First impression: interesting idea, obvious that it’s the first attempt at implementation.

Now, my questions:

1. What would the money spent on a Blackbox get you in offsite hosting?

2. If you have the space to store a 20 foot shipping container and a chiller could you not just build a new data center in that space?

3. What keeps vandals and competitors from hijacking or severing the power, cooling, and external network connections? Is a whole new industry going to sprout up for data center trailer parks, with armed guards? It’s just a colocation facility writ large.

4. When Sun says that these things are stackable, does that mean system administrators need to sprout wings to get to the servers? Won’t that be a total pain in the duff? Space efficiency and ease of administration are mutually exclusive, in my experience (and marketers and engineers don’t have to deal with these products on a daily basis).

5. Why doesn’t this come in a 40 foot container?

6. Why doesn’t it have an integrated cooling option (perhaps in a 40 foot container)? You have to provide your own chiller, which makes the unit decidedly not standalone (beyond power requirements, obviously). Your chiller isn’t going to have the same level of imperviousness to the environment, so I see that as an Achilles heel.

7. Why don’t the racks have a better way to slide out, instead of that clumsy dolly thing? It was tough for the demoer to slide the rack out because the container wasn’t quite level. Will I have that same problem? The demoer mentioned the shipping product will have a dolly that moves in two dimensions. That sounds even worse, since I’ll have to manhandle a heavy rack in four directions, with running servers in it. I worry about the cable management.

8. Why does this thing need GPS? Does that mean it’s so easy to move that someone is going to steal it? Do we now need LoJack for our data centers?

9. Can I buy these things preconfigured, so my staff doesn’t have to spend time building and cabling them? A Blackbox preconfigured with and for VMware would be awesome. Ditto for Solaris zones. Plug it in and go.

10. Why are the power and cooling connections on the side, sticking out? Does this mean I can’t park two of them side by side? Ditto for the network connections, which are on the other side, so I couldn’t even park two side by side in opposite directions. To me it seems like these should be on the short ends, and all the connections in one place.

In doing some searching now I see Rackable has come out with their version of Blackbox, called Concentro. Now I have one more, big question:

11. Why didn’t Sun go all the way with the power savings thing and offer certain configurations where they do what Rackable does with DC power?

I do call shenanigans on Rackable’s 1200U of space since they do half-rack servers, but that is neat because it allows for convenient cooling up the center of the rack column with servers back to back. Those are proprietary systems, though, so they aren’t as flexible as the Blackbox for loading the container with whatever you need, but it also means they can address certain problems, like power & cooling, more easily. Concentro is a 40 foot container, so it’s comparable to Blackbox in 20 feet (300U vs. 266U). Like Sun they also don’t supply any sort of integrated cooling, though.

Overall, I think Sun could volley back at Rackable pretty easily with some custom, pre-loaded configurations based on DC power and integrated KVM & systems management. Hopefully they were planning to do that anyhow, and the information is scarce. But at the same time the demo left me with more questions than answers, which isn’t cool. To be fair I didn’t think of a lot of these until afterwards, though.

My conclusion: containerized data centers are the new blades. They’re proprietary, solve some customers’ problems, and introduce their own set of security and operational problems. It’ll be interesting to see who is buying them, what problems they are solving with them, and how these units are getting deployed.

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Update: Tom Chi from Yahoo! commented below on my remarks. Digg.com has his comments, and they make sense. Part of my problem is that I didn’t realize there was an old Yahoo! Bookmarks offering. I still think some of my criticism is relevant, but they know their own audience, or more specifically, both of their audiences. Thanks for adding to the discussion, Tom.

My first impressions of Yahoo! Bookmarks:

• I agree with LifeHacker that the del.icio.us interface leaves something to be desired.
• You can’t automatically post your bookmarks to a blog. That sucks. The del.icio.us interface for that was turbo-clunky but it works reliably.
• The “Bookmark It!” tool bar thing pops up a new window underneath everything. What good is that? I want the thing on top so I can interact with it right then and there to save my bookmark. This might be a Firefox problem, though. However, the default behaviour should be the right thing, and should account for the browser’s behaviour. Imagine explaining how to fix this problem to your mom.
• The “Bookmark It!” bookmarklet interface is clunky. I liked the del.icio.us free form text field where I could type a few things and then hit enter.
• I really like the idea that I can use folders or tags. Lots of people just don’t think in terms of tagging, and folders are more natural to them. Tags seem like a real afterthought in this product, though.
• The “Send” feature is pointless. I don’t want to send something via IM from Yahoo!. You know how I do that now? I open my IM client and paste the URL in there. Likewise, I send URLs in email by pasting the URL into an email and sending it. All the skills I need to email or IM a URL I learned in kindergarten. :-)
• “The all new Yahoo! Bookmarks…” sidebar ad needs a “close” button on it. I got the bookmarklet. Leave me alone.
• Where do the recommended bookmarks come from? I didn’t have anything bookmarked and it recommended stuff to me. If it did some form of recommendations a la last.fm or Amazon that’d be cool.
• I like the screenshots with the bookmarks. A lot of people put a lot of time into the way their site looks, and that gives some credit to it.
• The import from del.icio.us doesn’t work at all. I save the XML output I get from api.del.icio.us as instructed, but all I get is an empty folder called “Del.icio.us Import” inside whatever folder I told it to put the bookmarks in. Which also means that I would have to go and move my bookmarks out of that folder and put them where I said they should go. Annoying. Why can’t the tool just talk to del.icio.us for me?
• I don’t like the fact that I have to select a bookmark and then explicitly edit it. I’d rather click an icon next to each bookmark than go through a few extra steps to select and perform an action.
• You can’t see who else is bookmarking the same thing you are. In fact, the idea of social bookmarking is completely absent from this product, as others cannot see my bookmarks, either. It’s just a fancy personal bookmark manager. Update: this is somewhat intentional, as per the comments.

Final conclusion: Yahoo! Bookmarks initial good looks belie the fact that the product team completely missed the point. Everything that makes del.icio.us useful and cool is missing (namely all social bookmarking). The features that were added, like IMing of URLs, are perfunctory and solve no problems that copy and paste didn’t already have under control. The interface is clunky, tags are an afterthought, and neither are well thought out. The whole exercise makes me wonder why Yahoo! didn’t just opt to sand the rough edges of del.icio.us rather than starting anew.

New Final Conclusion: Yahoo! Bookmarks looks good, but isn’t very useful to me. Del.icio.us is way more useful and while the interface is clunky there the social bookmarking aspects are what I use it for. I stick to my assertion that some parts of the Bookmarks interface are clunky and that tagging can be integrated better. Hopefully some work can be done on del.icio.us, too, to clean up some of its rough edges.

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I was going to write about Omea not wanting to update anything, but then I noticed that it had a red exclamation point in the bottom status bar, which seemed to indicate things weren’t all good. A simple restart took care of that. I didn’t look carefully at the errors. I’ll worry about it if it gets weird again later. I’m always willing to give an app the benefit of the doubt, especially when it just got done indexing stuff that was imported from another app. I hadn’t restarted the application at all at the point where this happened, and it’s been flawless since. I didn’t notice if there were any other indications that there was something wrong. A change in the system tray icon might be a good way to indicate that something is wrong.

I did find a bug, which I reported via their web site. Cancelling out of the “Select Category” dialog causes the application to hang (Edit View->Add a category exception->”New” in the Select Category dialog->Cancel->dead…). Undoubtably just an oversight, as users probably define a category if they go in there. :-)

I absolutely love the custom feed views. I sort my feeds into two categories, which I’ve made into “feed folders” in Omea. The categories for me are: “I will read your blog every day” and “Your blog is annoying in some way that makes me not want to deal with it except when I have time.” Blogs in the second category usually have so much content per day that it’s a full time job to read them, or sometimes it’s a blog that doesn’t post the full content of their articles in the feed. If you write a blog that makes people go to your website, um, stop it. Or figure out a way to put your ads in the feed.

I really like that I can make a custom feed view that lets me exclude the feeds I don’t want to track on a daily basis. I just wish I could select a feed folder, rather than having to specifically exclude every feed I don’t want. Now, when I add another feed to the “annoying” list I’ll have to update all my views. Not the worst thing in the world, but if the user is grouping stuff let them filter on the groups. :-) Vyacheslav, if you’re reading this, that’s a feature request. :-)

One of the first things I did was unload all the plugins except the RSS feed one. I also customized it so that it would open all URLs in my OS default web browser (Firefox set to open new windows as tabs). And I set the default update interval for everything to be 1 hour.

So, after 24 hours of using it, I’ve concluded that this isn’t a feed reader my mother will like. However, it is a feed reader that lets me organize all the information I get, and despite my mother I love it. Besides, my mother isn’t into blogs. Yet. :-) (Actually, I bet she would be if I found a quilting blog for her). Good job, JetBrains!

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