RazorfishOutlookReportVol10

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The obvious benefit is that you save on bandwidth costs, but
the even greater benefit is that you are where users are. You
create a branded experience on YouTube, and then extend that
experience through YouTube embed codes onto your branded
property. YouTube continues to grow their API to allow more
flexibility around how your player looks and whether or not ads
should show up on your videos.
Simple plugin buttons such as Facebook’s “Like” and “Share,”
Google’s “+1,” and Twitter’s “Tweet” and “Follow” dramatically
lower the barrier to users sharing content from your site out
to their entire social graph.
Data resources
Learn exactly how far users will go
to make a purchase, which users
are more likely to purchase where,
and what other locations they frequent.
If social cloud services accelerate traffic to your branded digital
experience, core cloud infrastructure services will enable your
social cloud services. Infrastructure as a service or rent-as-yougo
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) or Platform as a Service
(PaaS) let businesses like Zynga, Groupon, LivingSocial and
Airbnb go from nothing to $1 billion valuations with negligible
IT overhead, scaling when they need it, without overbuying
capacity. But make sure you architect for fault tolerance (see
hOW the sOciaL cLOud can acceLerate Brand interactiOn
AWS failure this spring). PaaS leaders make deployment,
database and background jobs easy: consider Heroku, AppFog,
Engine Yard, VMware and Cloud Foundry.
We can learn from the technologies, processes and concepts
that have enabled huge social cloud growth for those companies.
They are using PHP (Facebook), Ruby on Rails (Twitter, Groupon,
Airbnb), Python (Yelp), MySQL, unobtrusive JavaScript, serverside
JavaScript, cloud hosting, Scala, Clojure, MongoDB, CSS3,
HTML5, REST, JSON and WebSockets. These technologies
are being used by cutting-edge companies and they are
contributing their cutting-edge work back to the community.
Plus they are generally much more cost-effective than traditional
enterprise-based approaches, stuck within slow-moving,
expensive corporate IT data centers. Agile approaches have
pushed innovative approaches like continual builds of code
or continual releases of production code. Both approaches
are made practical through platform cloud services.
Cloud-based performance monitoring tools like New Relic can
identify performance problems in your application and give
you starting points for optimization. LinkedIn uses this kind
of information to identify functionality that can be replaced