This post makes it clear that we need to think beyond just SEO when building web properties. If you think about it, SEO and now also integrating with Social Networks is probably the most important thing you can do for your digital property. If you are building a site that no one can find, what’s the point. I do think social will help grow you link popularity, at least tangentially. At the end of the day, link popularity is a factor in organic SEO anyway.

from http://eu.techcrunch.com/2010/06/08/report-social-networks-overtake-search-engines-in-uk-should-google-be-worried/

There is some pretty cool stuff going on around APIs (application programming interfaces). It’s getting more and more important that you are using APIs to access social graphs and social functionality through API calls to Facebook Connect (now called Facebook for websites) and Twitter API for example. But on the other side of the equation it’s getting more and more imporant for your company to open up your own APIs. Best Buy’s Remix is one of my favorite examples of a company opening up their product catalog so people can build apps on top of the catalog. Think of things like shopping engines or widgets and gadgets for the latest on sale products, etc.

Companies like Apigee and Mashery help insure that you are getting the best performance. Think about it like a caching delivery network for API calls. Some of the caching can be done with Akamai i.e. jSON, but it’s not built for that. Apigee has an offering on top of twtiter for example. Mashery and Apigee are great for exposing your own API’s as well. They can throttle calls to ensure that your application doesn’t fall down if you get a spike in traffic and they can help accelerate delivery to your users through caching. These companies also provide services to manage the community of developers doing things like providing keys for access to the engine, etc. Analytics also start to get interesting. Some have called Apigee’s analytics the Google Aanalytics for apis.

Today we announced our Amazon Web Services Partnership. Building on our Razorfish 5 report and the recent Razorfish Techology Summit, this is the latest affirmation of our commitment to supporting the marketing and business needs of our clients with the cloud. We are really excited about the opportunities to work together, especially with the rapidly evolving cloud infrastructure technologies in the marketplace. We’ve been growing our cloud computing practice quite aggresively over the last couple of years and see huge potential for our clients. Some of the immediate benefits we’ve seen for clients are the following:

• Speed to market, getting up and running with servers and infrastructure is at a pace like never before. Minutes as compared to weeks.
• Elasticity to scale up and down easily saving money and keeping up with unexpected demand. We rarely see good traffic forecasts, so this makes us more nimble to be ready for unexpected traffic spikes with campaigns and product launches.
• Business solutions we have never dreamed of before. Using technologies like Amazon’s Elastic Map Reduce allows us to work with trillions of rows of data at very low costs. With traditional RDBMS’s this would have been both cost-prohibitive and practically impossible. Imagine using EMR to build a mini-google.

I am looking forward to the new and exciting things we can do with cloud computing.

Here’s a presentation I gave at a conference recently sharing our point of view on the linkage between social brands and cloud services technology. At the end of the day the power of cloud services helps to drive traffic in several powerful ways.

• Social cloud services like Facebook Connect have already gotten privacy permission to share consistent with each user’s guidelines. This will help you better deal with the upcoming privacy rules in the European Union. The EU is requiring all anonymous cookie to ask a user for permission before placing them on their computer, so likely ad servers, analytics, etc. will be impacted.
• Social cloud services help increase your ranking with Google, Bing, and Yahoo. For example, twitter is indexed by all those services. Facebook has started to let some content get indexed, but has to respect privacy guidelines in many cases.
• Open API’s are empowering brands in new and innovative ways, with API’s both in and out. So, for example, tasty-d-lite uses foursquare and twitter to power their loyalty program. Or the Guardian Open Content API is being used to power new and innovative experiences like a new Guardian Content Roulette application.

Tim Bray spoke at the Razorfish technology summit a couple of years ago. It looks like he’s finally leaving Sun/Oracle to join Google and work on the Android platform. Android has been getting plenty of press and looks like a fun device, I’ve played around with a bunch. In Tim’s post about joining Google, he gives credit to Dave Winer for recognizing that Android is the ‘platform without a vendor’.  That’s a neat way to put it. At the end of the day, the most exciting thing to me is choice, competition, and different perspectives. We are all guessing at where the future is headed and the only way to find out is through experimentation and learning.

Rob Scoble was the Keynote at the Fourth annual Razorfish Technology Summit. He gave us an outstanding overview of what’s going on with Cloud Computing and how it’s impacting the digital work we do with our clients. He also challenged us to think of new ways we can leverage cloud services and cloud infrastructure for the daily work we do with clients.Thanks for a great keynote Rob. Here’s his Prezi Presentation.

We’ve been experimenting with Prezi.com. It’s a different style presentation tool. Here’s a prezi summarizing the Razorfish 5 report. This summarizes our report and highlights key information. Looking forward to your comments and thoughts.

We launched the Razorfish 5 report today. We put a lot into the report and are excited to share it more broadly. In this report, we discuss the 5 technologies that are transforming businesses, including multi-touch and cloud computing. The findings are based on Razorfish’s experience designing and integrating complex technologies for clients around the world.The report explores the recent advances and upcoming developments of five significant technologies. Key findings include:

• Cloud services and open APIs will become essential for social brands, making it easier for businesses to tap into the consumer’s social graph.
• Reliance on the cloud’s infrastructure will continue to grow as the need for real-time scalability becomes increasingly critical for survival.
• Multi-touch technology, which has already become mainstream in consumer devices, will infiltrate retail and business environments so extensively that it will become expected.
• Improved hardware and connectivity will help mobile make the final transition into cloud-based data that allows the user to learn the world around her in real time.
• Agile and iterative Web development will open new doors for innovation by allowing developers to innovate and adjust products based on immediate customer feedback.

Thanks to everyone who contributed to the report:

Writers/Contributors
Shiv Singh
Tobias Klauder
John Cunningham
Steve Dawson
Luke Hamilton
Paul Gelb
Mike Scafidi
John Ewen

Marketing & PR
David Deal
Lauren Nguyen
Katie Lamkin
Crystal Higgins-Peterson
Heather Gately
Jennifer Li

It’s comes up again. Folks are asking us to define cloud computing and every time we do, we refine it a little more. At times it’s seemed like Cloud Computing became the new web 2.0 as a blanket term for everything:). I actually think we define it similarly to the Wikipedia definition. For us it breaks down into two categories: cloud services and cloud infrastructure.

Cloud services are defined as technologies that provide a virtual service either through and Open API or through a user interface. Examples range from the classic Salesforce.com to cloud email like Gmail or Twitter and the Twitter Open API, and Facebook Connect. There are lots others, and it’s growing at a frantic pace. Open API’s like Facebook Connect and the Twitter API are incredibly powerful for driving traffic and getting your product, brand, and service out there. In the past we would build a social network from scratch for a web site, that would mean custom application development and maintenance, now we use Javascript and REST to interface with Facebook Connect and we are up and running in a fraction of the time it used to take in the past.

Cloud infrastructure is defined as the virtual and physical infrastructure powering web and digital applications. Cloud infrastructure was strongly enabled through technologies like VMWare that made it possible to make one physical server into 10 or more virtual servers. This coupled with low cast storage created an elastic scalable platform to enable us to do things that weren’t feasible using the old cost models. These services are metered and you only pay as you go, which is a drastic departure from the buy a server, manage and drive it all the time whether you use it or not. While it used to take weeks to get a server up and ready now takes minutes and all you need is a credit card. Companies paving the way include Amazon, Microsoft, and Google, with traditional hosting companies like Rackspace, Savvis, Terremark and others also making these infrastructure services available.

We believe the cloud and it’s ability to scale at a lower cost point will enable more innovation like never before.