Digital Realty designs, builds and manages large data centers for third parties, including collocation providers and hosting companies. It is one of the biggest providers of such services worldwide.

The company hired Manos last April as senior vice president of technical services, where he oversaw design, construction and technical operations for Digital Realty’s data centers worldwide. Before that, he ran Microsoft’s Data Center Services division.

Manos said via e-mail that he planned to announce his next move on Sunday. “The next chapter of my career brings me back in closer alignment with what I did for Microsoft,” he wrote.

“I remain firm in my endorsement of Digital Realty Trust and hope that my involvement has helped to move the company forward,” he was quoted as saying in a statement from Digital Realty.

Digital Realty said, “We understand that this was a difficult, personal decision for him and we wish him the very best in his future endeavors.”

Manos has been a champion of containerized data centers like those being used on a large scale at Microsoft’s new data center in Chicago. Containerized data centers pack servers and other compute gear into shipping containers, and they can help companies boost energy efficiency or delay the need to construct new data centers.

Manos is also a frequent speaker at industry conferences on energy efficiency and other data center topics. He is also a proponent of building data centers in a more modular, standardized way, where mechanical and electrical components are designed and can then be reused in a “cookie-cutter” fashion.

Digital Realty said Dave Caron, senior vice president for portfolio management, will oversee technical operations, and Jim Smith, chief technology officer, will oversee design and construction on an interim basis, both effective Feb. 1.

Apple’s upcoming iPad includes the iBooks app, which combines e-book reader software with an iTunes-like service for selling books. I was somewhat surprised by iBooks. I had just assumed that Apple was going to let existing e-book distributors like Amazon.com and FictionWise install apps on the iPad and sell books that way. But I should not have been surprised. Why wouldn’t Apple want to have its own e-book store?

The iPad is likely to suck the oxygen from e-book hardware sales. Given a choice between an e-book reader and a device that does e-books and dozens of other things, consumers will likely choose the more useful device.

Novelist Charles Stross thinks the Kindle is in trouble.

“And this thing is going to slaughter the Kindle and most of the other ebook readers on the market, even without Apple coming up with a better business model for the publishers. With Penguin, Hachette, Macmillan, Simon and Schuster and HarperCollins on board, they’ve just about aced the main US trade publishers — remains to be seen how smaller outfits plug into the platform, but at this point Amazon have a struggle on their hands. As iBook reads ePub format files it may be possible to add free content to it. Maybe.”

Whether this is a win or loss for Amazon depends on how Amazon plays it from here out. The Amazon Kindle software already runs on the iPhone, and it will therefore run on the iPad. With the introduction of the iPad, the market for e-books is going to explode.

If Amazon stakes its future on the Kindle hardware, it’s in for a world of hurt. But if it builds a business on cross-platform e-book sales, then Amazon will prosper.

Not everyone agrees that the iPad will be fatal to the Kindle. Brad Stone of the New York Times argues that the iPad is not a Kindle-killer:

“The Kindle is for book lovers, and the iPad is not.

“Sure, the Kindle’s potential market may have shrunk today, since the two-books-a-year folks will now opt for the more versatile iPad.

“But the Kindle (and other devices with E Ink screens) will continue to be the best device for lovers of long-form reading, period. (And they do love it; check the Kindle forums for the passion of Kindle owners.) The iPad’s backlit screen, higher price and more limited battery all make it a poorer choice for curling up with a novel.

“Also, there’s the distraction factor. When you read a book, you just don’t want to have e-mail, Twitter and the ESPN Web site beckoning from the browser. The absence of those services on the Kindle — sure, it’s also a flaw — actually make it better for focused leisure reading.”

I’m a book-lover, and I disagree with Stone. I don’t think there are enough people who agree with him to sustain e-book reader sales.

And there’s one way the iPad is great for writers, readers and publishers: The iBooks store will provide an e-book alternative to Amazon’s growing monopoly.

As an added bonus feature, iBooks supports the ePub standard for e-books. Macworld’s Dan Frakes explains the significance of ePub support:

“Adopted by the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF) as an open-standards-based format for digital books, ePub allows publishers to create books in a single format for distribution to various e-book resellers and for use on any device that supports ePub. With more and more publishers and hardware vendors adopting the ePub standard, this news means it will be easier for publishers—big and small—to make their e-books available for the iPad and other e-readers.

“(Questions still remain, however: Will Apple apply FairPlay copy protection to books you purchase through the iBookstore? Will you be able to import unprotected ePub documents into the iBooks app? We’ll be working on the answers to these questions going forward.)”

“Many other companies have already stopped supporting older browsers like Internet Explorer 6.0 as well as browsers that are not supported by their own manufacturers. We’re also going to begin phasing out our support, starting with Google Docs and Google Sites,” Rajen Sheth, Google Apps senior product manager, wrote in a blog post Friday.

The announcement comes more than two weeks after Google reported that its servers had been the target of attacks originating in China. Those attacks targeted a vulnerability in IE 6, for which Microsoft has since issued a fix.

Support for IE6 in Google Docs and Google Sites will end March 1, Sheth said in the post. At that point, IE6 users who try to access Docs or Sites may find that “key functionality” won’t work properly, he said.

Sheth suggested that customers upgrade to Internet Explorer 7, Mozilla Firefox 3.0, Google Chrome 4.0 or Safari 3.0, or more recent versions of those browsers.

According to StatCounter, IE6 has 18 percent market share among browsers.

Until recently, pretty much all e-readers used E-Ink displays like the ones in Amazon’s Kindle and Barnes & Noble’s Nook. However, at CES we’ve seen a number of concept designs and prototypes-from both Asian contract manufacturers and established companies-that are billed as “e-readers”, but use LCD screens like the ones in typical notebooks.

Are these devices truly e-readers? The whole point of electronic paper-based e-readers is that the display, which doesn’t use a backlight, mimics the look of physical paper and is easier on the eyes than a bright, backlit LCD. I saw many LCD “e-readers” at the show, but none had those same qualities.

Tech companies are as susceptible to trends as teenage girls and I’d argue that many of the companies making LCD-based e-readers are simply jumping on the craze for these devices. Many of these so-called e-readers are no more than tablet PCs or MID (mobile Internet devices), capable of displaying e-books with e-reader software but not really optimized for that purpose. It’s no different, really, than a mobile phone running Amazon’s Kindle app, or any other e-reader software for that matter. The only difference between the two categories is the size of the screen.

Much of the hype is just that. After all, this is CES-the place where companies go to put forth ideas and gauge the reception from the media and potential customers.

Which brings me around to the MSI 10-inch dual-screen e-reader concept. The clam-shell prototype device was surprisingly lightweight in my hands, and had a touchscreen that made it easy to navigate around the Windows 7 starter operating system. The screens responded to being reoriented from the vertical position to horizontal; in horizontal mode, the unit has a virtual keyboard with haptic feedback. The prototype is intriguing, to be sure, but, MSI has no plans to bring it to market, and according to a product manager, the product won’t be manufactured until at least 2011. Ditto for the company’s other concept display, a half-inch-thick (give or take) tablet “e-reader” with touchscreen, running Google Android. Both devices ran e-reader software, had LCD screens, and used full-featured operating systems. They were capable of far more than many traditional e-readers, but will they be optimal if what you really want is a device primarily to read novels on your commute?

Other e-readers, like the Entourage eDge and the Spring Designs Alex Reader, also include multi-purpose LCD screens. But in addition, they have E-Ink displays of equal or greater size that the manufacturers intend for use as the primary reading display.

While many of the tablet/MID devices introduced at CES look promising, none appear ready to replace electronic paper for long-form reading. When the sun set in Vegas, they’re still just small PCs that let you access electronic books, along with doing a whole lot of other stuff.

The Chinese Writers Association posted a copy of the Google statement on its Web site on Sunday. On the same day Erik Hartmann, an Asia-Pacific representative of Google Books, delivered the apology in a news program aired by China’s state broadcaster.

China is one of several countries, including the U.S. and France, where Google’s digital library program has faced legal challenges. The apology comes after the Chinese group demanded that Google compensate local authors whose works the U.S. search giant scanned without their approval.

Google is scanning hundreds of thousands of books, often without prior permission from their rights holders, so they can be searched and previewed on the Google Books service.

Google acknowledged in the statement that it had scanned books by Chinese writers and said the company would no longer do so without local authors’ permission. It also said it hopes to reach a general agreement over resolving the tensions by March and to sign a final agreement in the second quarter.

“Due to different starting notions and different understandings of the copyright law systems in China and the U.S., our behavior has caused discontent among Chinese writers,” the statement said. “Our communication with Chinese authors has not been good enough. Google is willing to apologize to Chinese authors for this behavior.”

Google has held talks with a local copyright protection group over the book service. One Chinese author, Shanghai-based Mian Mian, has brought a copyright infringement lawsuit against Google for scanning her novel Acid Lover and showing portions of it online.

A Google spokeswoman said Google Books complies with U.S. and Chinese law and that the company only shows snippets of copyright books for which it does not have permission from rights holders. Authors and publishers can choose to exclude their works from the service, she said.

The cloud is all the rage. Vendors of all shapes and sizes are in a race to move as many products and services as possible to the cloud – providing managed services and software-as-a-service rather than traditional, locally-installed, software applications.

There are many major players investing in moving customers to the cloud. Amazon has a cloud computing offering and recently bolstered it with a more secure, segregated private cloud service. Microsoft provides hosted online productivity services and recently rolled out the technical preview of Office Web Apps, delivering Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote from the cloud.

Google is arguably the primary champion of cloud computing. The Web is what Google does. Google has a virtually endless list of products and services that are all delivered via the Web from the cloud.

Google is not content with dominating Web search or search engine advertising. It has an ongoing crusade to deliver business productivity from the Web. Google is taking on Microsoft head-to-head across a range of markets in an effort to wrest control from the desktop and move the computing experience to the Web.

That crusade has had relative success. Many users and businesses have found that Google Docs can fill their office productivity needs. Gmail can fulfill their e-mail needs. Google Calendar provides scheduling. Google Talk delivers instant messaging. Basically, Google has enough tools and services to fulfill virtually all of the productivity and communications needs for an organization…from the Web.

The problem is that Google has experienced repeated issues with service outages. Here are just a few of the headline-making outages:

· September 24, 2009: Gmail outage

· September 22, 2009: Google News outage

· September 1, 2009: Gmail outage

· May 14, 2009: Google network outage

· May 18, 2009: Google News outage

· March 9, 2009: Gmail outage

· August 7, 2008: Gmail and Google Apps outage

These repeated outages damage the credibility of the cloud. Enterprises that are considering the pros and cons of moving office productivity or communications to the cloud have reason to be concerned when the poster child of cloud computing can’t provide reliable availability.

The cloud offers many potential advantages for customers, but one of the biggest factors driving apprehension and impeding adoption is availability. Customers are reluctant to offload productivity and communication to the cloud if the possibility exists for the cloud to disappear. Productivity and communication are mission-critical aspects for businesses and reliable availability is not negotiable.

David Coursey summed it up nicely, stating “Rather than adding features that add only questionable value to our lives, such as Sidewiki and Fast Flip news, maybe Google needs to stop, take a deep breath, and focus on quality and reliability for products many of us use every day? ”

Google can help improve the reputation of the cloud and further its own agenda to make desktop applications obsolete and move everything to the Web by ensuring that the products and services it provides are as reliable as they are functional.

On the subject of Twitter, the company announced some changes to its terms of service late last week. They tried to emphasize that users “own their tweets.” But do users really own them if they cannot access them because Twitter is not working? What if you could export your Tweets into Facebook, or into MySpace? It’s not that one service is better than the other. It’s about simply having the freedom to take your data wherever you want.

Google realizes the importance of this concept, which is why some members of the company’s team have gotten together and formed the Data Liberation Front, a group that is dedicated to making Google’s products easier to get data in and out of. The group has also launched a website at DataLiberation.org, where users of Google products can find information about how to import and export data.

“Many web services make it difficult to leave their services – you have to pay them for exporting your data, or jump through all sorts of technical hoops — for example, exporting your photos one by one, versus all at once,” says Brian Fitzpatrick, Data Liberation engineering manager. “We believe that users – not products – own their data, and should be able to quickly and easily take that data out of any product without a hassle. We’d rather have loyal users who use Google products because they’re innovative – not because they lock users in.”

The group’s mission statement goes:

Users own the data they store in any of Google’s products. Our team’s goal is to give users greater control by making it easier for them to move data in and out.

“This principle not only applies to individual users, but also to businesses, schools and other organizations that choose Google Apps to provide better tools at a fraction of the cost of traditional solutions,” says Fitzpatrick. “It should be easy to bring legacy data into the cloud, share data between Google Apps and other IT infrastructure, and get data out of the cloud if it ever makes sense to stop using our service.“

At DataLiberation.org, users can simply browse through Google’s list of products and see detailed instructions for each one about how to “escape” to or from any of them. This list includes: AdWords, Alerts, Analytics, App Engine, Apps for Businesses, Blogger, Bookmarks, Calendar, Chrome Boomarks, Contacts, Docs, Finance, Gmail, Health, iGoogle, Maps, Notebook, Orkut, Picasa, Reader, Voice, Web History, and YouTube.

The company says it will be working on adding import/export features to more of its products like Google Sites, and Google Docs (batch-export) in the coming months.

“We think open is better than closed — not because closed is inherently bad, but because when it’s easy for users to leave your product, there’s a sense of urgency to improve and innovate in order to keep your users,” says Fitzpatrick. “When your users are locked in, there’s a strong temptation to be complacent and focus less on making your product better.”

Google’s certainly not the only company to offer data portability options, but it’s a very large one that has a huge impact on a lot of users and businesses. That’s why Google’s work in this area is so important. The company’s broad range of products that are used heavily on a daily basis emphasizes the importance of the issue on the web in general. Tired of Gmail going down? You can take your info elsewhere if you wish.

“Google Checkout sellers of real estate rentals, timeshares, and day sight-seeing tours must have a valid public business URL,” says Sammer Abdul of Google Checkout Operations. “The sellers may, however, choose to use either Checkout buttons or Checkout invoices to process transactions for the above allowable services based on their business requirements.”

The Google Checkout merchant help center provides a list of product categories (as well as examples), which are still considered unacceptable. Some of these are obvious (illegal goods), and some not so obvious (Travel packages and offers).
The competition is heating up among payment services, with Facebook now widely considered a potential big-player, and possibly Apple too. By not offering real estate rentals, timeshares, etc. Google is missing out on a fair amount of business. This is likely the driving factor behind Google’s decision to allow these.
On a semi-related note, Google recently announced it has made it easier to link Google Checkout with Google Base accounts. There’s a new page in the “settings” tab called “Checkout,” where you can add accounts to Checkout by entering a Checkout Merchant ID.

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) last week launched a campaign against Microsoft Corp.’s upcoming Windows 7 operating system, calling it “treacherous computing” that stealthily takes away rights from users.

At the Web site Windows7Sins.org, the Boston-based FSF lists the seven “sins” that proprietary software such as Windows 7 commits against computer users.

They include: Poisoning education, locking in users, abusing standards such as OpenDocument Format (ODF), leveraging monopolistic behavior, threatening user security, enforcing Digital Rights Management (DRM) at the request of entertainment companies concerned about movie and music piracy, and invading your privacy.

“Windows, for some time now, has really been a DRM platform, restricting you from making copies of digital files,” said executive director Peter Brown. And if Microsoft’s Trusted Computing technology were fully implemented the way the company would like, the vendor would have “malicious and really complete control over your computer.”

The result is that Microsoft could do things like Amazon.com, which last month went into customers’ Kindle e-readers and deleted illegally-sold copies of novels such as George Orwell’s 1984 , he said.

“This is treacherous computing,” Brown said.

Microsoft did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The group, best-known for overseeing the General Public License (GPL) used by most open-source software, including Linux , will hold a rally at noon in Boston Common, where it will unveil a 12-foot-tall art installation depicting Windows 7 “being trashed,” Brown said.

The group is also sending a letter (available at the group’s Web site) to top executives at Fortune 500 companies that argues their companies would benefit ethically, technically and, in the long-term, financially, from switching away from Windows and Microsoft Office to free alternatives such as Linux and OpenOffice.org.

Founded in the mid-1980s by hacker-activist Richard Stallman , the FSF argues that free software and source code is a moral right. It takes pains to distinguish itself from the open-source movement, which advocates sharing of source code but tolerates charging for software.

Both groups, however, view proprietary software vendors such as Microsoft, Adobe Systems Inc., and Apple Inc. as the enemy, Brown said.

Even with DRM, users running Windows PCs still maintain more freedom and privacy than those who foolishly use cloud computing services such as Google Docs and store their data there.

“That is the ultimate giving-away of your freedom,” he said. “That’s not a software freedom issue, it’s a stupidity issue.”

While Brown acknowledges that many Fortune 500 companies base their businesses around proprietary business models similar to Microsoft, he also points out that most of them, at least regarding software, are more consumer than vendor.

“Large corporations spend an awful lot of money on software. They face numerous software audits and more vendor lock-in than you or me,” Brown said. “Do you think they would rather be driving on a freeway, or always be paying on toll roads?”

“I’m not expecting an instant wave of companies switching off XP to Linux,” he said. “But we would like get that debate going. Hopefully, some will re-evaluate and say no to Windows 7.”

More than half of all adult Internet users in the United States either visit or maintain a profile on at least one social networking site, according to a new study conducted by Forrester Research.

Where IT pros do their social networking

In its latest survey on social technologies, Forrester found that 51% of online U.S. adults utilize social networking sites such as Facebook or LinkedIn, a large increase from the 25% of users who reported using social networking sites in 2007. Forrester says that the surge in social networking for online Americans “reflects the appeal of Facebook, as both press coverage and invitations from friends suck more of us into social networks.”

Facebook is the most popular social networking site with 250 million active users and 120 million who log on daily.

Forrester conducted its survey online in May by questioning more than 4,700 Web users between the ages of 18 and 88. The firm used data collected from the survey to classify Internet users into six different type: “creators” who create and publish their own content such as blogs, videos or music; “critics” who post reviews or comment on others’ online forums or blogs; “collectors” who use RSS feeds; “joiners” who visit or maintain profiles on social networking sites; “spectators” who utilize podcasts, videos and blogs but who don’t interact with others; and “inactives” who do none of the above.Forrester says that the growth of users who consume social media such as podcasts, videos and blogs has grown almost as dramatically as social networking Web site users. The survey classified a full 73% of online U.S. adults as spectators, a big increase from the 48% that it classified as such in 2007. Additionally, the number of users who consume no social media has fallen from 44% in 2007 to 18% this year. Looking at age demographics, Forrester expects these trends to intensify in the coming years.

“We now see that participation among those under 35 is nearly universal,” writes Forrester analyst Josh Bernoff at the Forrester Interactive Marketing blog. “Soon, if you’re online, you’ll almost certainly be consuming social technologies…Marketers, if you’re not doing social technology applications now, you’re officially behind.”

The one group of social networking users that has not grown rapidly over the past three years, however, has been the creators who post their own content online. According to the survey, just 24% of American Web users are classified as creators, up from 18% in 2007. Forrester analyst Sean Corcoran, who authored the report on the survey, says that creators have a certain temperament that many Internet users don’t share, thus limiting their potential expansion.

“It really comes down to whether you want to be a publisher or not,” he explains. “It’s going to be a smaller group than most of the rest.”