The new year brought a treat for those who like to follow aging media moguls, with the launch of official Twitter accounts belonging to both News Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch and his wife Wendi Deng, including some awkward banter around a tweet that Murdoch later deleted. The only problem with the voyeuristic appeal of this exchange, however, is that Deng wasn’t the real thing — although the account was marked as “verified,” with Twitter’s blue check mark, it was revealed to be a fake on Tuesday. A simple slip-up? Perhaps, but one that reinforces how little we know about Twitter’s verification process, something that is becoming more and more important as the service grows.

When Murdoch showed up on Twitter on December 31, there was widespread skepticism about whether it was the real News Corp. billionaire or not, despite the fact that the account was marked as verified. But a tweet from Twitter co-founder and chief product officer Jack Dorsey confirmed that it was the real Murdoch — and the “verified” check-mark, combined with the apparent back-and-forth between the Wendi Deng account and Murdoch’s, convinced many that it was also real (although some, including publishing industry veteran Michael Wolff, continued to doubt this).

How was the account verified? We don’t know

On Tuesday, however, it emerged that the Wendi Deng account had been set up as a prank by a British man, who said he “set up the account for a laugh” during the holidays, when he saw how much attention the Murdoch account was getting. The account’s creator said that he was as surprised as anyone when his account showed up with a blue check-mark, and that he hadn’t been contacted by anyone at Twitter about who he was or whether the account was for real, telling the Guardian:

I just couldn’t believe they would have verified such a high profile account without checking it out, but I absolutely received no communication from Twitter to the email address I used to register.

Twitter has refused to speak publicly about what happened with the Deng account, or to explain why it was verified and then suddenly un-verified — and the company has also repeatedly refused to talk on the record about how the verification process as a whole works, and why some accounts are chosen for verification and others aren’t. Even if the Deng verification was a simple screw-up due to reduced staffing levels over the holidays, Twitter’s radio silence on the issue makes it even harder to trust the entire process, and that could have ramifications that go beyond just the Murdoch case.

The “verified” program started with the blue check mark as a beta in 2009, primarily because a number of celebrities had complained about fake accounts pretending to be them, and the company said it wanted to help users figure out which were real. For a time, anyone could apply to have their account verified by using a form on the Twitter website, but this was later phased out and verification is now done on what the company calls a “case by case” basis, including advertisers and partners.

Twitter needs to be more transparent about the process

Given the rapid growth in Twitter’s user base, it’s not surprising that Twitter would have problems scaling a widespread verification program — and in some ways, doing this runs against the grain for the network, which has made a point of not requiring real names from users the way that Facebook and Google+ have. But even worse than having an arbitrary verification process is having one that doesn’t work properly, and one that the company is so opaque about. It’s not clear why Twitter doesn’t talk about it, but this vacuum of information is hardly conducive to gaining the trust of users.

And trust is something that Twitter needs in spades, especially as it grows and becomes a crucial part of the way that news and other information spreads in a social-media age. The network is already in a delicate situation when it comes to issues like free speech, with the State Department pressuring it to shut down accounts that belong (or appear to belong) to terrorist organizations, and other lobby groups launching legal claims against the company because it allegedly supports entities like Hezbollah by giving them a platform.

The company’s refusal to provide more details about how the verification process functions may stem in part from its desire to protect the users it is verifying, or to prevent the system from being gamed somehow. But if it is going to continue to ask for the trust of its users, it is going to have to be more transparent about how it manages the network, or risk losing the faith that it has spent so much time building up.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users Hans Gerwitz and See-ming Lee

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Mike Pav

Austin, Texas-based startup Spanning has embraced the concept of cloud computing so much that its product is a backup service for Google Apps — completely hosted and run from Amazon Web Services. The idea of backing up one cloud service via another was intriguing enough that I asked Mike Pav, the VP of engineering at Spanning, how he does it.

Spanning charges people or businesses a year to back up Google Apps, including email and documents, against the user somehow deleting or losing them. Google will support users if it loses their data, but it won’t go searching for your files if you mess up.

Spanning CEO Charlie Wood is confident enough that Google won’t get into extended services like backup that he’s sticking with this, although he’s also looking for new lines of business as the company continues to grow. To that end, the company is seeking its next round of funding after having raised a million Series A round last April.

Building a backup cloud in the cloud

Building a cloud-based backup for a cloud service requires a devotion to reliability and planning for worst-case scenarios. Creating a backup service in Amazon Web services is never done, said Pav, as he explained some of the techniques he’s used to support Spanning while also trying to keep costs in line. “For example, a single point of failure for us was our database, but we just finished up a big project to partition our database,” Pav said. “We have to focus on the path and not the destination, because as far as scalability is concerned, we’ll never be done. That’s our real barrier to entry.”

The Spanning engineering team.

Spanning adds terabytes of storage each month, and it uses Amazon because it makes automatic scaling seamless. “It would be terrible if we had to rack our own drives into an array to deal with that,” Pav says. Spanning stores all the content on S3 because it guarantees high reliability, but the getting the data to S3 can be slow. To address this, Spanning uses parallel access, which helps address the speed of S3, but also provides an added benefit in terms of scalability and reliability.

Designing messaging so dying VMs won’t take out your data

Spanning uses Amazon SQS to queue work to a pool of virtual resources that grows and shrinks based on load. Pav’s team has set up Spanning’s application to track the incoming flow of data to EC2 and make sure each time the system is about to back up new content, it checks to see if the EC2 instance is about to shut down. If it is, the in-progress backup requeues its work-in-progress so another server can pick up this work when AWS adds another server from the pool. That way, the backup doesn’t have to start all over again.

This is important when dealing with potentially large sets of data. Pav says Amazon offers several different models for queue management, but simplicity and scalability are the driving features for Spanning. “When you’re dealing with large data sets for a large number of users, you can’t afford to do anything twice.”

Don’t do anything Amazon will do for you

From storing papers to storing packets.

Spanning uses Amazon Relational Database (RDS) for its persistent database storage, although it does impose limitations on how much data Spanning can store and the throughput it can support on any single database instance. Pav admits this limits his partitioning strategies, but he’s willing to work within those limits, because it cuts his need to support and build his own data store.

“We want to get out of the business of spending time managing these things. We can solve this problem at the application’s architectural level to make sure it scales,” he said. “RDS may not be the highest-performance option, but we are able to reduce investment into something that’s not core to our business and by making good application level architectural decisions we can render the RDS performance issue moot.”

Amazon has changed not just the economics of building an IT service, but also helps make his product better and faster at less cost to him and his team. Pav notes that because of the reliability of Spanning on Amazon and his confidence that user data won’t be lost, he deploys new code when features are ready, and often in the middle of the day when his team is fresh. This is a big shift from the older days of waiting until late at night when theoretically fewer users are online to feel any disruptions.

Of course, with a large customer base all over the world and a growing one in North America, Pav points out that in today’s distributed world, there really is no more middle of the night.

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Feds deny hacking caused Illinois water pump failure originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 23 Nov 2011 17:51:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Consider this: managers spend between 30 to 80 percent of their time in meetings and more than 50 percent of them consider many meetings to be a “waste of time.” Ninety percent of managers attribute the failure of most meetings to a “lack of planning and organization,” and most managers have never been trained on how to host a productive meeting. When you add in the complexity of leveraging the Internet for hosting distributed meetings online, it is even more difficult to ensure a successful result. Without some amount of preparation and planning, remote team members can feel disconnected, disregarded and even unwelcome in meetings.

At oDesk, our in-house full-time employees work from home at least one day a week, and we’re regularly collaborating with a team of about 250 remote contractors who act as a crucial extension of our internal team. This has forced us to study how to make meetings work for all involved.

We’ve found there are three steps to a successful online meeting:

• Be sure you need a meeting to accomplish the desired result
• Establish topics and their time allocation, roles and processes (planning objectives, information sharing, problem solving, decision making, relationship building)
• Assess your meeting afterwards (results met, process adhered to, relationships strengthened)

We started by defining the roles involved in making a remote meeting work: the organizer, coordinator, presenter(s) and attendees. Each role has its responsibilities to the team, and by defining those roles, we’re able to ensure accountability for each meeting’s success and seek out ways to continually improve the remote meeting experience. Adopting these roles has allowed us to make sure members of a distributed team are as active, included, and productive during a meeting as those who are on-site.

Organizer: Setting the stage

Someone needs to make sure the meeting will accommodate all participants. The format of the meeting will largely depend on the needs of the group and the goals of the meeting. The meeting organizer works with the presenter to ensure that the right format is chosen and prepared ahead of time.

• Where will we hold the on-site meeting? Generally, this will be a conference room or office large enough to hold all the on-site attendees, with the technology necessary to accommodate remote attendees.
• What kind of access do remote attendees need? Is audio sufficient, or do they need video of the room? Do they need to be able to see slides or other materials?
• How will remote attendees “dial in”? This means choosing the platform of the meeting, which can include a bridge line, Skype, or a desktop sharing/presenting platform such as GoToMeeting.
• How will we communicate when and how to attend? Invitees need to know when, where and how to attend the meeting. If remote attendees need to have a login to register or to download and install a plugin, the organizer makes sure they are aware of this potential roadblock and are prepared in advance.
• Is everyone clear on the roles and their responsibilities? Make sure all attendees are aware of the presenters and meeting coordinator, and share the agenda and best practices with them.

Presenters: Adapting to the environment

Presenters must remember to take into account the remote participants. When you’re explaining concepts or an initiative to a distributed team, will there be visual aids? Do you intend to show something on a computer screen? Does it need to be seen live, as you manipulate it, or can you send a copy of the material, such as a PowerPoint presentation, to remote participants so they can follow along? Prior to the meeting, the presenter should work with the meeting organizer to make sure they—and the facility—are prepared technically to present via local projection and remote platforms.

During the meeting, presenters should:

• Log onto their presentation platform five minutes early to address any technical difficulties.
• Welcome everyone and ask remote attendees whether they can hear and see appropriately
• Make sure to verbalize throughout the meeting what attendees should be seeing (slide number, visual cues, etc.) to help flag sharing problems quickly.
• Ask whether the remote team has any questions. It can be hard for remote participants to interject or notify organizers of their desire to speak. Give them equal opportunity to contribute by offering them the floor at meeting/slide transitions.
• If a contributor is not near a microphone or speakerphone, repeat the statement or question yourself to ensure remote attendees can hear all conversations (since you’ll probably be best situated for microphone pickup).

Coordinators: Keeping everything on track

Identify a coordinator before the meeting. This person makes sure that the technical side runs smoothly and is prepared to respond to challenges as they arise. The meeting coordinator can also be the organizer, but should not be a presenter. If presentations are being made from more than one location, there should ideally be a coordinator in each place. Also, the coordinators should be members of the department presenting the meeting, to ensure that they’ll understand the material being presented, even if they’re distracted by the on-the-fly back-end management.

During the meeting, the coordinator:

• Facilitates an instant messaging group chat with remote team members, including updating the conversation regularly as problems are recognized and addressed. This IM session allows remote members to communicate technical difficulties or other distractions that need to be addressed without interrupting the meeting flow.
• Handles all troubleshooting requiring local action, such as adjusting microphones, encouraging speakers to talk louder, refreshing slide screens, etc.

Attendees: Ready to go

Attendees have a role to play in keeping the meeting running smoothly, as well. They’re responsible for:

• Logging onto the platform five minutes early to address any technical issues prior to the meeting.
• Communicating difficulties during the meeting to the coordinator via the chosen instant messaging channel.

A note on having a solid platform

Often a simple phone call and speakerphone is sufficient, but make sure any printed material, such as an agenda, is also shared with remote participants before the meeting. Depending on your presentation needs, more involved platform options include:

• Dial-in conference bridges or direct-dial phone calls
• Skype (video and voice chat)
• Shared documents (Google Docs)
• GoToMeeting/GoToWebinar
• WebEx

Whatever platform you choose, adapt your presentation to the platform’s strengths (don’t try to present a PowerPoint over a direct-dial phone call), and make sure that everyone is prepared. Check in with remote attendees afterward to make sure they had a positive experience, and work on ironing out wrinkles as they’re identified.

At oDesk, we’ve been refining our techniques for years, and we’re progressing toward meetings that are every bit as easy as having everyone under the same roof — sometimes even easier. More importantly, we’ve made sure that our remote workers are able to fully contribute to our success at least as well as if they were in our office. Which is the whole point of what we do, after all.

Gary Swart is CEO of oDesk. He has more than 17 years’ experience leading remote and local teams as an executive at Intellibank, IBM and Pure Software. 

Image courtesy of Flickr user Joe Shlabotnik

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At first glance, the N-Control Avenger looks like the fevered dream of a quirky lunatic, destined for fame and failure as a legendary crapgadget. When one showed up on our doorstep, we were admittedly skeptical. Could a lever- and pulley-laden Xbox 360 controller clamshell really give us a competitive edge? Wouldn’t all the extra bits and pieces only result in a cumbersome mess? Is this doodad really worth the asking price? We went hands-on to find out, and boy howdy, were we surprised.

Continue reading N-Control Avenger Xbox 360 attachment makes it look complicated, we go hands-on (video)

N-Control Avenger Xbox 360 attachment makes it look complicated, we go hands-on (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 14 Jun 2011 22:16:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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To Avert a sudden break down, it is vital to replace your timing belt. If you so desire, you can replace the timing belt yourself, without a lot of effort. Normally, after you have driven over 60,000 miles, you should contemplate replacing the timing belt.

So, how is your car’s timing belt doing? Have you changed it lately? Look At Your timing belt regularly, or you could find yourself in a bad situation. Typically, a timing belt will last anywhere from about 60,000 miles to just over 100,000 miles. Your owner’s manual will spell that information out for you. At any time the timing belt can fail but if you are vigilant then you can avoid being stranded. Contact Mini repair Atlanta to get the right timing belt for your vehicle.

A timing belt is used to turn the camshaft at precisely half the speed as the crankshaft. The camshaft causes the intake and exhaust valves to open and shut in time with the pistons as they move up and down in the cylinders. When the timing belt breaks, you aren’t going anywhere as the engine can no longer run. In some cases a timing belt failure could damage or even ruin a car’s engine. Most drivers ignore their timing belt until it breaks. This can be a real problem when you are miles away from the nearest help!

There is no absolute certain way to check that a timing belt has worn out. Rather, changing it regularly will decrease the risk of the timing belt tearing before it has to be replaced. Even if it has not failed many mechanics advise changing the water pump at the same time as of changing the timing belt as an additional work. To get a new water pump get in touch with Mini repair Atlanta .

By changing the timing belt, you’ve gone 90% of the way to replacing the water pump, too. This is your call: the water pump could last as long as your car, or could fail at some time. If the latter, you could be faced with a big repair bill as well as the inconvenience of having your car out of commission for several days.

Many weekend mechanics feel comfortable enough to replace their car’s timing belt themselves. With a trusty Chilton or Haynes auto maintenance and repair manual by your side you can pop the hood and remove and replace the timing belt in no time. Timing Belt Pros is one reputable online merchant where you can compare replacement timing belts and select one that suits your needs. Save a stash of money by undertaking work on your own and prevent expense of traveling to your local repair shop.