiveness. That was me, but I had fair cause. No, it wasn't hackers assaulting Facebook that triggered the outburst. Rather, the application I used to blog in real time did not save my article or any of my changes, so when I had a system interruption, two hours of work went down the drain. Hence my lapse, which made me ponder a few things about performance.

After my tantrum, the engineer in me kicked in and began troubleshooting my issue (I know, I’m sounding like phone support without hold music – bear with me). At some point, I lost contact with my blogging cloud application, and it occurred to me that performance breaks down into several segments.

From the application – from any cloud application to my desktop we are talking about four different potential bottlenecks – and measuring points – in the overall performance of a cloud application. These waypoints are Browser Performance, Network Performance, Cloud Infrastructure Performance, and Application Performance.

Cloud Infrastructure Performance to me means the performance of Amazon’s EC2, if I happened to be using it (in the case of my blogging, it was not). However if I were getting a SLA (service level agreement) to develop a cloud solution for my organization, I would want to quantify the performance of this vital cloud component when applicable.

The Browser: I did touch on this in my earlier review of Google Chrome 2.0, and its improvement in performance over the original Chrome. We often take the performance of the browser as a given. However a user of Google Chrome will tell you that there are significant differences between Chrome and Chrome 2.0, with the 30% improvement in performance. Firefox raises the ante with the release of Firefox 3.5.  As more and more Web 2.0 applications utilize Java applets that demand resources, browsers that efficiently use those resources are of paramount importance. All browsers certainly are not created equal (as my recent testing trials involving IE7, Firefox, and Safari have proven), and that needs to be quantified.

Network Performance: When considering putting applications for an organization in the cloud, the network performance is the first non-browser bottleneck, if I'm directing myself outward from the user perspective. Wearing my SLA hat again, the development of a strong network infrastructure is a must, and really not subject to compromise. Think of this as a variation on the issue that caught some users unaware in the “Web 1.0” era. High-speed fiber/broadband service to a neighborhood - but no fiber into homes. Result: Questionable performance for the end user – because you are only as fast as your slowest link.

Application Performance: Let’s file this under “No Brainer”. Or is it? We do tend to take the performance of applications for granted these days. At least the ones we buy off the shelf. However, with applications in the cloud itself, "benign" memory leakage issues aren’t so benign anymore. A momentary application hang in the old client-server, or self-contained application paradigm – what happens if system resources are strained in the cloud? The Blue Screen Of Death is not an option. Application performance should be judged not just by usability of course, but by the ability to handle user needs when the network is slow and data in transit could be compromised.

As I stated at the beginning of this post, I lost information due to a system burp, and perhaps some misplaced confidence in the autosave capabilities of my cloud application. It was the second time it happened on this article alone/ At this moment, I’m writing this on MS-Word as a contingency. It is a fair question to ask for users such as myself doing editing work in the cloud: How are you protecting my real-time editing from disaster?

Performance. In four important components none of them trivial. Keep it in mind when testing - or using your application of choice.

Reviewing what I know about Yoono.

Recently, I’ve added a new weapon to my Web 2.0 arsenal called Yoono. Actually, Yoono (as in You Know) has existed on my Firefox for a few months, but I never really put it to use. For three months it was Just Another Plug-In on my Firefox front end, and thus not getting much of a workout. Recently, I decided to take it out for a spin. And it was a revelation.

Yoono is technically known as a social-networking data aggregator. In plainer English, Yoono allows you to round up all of your social networking applications in one location. Yoono supports, among other applications Twitter, AOL and Yahoo IMs, Facebook, Imeen, and GoogleTalk. In this way you can constantly get a stock-ticker feed for as many social media sites as you please. You can look at everything at once (trust me, on my machine, that’s a tsunami of information), or zero in on each application one at a time; first my Facebook friends, Yahoo IM contacts, etc. But it gets better. More on that later.

Launching Yoono creates a unique task bar that some may find almost intrusive. as you can see above, it runs vertically on the left side of the browser, although it can be minimized with a click.  However, I found the UI to be clean in design with little clutter, and when I expand the browser to full screen, I find that I don’t mind the strip. A small advertising bar sits in the bottom part of the Yoono window.

I can search Wikipedia if I desire without opening a new tab on the browser (see below) . The search function is a wonder. It is context based search, so whatever appears on the web page will appear in the search window. In the example below, I have a LiveJournal window active, and when the Discovery widget (Yoono's name for the search) is activated, note all of the Livejournal-related posts.

There is also a Video widget, and combining these seems to bring us closer to the semantic web. Here’s how: I got to YouTube and given the hoopla over the passing of pop icon Michael Jackson, I went to YouTube and looked up the video of his incredible Motown 25 performance back in 1983. I performed a drag and drop of the video screen into Web notes, and the fun really began. (Note: The video widget is in Beta, when it is ready, you would be able to detect and save videos on a page.)

The Discovery widget (the search page) showed various links to MJ, I also saw the Wikipedia link to Jackson appear. But that wasn’t all. The Shopping widget showed saleable items and actions in eBay and Amazon. It was MJ-mania, or at least as long as that web page was active. Take a look at the posts below - I think it's pretty impressive. In the first one, note the notification window that notified me of a tweet while I was engaged on YouTube. The search results are the result of the page, and my dragging and dropping the image into the Discovery window. The lower image shows the ongoing eBay and Amazon auctions.

In all there are seven Widgets currently available: Friends, Discovery, Shopping, Web Notes, Mail, Music and Notes. The latter three are currently in Beta stage, and Web Notes are lackingfull functionality. The Friends Widget allows me to look at my Tweets and my Facebook friends, etc and update my status for all in one swoop or separately. Updates come constantly in small windows, and I must say, the updates look better than the Facebook updates sent from my Firefox plug-in. The Mail widget allows me to combine my webmails in one location. Music allows the user to stream music through imeem.

No application is perfect of course, and Yoono has its drawbacks. If you have multiple personalities on Yahoo IM for example, you can’t switch back and forth (you have log into Yoono as you would the IM.), hence I could not look at my work and personal Facebook accounts. You will not have access to some of the richer features of Facebook of course, and when I wanted to share photos on Yahoo IM, I had to leave Yoono, and launch the full IM in order to do so. Nor would I advise anyone to dump TweetDeck once Yoono is installed. I can monitor tweets, but some of the nicer grouping functions are missing.

But that isn’t important, as Yoono never billed itself as replacement for any of the aforementioned tools, but as an aggregator, and it is very good at that. I’m impressed with the UI, the performance, and especially with the relevant search function. I think Yoono will become an important tool in my Web 2.0 arsenal.