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This was originally published at ZDNet’s Between the Lines.

Facebook’s photo storage system holds 850 million photos and costs a lot of dough. Niall Kennedy has a nice overview of what Facebook is doing to minimize its storage costs.

Facebook’s system, dubbed Haystack, is custom-built but relies on content delivery networks and NetApp. Facebook is trying to minimize the custom stuff and use commodity hardware.

Kennedy does a nice job of synthesizing Facebook’s storage system. In a nutshell:

• Facebook’s previous system relied heavily on Akamai and Limelight to improve latency.

• That Akamai and Limelight use costs money.

• Facebook has invested in its own “blob” storage system designed to cut the total cost per photo on the social network’s systems.

• The company hired a former NetApp engineer to redesign the storage system.

A lot of this storage architecture is complicated–and frankly over my head–but for the engineers in the house here’s a presentation on Haystack from last year.

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Overhauling Facebook’s photo system

Yaaaaaaay! SpongeBob is taking over your Netflix account!

(Credit: Nickelodeon)

Viacom’s MTV Networks has brought some of its television content to Netflix’s library of streaming online video, the companies announced Monday.

The offering consists primarily of kids’ shows from the Nickelodeon network, with select seasons from the shows “iCarly,” “Blue’s Clues,” “Dora the Explorer,” “SpongeBob SquarePants,” and a handful of others, as well as the first nine seasons of “South Park,” the Comedy Central animated series that you probably don’t want your kids watching.

Netflix’s streaming-video service still very much takes the back burner to its DVDs-by-mail service, but the company has deals in place with TiVo, Boxee, Microsoft’s Xbox, and some HDTV providers.

It’s also the second streaming Netflix deal for Viacom, which licensed content from its Logo network last year. Viacom has also signed content deals with Joost (Disclosure: CNET News publisher CBS is an investor in Joost) and NBC Universal-News Corp. joint venture Hulu, which now runs episodes of Comedy Central’s hit talk shows “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” and “The Colbert Report.”

One major player in the video world with which you probably won’t see MTV Networks making a deal any time soon: YouTube. Viacom still has an outstanding lawsuit against YouTube parent company Google over infringing content.

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Now streaming on Netflix: SpongeBob, Cartman

The Pogoplug connects a USB hard drive the the Web.

(Credit: Pogoplug)

The Pogoplug, which I first covered from the Consumer Electronics Show, connects any USB hard drive to your local network and also puts it on the Internet so you can share files.

As I said before, this is not a new idea, but Pogoplug is supposed to be uncommonly easy to set up and use. It’s shipping today, and I’ve had a few days to preview the device to check out the claims.

It’s a good product. It actually does combine the speed of a local drive with the convenience of Web-accessible storage, it and requires barely any geek skills to get running.

The $99 product (no monthly fees) has two connections besides power: USB and Ethernet. It should be pretty clear what you plug into each. Once connected, you go online to the Pogoplug site to register your particular unit based on its serial number. This gives you password-controlled access over the Web to the storage device you have plugged into it. If you attach a USB hub, you can use it to access multiple hard drives or memory sticks.

The real benefit of using the Pogoplug over the Web is that it’s easy to share files stored on it. You can share directories on your drive just by clicking a Share button and optionally entering an e-mail address to send out invitations, and you can also get an RSS feed for any shared directory.

The Pogoplug Web service displays pictures and videos (first frames only) in nice slide shows, and it streams audio files. You can easily download files from it.

You can upload files to your Pogoplug drives via a standard-issue clunky Web form, or–much better–use the software driver that makes the Pogoplug emulate a local hard drive on a Mac or Windows system. With the driver installed, adding or managing files to the Pogoplug drive is as simple as dragging them with your computer’s file manager. Files quickly pop onto the drive over your local network.

Pogoplug can be used for sharing files or just for personal use. For example, you could back up files to a Pogoplug-connected drive so you have access to your files when you’re away from your home computer. However, no backup software for this is included (for PC users, I recommend SyncBackSE).

Finally, there’s a nice iPhone application for the Pogoplug that makes it easy to view files stored on it, as well as to upload iPhone photos back to the drive. The iPhone app also streams music files from the Pogoplug.

Each Pogoplug gets its own Web site for sharing the files on it.

(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)

This is a very cool and usable product, though there are version 1.0 snags. Photos uploaded from the iPhone to the Pogoplug can be made immediately available to your friends, but only if you give them access to the root directory of the drive, where the iPhone uploads. That’s a rather big security risk.

The software driver works great on a Mac (I tried it on OS X 10.5.6), but there’s no driver for 64-bit Vista; that should come out in about two weeks. I’d like to see more options for sharing, too, such as embeddable widgets to insert in blog posts or profiles page, or perhaps tools to synchronize Pogoplug files with sharing sites like Flickr. Or at the very least, the capability to easily find the static URL for each shared file (they’re there, but buried). My test unit also ran a bit hot.

Compared to some newer network-attached drives, like Western Digital’s My Book World Edition, or a Windows Home Server product like the HP MediaSmart line, the Pogoplug is light on the features. But it is a very good solution for quickly putting videos and photos online, especially if you already have them on an external drive.

Even if you don’t, this product strikes a compelling balance between speed, ease of use, and low cost. The Pogoplug fits into a narrow niche in network storage, but it does its job well. It’s the quickest solution I’ve seen for putting a hard disk on the Web.

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First hands-on with Pogoplug

Last week, Tech Crunch reported on rumors that Google was in “late-stage talks” to buy microblogging service Twitter. Kara Swisher responded to this post in her own blog, dousing the fire with sourced comments like, “There was a discussion…about real-time search and about product stuff. It was a couple weeks ago. It was very preliminary.”

The question is not whether Google and Twitter are talking. They are. If they weren’t, it would be news in itself. Venture capitalist David Hornik, who’s been doing deals in Silicon Valley for nine years, says, “They’ll never not be talking. It’s neither in Twitter nor Google’s interest to not be talking.”

Topics for discussion could include technology partnerships (for Twitter’s search engine), an advertising deal, or indeed acquisition. But is there a piece of paper on the table related to the latter? Hornik says that the demarcation line between and early-stage and late-stage discussion for a partnership or acquisition is, roughly, the letter of intent, which illustrates the basic terms of any deal. Even with a letter of intent, a most deals fall apart. No stories on the Twitter/Google topic mention anyone seeing a letter of intent, or even a basic deal structure. This leads me to believe that the talks are what are loosely called, “early stage”–the kind of talking everyone has with everyone else.

It’s also worth noting that the financial backers of Twitter, especially VC firm Benchmark Capital, are long-term investors, not likely interested in a quick exit–even for $1 billion figure that’s been thrown around by armchair deal makers. Given the reported $230 million valuation of the company at its last funding round, a $1 billion exit would not actually generate the level or return that a patient VC would expect to see from a hot and growing company like Twitter. There is also no indication whatsoever that Twitter is in any hurry to sell. Unlike YouTube before the Google acquisition, Twitter has a lot of cash in the bank and minimal expenses. YouTube was staring at two oncoming trains–bandwidth expenses and legal challenges–that Twitter doesn’t have to worry about.

Still, it does look like acquisition talks will have to start eventually. Although Twitter founders say they want to build an “independent” company, unless they dramatically increase the diversity of products offered by Twitter, or reveal both a revenue model that scales and a sustainable competitive barrier to it, I’d say the chances of staying single are slim. And with funding from VCs who expect a big return on their money–maybe not now, but definitely eventually–the company will likely, at some point, begin those “late stage” negotiations. But everything I’m reading and seeing points to talks being a bit of a way off.

See the rest here:
Reading the Google-Twitter tea leaves: Of course they’re talking

Last week, TechCrunch reported on rumors that Google was in “late-stage talks” to buy microblogging service Twitter.

Kara Swisher responded to this post in her own blog, dousing the fire with sourced comments such as, “There was a discussion…about real-time search and about product stuff. It was a couple weeks ago. It was very preliminary.”

The question is not whether Google and Twitter are talking. They are. If they weren’t, it would be news in itself. Venture capitalist David Hornik, who’s been doing deals in Silicon Valley for nine years, says, “They’ll never not be talking. It’s neither in Twitter nor Google’s interest to not be talking.”

Topics for discussion could include technology partnerships (for Twitter’s search engine), an advertising deal, or indeed acquisition. But is there a piece of paper on the table related to the latter? Hornik says the demarcation line between and early-stage and late-stage discussion for a partnership or acquisition is, roughly, the letter of intent, which illustrates the basic terms of any deal.

Even with a letter of intent, most deals fall apart. No stories on the Twitter-Google topic mention anyone seeing a letter of intent, or even a basic deal structure. This leads me to believe that the talks are what are loosely called “early stage”–the kind of talking everyone has with everyone else.

It’s also worth noting that the financial backers of Twitter, especially VC firm Benchmark Capital, are long-term investors, not likely interested in a quick exit–even for a $1 billion figure that’s been thrown around by armchair deal makers.

Given the reported $230 million valuation of the company at its last funding round, a $1 billion exit would not actually generate the level or return that a patient VC would expect to see from a hot and growing company such as Twitter.

There is also no indication whatsoever that Twitter is in any hurry to sell. Unlike YouTube before the Google acquisition, Twitter has a lot of cash in the bank and minimal expenses. YouTube was staring at two oncoming trains–bandwidth expenses and legal challenges–that Twitter doesn’t have to worry about.

Still, it does look as if acquisition talks will have to start eventually. Although Twitter’s founders say they want to build an “independent” company, unless they dramatically increase the diversity of products offered by Twitter, or reveal both a revenue model that scales and a sustainable competitive barrier to it, I’d say the chances of staying single are slim. And with funding from VCs who expect a big return on their money–maybe not now, but definitely eventually–the company will likely, at some point, begin those “late stage” negotiations. But everything I’m reading and seeing points to acquisition talks being a bit of a way off.

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Google and Twitter: Of course they’re talking