intertwingly

It’s just data

Megadata


Tim O’Reilly: One of the important truths of Web 2.0 is that it ain’t the personal computer era any more, Eben Moglen’s arguments to the contrary notwithstanding. A lot of really important software can’t even be exercised properly without very large networks of machines, very large data sets, and heavy performance demands. Yahoo! provides all of these. This means that Hadoop will work for the big boys, and not just for toy projects.

The FSF says that the Apache License, Version 2.0 is free, and that is good enough for me.

As to the “Look!  Now with rounded corners!” revision of the web; long after that has faded, I believe that the point that Tim makes in the second sentence quoted above is transformational.  The quantity and volatility of the data that we are describing is not just quantitatively different, but also qualitatively different than the Data is the Next Intel Inside notion of Web 2.0.

This notion deserves a separate name.  Perhaps even a really awful one.