While the Silicon Valley seems to largely have turned a blind eye to any social network not named Facebook or Twitter, one country's citizens have flocked to alternative sites more than practically any other. Turkey, well-known for being the #1 country driving traffic to the Facebook property FriendFeed, appears to be having a similar impact to the well-designed, if not fully embraced by the masses, Cliqset. Partly due to the uncertainty around FriendFeed's domain, thanks to recent downtime, a year after the product was acquired, Turkish users of the network are seeking out alternatives, and have seemingly found Cliqset as the best alternative.

Cliqset, which supports integration with more than 80 networks, has closely integrated with other sites, including Twitter and Google Buzz, to highlight mentions and migrate comments between networks, is now seeing the results of this migration, be it temporary and permanent, as the site's public feed (highlighted as Community) sports a great deal of Turkish posts and updates from the FriendFeed refugees. The sheer volume from the new arrivals, either testing the site or setting up their profiles, drowns out all other languages, amusingly.



The Turkish invasion aside, Cliqset has quietly developed a fantastic tool for discussions, letting you easily discover your friends from other networks, search across the site for topics and tags, join groups, and see direct messages from Twitter from their centralized interface. In fact, the ties between Cliqset and other networks are so strong that you can see items you have favorited in Twitter, and should you follow a person on Cliqset who has registered their Twitter account, you may end up following them on that network as well.

Earlier this month, TheNextWeb highlighted the tie-ins between Cliqset and Buzz, arguing the former was trying to save the latter, by offering an extremely clean interface to Google's network. And whether you agree with the author's premise, his comment that "Both Buzz and Cliqset have a similar struggle: strong technology that is not quite matched with equivalent user activity," rings true in light of the more-discussed and more utilized alternatives, especially Facebook and Twitter.

As somebody has always investigated edge case social networks, from FriendFeed to Strands, MergeLab, Socialmedian and others, the new generation, including Cliqset, Amplify and Google Buzz are innovators I am rooting for in the battle for attention and activity. While I don't speak a lick of Turkish outside of Google Translate, it's always good to see entire groups find community in a new place and have ties so strong that they can all migrate at once. As for FriendFeed, I am sure the site will do just fine if their Turkish fans are now congregating in multiple places.

You can find me on Cliqset at http://cliqset.com/louisgray. Your language choice is up to you.

At the Search Engine Strategies San Francisco event Wednesday, Echo's Khris Loux sat down with me and representatives from UltraKnowledge, CBS Interactive (formerly CNET) and CNN.com to discuss the rise of citizen journalism and social media, intertwined with traditional journalism, and how mainstream media outlets can adapt their practices to include curation as part of their offerings. Our panel's determination could be summarized as saying the ability for the public to launch stories and extend storylines related to realtime has removed the ability for mainstream media to be gatekeepers, furthering the need to accurately determine authenticity and truth. And where mainstream media cannot have exceptional access, be it to geography, sources or timing, part of their new role is to discover and highlight high quality content, regardless of its source, in effect, adopting the role of curator.

Best exemplified by CNN.com's iReport, citizen journalists are being given a chance to report on equal footing with the mainstream media. While iReport gives these would-be reporters a place to piggyback on a major brand, many others have taken to their own blogs, social networks or Twitter to report live, and unlike the traditional approach where media authors would issue a story and call it a day, the life of a story now often starts when it hits the Web, spawning comments, shares and retweets. But as citizen journalists and bloggers are given the same capability to gain visibility, mainstream media's much-celebrated structure to put articles and stories through the vetting process sometimes falls astray in the race to get the story out quickly.

A little over two years ago, I highlighted how quickly incorrect news can spread in the age of microblogging. (See: Smart People, Stupid Tweets. Fake News Spreads Fast on Twitter.) While many of us know not to believe everything on the Web, even if it is in Wikipedia, there remains a need to separate fact from fiction. With so many publications out there reporting on the same information at the same time, without having additional insight, the task of curating the very best of the analysis and repeaters can become a very serious task.

In January, I broached this issue, asking, "Can You Filter for Quality News Amidst Instant Analysis?" and earlier still, in December, highlighting how some news organizations are in fact incentivized for behavior which may lead away from taking the extra effort sometimes required to get the story right. (See: Growing Grumblings on Tech News Don't Address Incentives)

As excited and promotional as I am about the ability for anyone to create and share content, I am equally worried that incentives to promote the discovery of accuracy are not clearly defined, and it is often very difficult to find a real authority on a given topic in a world of instant analysis. When a story breaks in a real-time platform, like Twitter, the person who first reported the earthquake, or was present on the scene of an event, is only an expert for a short time, and when that topic has faded, new influencers for new stories are needed. This leads to a need for trusted sources to harness the truth from the originator of news, wherever it may be, mass media or citizen journalism, and rapidly verify accuracy.

But the sheer volume of feedback can overwhelm even the most well-intended. CNN.com reported one recent popular article achieved more than 30,000 comments - a practical impossibility to moderate by humans, leading to the desire to somehow separate the wheat from the chaff and surface the most accurate and supported insight. As one knows, trusting the community is possible, but usually results in an across the board maligning of those who share opposing views. See any political blog or sports blog for this particular variety of trench warfare. See any comment stream on Yahoo! News or on YouTube to see the quality of the masses at work.

The answer lies in finding a way to reward the truth-seekers in the real-time Web, and to reward media, be they an established brand or an emerging one, for discovering accurate insights, or simply harnessing them. The world of real-time storytelling is evolving before our eyes, and in some cases, its sheer ephemeral nature promises to introduce as many issues as it solves. We, as readers, creators and sharers, should be working diligently to keep our streams clean and provide value to all those who come in contact with our content.

For more thoughts, see Echo's essay: Real-time Storytelling

Today, at least for those of us who watch the enterprise space closely, the big news is that Dell Computer has offered to acquire Fremont-based 3Par for $1.15 billion, a premium of more than 80 percent over the company's stock price. In a world where much of the tech news is dominated by small companies taking money from angels, it's interesting to see the gulf between what it takes to grow a successful hardware company and the more ephemeral Web-based or application based companies that play significant roles on practically everyone's smartphone. And while I haven't talked about it too much on the blog, trying to keep a black and white separation between my day job for much of the last decade and my more hobby-oriented interests here, I've lived it, participating in one venture backed storage startup for more than 8 years, from 2001 to 2009, seeing companies raise, rise, fall and fail. In storage, the big winners, with few exceptions, can raise hundreds of millions of dollars before reaching break-even, and may be worth billions on the other side. Others may never find traction at all. 3Par, which took on tech titans like EMC and IBM, proved to have a winning formula.

There are three major truisms in technology. The first, and most well known, is that of Moore's Law, which while it has slowed in recent years, dictates that CPU processing speed increases at a regular clip while reducing in price. The second is that data storage capacities and densities are doubling at practically the same rate. Just look at the gigabytes or terabytes on your desktop or laptop hard drive and compare that with 5 or ten years ago. And the third is the speed of the network, both wired and wireless, increases - from the Kbps-rated modems of yesteryear to the fast-flowing networks of today, including 10 gigabit Ethernet on the client side and high speed Fibre Channel on the back end of many data centers.

These three advances mean simply this - more data can be created, shared, transmitted and stored more quickly than ever. Entire industries have been spawned around managing the data flow and storage, enabling branch office access to centralized data, deduplication and compression, load balancing and virtualizing the resulting complexity. If you watch consumer companies, such as Twitter, Facebook and Google, you probably see each of those companies creating new standards for global file systems and redundancy. You see them eschewing traditional storage companies and building their own devices in an effort to keep costs down as usage spirals upward. The trends are both amazing and incredible.

Back in January 2001, as Web 1.0 was crashing, I left a Web services company (eventually sold to Oracle) and joined a small company called Synaxia Networks, which later launched publicly to the world in March as BlueArc. At the time, comparable network attached storage devices from EMC and NetApp were capable of scaling to a then-massive 7 terabytes, and performance was not a metric either of them dominated. Our approach was simple - by converting aspects of the file system from software to hardware, we could dramatically accelerate storage. We scaled not to 7 terabytes, but to 225. We promised five nines (99.999% uptime) of reliability, and performance that was ten times the competition. And if we were less than that, everybody knows that two to five times the speed of the incumbent is still pretty darn good.

As we debuted, the press attention at the time was incredible - as our launch, backed by $30+ million in funding and our CEO being a former top guy at Compaq computer, gained massive attention. We had headlines in the Wall Street Journal and New York Times. George Gilder proclaimed that our product "imperiled" all software based storage devices, and after a successful debut at PC Forum, one reporter at TheStreet.com said it was like offering crack to CIOs. Pretty heady stuff, and not unlike other dramatic booms seen from companies that captured the tech press's attention, including the currently hot Twitter and Foursquare, to those less successful, like Handspring and Transmeta.

But building a storage company takes a lot of real money. BlueArc, which raised another $20 million just last month, has raised $200+ million over its lifespan. 3Par, purchased today by Dell, similarly raised $100 million in 2001 (as we were raising $72 million) and others raised similar amounts. Cereva Networks, whose assets were later purchased by EMC, had raised $137 million and laid off 140 employees back in 2002 after not getting off the ground. Zambeel closed in 2003, having raised $66 million, but selling only a single system. Panasas raised $25 million in 2008, one of multiple rounds for the firm. Maxiscale raised $12 million before coming out of stealth. Pillar Data, funded largely by Oracle's Larry Ellison, is expected to have raised between $300 and $400 million alone. So when I hear tech reporters hem and haw about Web startups raising $10 or $20 million, it doesn't make me blink, considering the world of big dollars I've operated in for a decade.

So why the big dollars? Why are venture capitalists so willing to put such big bets into spinning disk and faster networks? Because when things go well, the customer benefits are very real, and the returns could be even better. Customers will pay top dollar to reduce the amount of time it takes to build special effects or bring pharmaceuticals to market. Fast network storage devices are key in mapping out the earth's terrain from satellites, and combing its ocean floor for potential oil deposits. Fast network storage is being used to collect mountains of data by the government, to simulate nuclear weapons' testing, and build next generation vehicles. And those companies that won't compromise on the speed of execution will buy from new storage startups not named IBM, EMC and HP.

That's why Isilon, a competitor to BlueArc during my time there, is worth more than $1.1 billion today, even after its own public struggles. 3Par earned its way to the discussion and is now cresting above $1 billion. Ocarina Networks, a client of Paladin, was purchased by Dell last month, for an undisclosed sum. Ocarina's competitor, Data Domain, was caught in a bidding war between EMC and NetApp, eventually going to EMC for more than $2 billion last year - simply with the promise of reducing storage capacity!

Today, some of the biggest debates in the Silicon Valley are around angels versus venture capitalists, and whether a $500k round can tip you from one side to another. Some of the best known Web startups today are begging for a $25 million acquisition by Google, or so it seems. FriendFeed, one of the biggest acquisitions by Facebook, was rumored to be "only" $50 million. But on the other side of the datacenter, it is an entirely new ballgame, where hundreds of millions of dollars go in one side, and you could get billions out the other end, or you could get nothing. Companies like 3Par, BlueArc, Isilon, DataDirect Networks, Panasas and others have put pressure on EMC, NetApp and IBM to innovate, and expand their product portfolios. Companies like Data Domain, Ocarina Networks and Permabit are working to optimize storage throughout the datacenter. Emulex, Qlogic, Brocade and Cisco are working on faster networks, cards, adapters and protocols to make sure data can go between client and server and back again at rates previously impossible, and everybody is betting on standards they hope will put them in the best spot.

So congratulations to 3Par for their fantastic exit and sale to Dell. Congratulations to Isilon for fighting a tough battle and living the life of a public company, worth $1 billion and up. It's fun to see companies and people I once saw as competitors, partners and allies, who I rubbed shoulders with at trade shows, and with whom I traded taunts on Twitter, taking things to the next level. There is no doubt in my mind that others will be good stories, and some will go the other way with spectacular flameouts, equally incredible to watch, but for much different reasons. It's a very different ballgame over here.

Disclosures: As a former BlueArc employee and investor, I own private equity stock in the company. In addition, Emulex is a current client of Paladin Advisors Group. Prior to their sale to Dell, Ocarina Networks was also a client of Paladin Advisors Group. Maxiscale was also a Paladin Advisors Group client in 2010. At times, I may seek to do business with or engage with many companies in this list, or their competitors.

Two months ago, I told you about how my wife and I used Redfin for practically the entire process of searching for and buying a home. If there were properties not listed on the site, we simply didn't see them, as we leveraged the company to track our favorites and discover new options. Even after finally picking one and moving in at the end of July, I haven't stopped window shopping - partly to ensure we made the right choice and to watch macro changes in the area - and I was pleased to see the service has added a new wrinkle to the site, displaying area schools with every single query - making area education options as important as any other facet when choosing a home.

Now, when you search for properties, not only due you see which properties are on the market, and which have upcoming open houses, but you also see school locations, as well as how they rank relative to their peers on a 1-10 scale, based on standardized test scores. Obviously, for a family with children, the higher an area school's ranking, the more appealing the property, and the lower the school's quality, the more likely it is that one's neighbors and neighborhood will have some issues.


The integration of education data in Redfin's real estate service is more than skin deep, as each school is now profiled on the site, with basic facts and even parent's reviews. According to Redfin's blog, the service will even soon let you search for homes within a specific district, a big deal for some families.


In the areas of the country served by Redin, the product has eclipsed Zillow and others in many ways, and it looks like it could deliver the same level of detail for schools as it has for new properties. You can even start with a school's description and find homes for sale in the neighborhood, effectively turning the real estate search process on its head. If you're looking for a home and want to find data on schools in the area, Redfin looks to be leading the pack.