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Messaging protocols and message brokers are the glue that connects your cloud apps, and having support for different ones is critical to how you design and build out your virtual data center and fill it with apps. And by apps we aren’t talking about those iPhone eye candy, but pushing around big data in real time streams. From the company’s blog post, “[M]essaging provides stable communication patterns that scale across multiple network topologies…. RabbitMQ has a proven track record of moving a lot of data reliably in these scenarios at scale.”

The blog link cited above has links to all sorts of programming examples and sample applications in a variety of languages to help you get started. One of the reasons this is a significant announcement for CloudFoundry is because RabbitMQ is so protocol and language adept and easy to implement: it works with dozens of different languages and frameworks.

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The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has contributed $2 million in funding to a Facebook application with the hope that it will help improve postsecondary education graduation rates in the U.S. This is the first time the Foundation has made a direct equity investment in a for-profit company as part of its charitable mission.

Inigral’s Schools App creates a closed community of students within Facebook’s platform. Retro Venture Partners and Founders Fund also contributed to what totaled to a $4 million round of Series B funding.

About 11 schools use customized versions of the app, which Inigral’s CEO and founder Michael Staton describes as “a cross between Yammer and Twitter.” Essentially, each student gets access to two real-time streams. One provides updates from everyone at the school. The other contains updates that only pertain to topics the student has indicated she or he is interested in. Students can join groups and interact without friending other participants.

“The key is the way that we’re designed is to help people who don’t know each other get to know each other,” Staton says. “Whereas Facebook is designed to have people who already know each other stay in touch with each other.”

Schools App fills the void that Facebook left when it removed the requirement to sign up with a school e-mail address, its education networks and courses features in order to pursue a larger market. The app, which launched in 2009, turns the Facebook platform into a school community again — a function that turns out to be quite important.

Engagement with peers and school activities is widely regarded as one of the most important factors in whether a student graduates. When the ACT surveyed about 1,000 academic officers in 2004 to gauge what led students to stay enrolled in postsecondary schools, it found first-year programs that encourage peer-to-peer interaction to be among the three greatest contributors to retention.

Schools pay between $10,000 and $50,000, depending on the number of students, to use the app each year. It’s an interest in student acquisition as well as retention that drives this purchase. When deciding between the schools they’ve been accepted to, students are more likely to go to a school where they’ve already started making friends online (at least the that’s how the theory goes).

One school that invites its admitted students to join the school’s app, The University of Texas at Tyler, has started using participation in the app as a predictor of student enrollment. Before the app, whether a student had attended a campus tour was the best predictor. Students who had made a trip to campus were three times more likely to enroll than students who did not.

The school found, however, that students were five times more likely to enroll if they had used the application.

The Schools App offers an appealing value proposition for schools, a likely payout for investors, and an intriguing experiment for organizations, like the Gates Foundation, that are focused on improving graduation rates. That all three of these parties are happy with the same product seems like a small miracle (even Facebook is a fan) — but the true test will be whether the payoffs are as equally distributed as the anticipation.

More About: bill and melinda gates foundation, facebook, Inigral, Schools App

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Frequency is the best way to find, follow and share real time streams from your favorite online video sources and friends.

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While a lot of startups try to fine tune the search results in their quest to get a share of big advertising bucks, there’s hardly any innovation in the way search results are displayed. Google does a great a job from time to time, tweaking the search results page, adding real-time streams, search previews etc. Still, nobody has nailed the presentation like Qwiki has. Follow me after the jump to get a glimpse of the innovative information experience.

Overview

Qwiki’s goal is to forever improve the way people experience information. Qwiki offers a brand new way to consume information: text, audio, video, and images fused together in a gorgeous and streamlined interface. The final search results will look more like a slideshow or a movie reel with all the relevant information related to the keyword you have searched for.

Overview

Instead of throwing up a bunch of links with a few words of description or a monotonous page with thousands of words of text, Qwiki captures your attention and engages you with an interactive storyline. Qwiki is in private alpha and you’ll have to submit your email address to get an invitation. Qwiki is free to use.

How it Works

Qwiki doesn’t create information on its own but curates them in a streamlined manner. So if you’re performing a search on a city for a trip, gadget or person, Qwiki puts together information available in the public domain and social networking sites for the users to consume. Qwiki has millions of curated topics in their database. The web app focuses a lot on visuals, partly on audio and less on textual content.

Welcome Screen

Searching for information you’re looking for happens in the usual way-typing into a search box. Once you execute a search, be it a topic or person, Qwiki displays a slide with all the key things you have to know about the keyword. To enhance the experience, Qwiki also narrates those points to you as and when the slides appear for better understanding. Consider this like a short documentary on the topic of your interest if you will.

The Qwiki

Search In Progress

After entering the keyword, Qwiki takes a few seconds to put together the slideshow for you. A status page with a note saying that this is a rough draft and your feedback will help improve acts as a place holder in the mean time. Without much ado, the results page shows up and starts playing immediately. The results are nothing like we have seen before-no blue links or endless lines of text. We are shown blocks of images and video arranged in a rectangular frame.

The Slideshow

When the narration moves from one block to another, the focus is shifted and the content is prominently displayed. Without a need for any input from the user, videos associated with the results will start playing. In addition to the audio overlay, a transcript scrolls at the bottom of the slide and is in sync with the narration.

Qwiki Controls

The Controller

You can control the Qwiki with the controller hidden by random color strips. This adds to the already beautiful aesthetics of the web app. Just like in a regular video player, you have standard controls like play, pause, mute, skip across the timeline etc. You can also share the Qwiki with your friends using the share icon.

Accessing Related Topics

Realted Qwikis

The web app excels in displaying Qwikis of the related topics. All related topics mentioned in the narration of the initial search keyword are shown and you can access them in a single click. If you are someone who like to explore Wikipedia by clicking on the links available in a page, you will know that this is such a great way to kill some time usefully. Links to external sources like Wikipedia, Flickr, YouTube and Google are also available for further research.

Comments & Feedback

Finally, if you are satisfied with the Qwiki, you have the option to rate it. There is also an option to comment on the Qwiki for improving the content and to let the Qwiki team know if you will be sharing it with your friends.

Final Thoughts

There is no denying that Qwiki is a cool web app. However there are a couple of shortcomings to the app-both of them are related to the audio overlay. First, the narration begins instantaneously and it takes while to find the pause/mute button as it’s hidden behind the beautifully designed color coded bars. Audio playback begins with the slideshow and it would be better to inform the user beforehand regarding the same to avoid some embarrassing moments.

Second, the text displayed beneath the slide scrolls pretty fast to keep up with the narrator. This hampers the experience for people who don’t have their speakers turned on or don’t want to listen to the audio at all. Also, the information available on a lot of topics is not comprehensive and barely skims the surface. It’s more like a trailer reel to get interested on the topic in question and continue your quest for more information from sources like Wikipedia or Google. At the very least, information from one source should be covered in full for keeping the information complete.

If you have a tough time deciding on whether to dive deep into a topic or cannot decide if suits your interests, Qwiki is the perfect destination to brush the surface without having to waste a lot of time.

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In October, social networking service Cliqset entered public beta. Three months later, the site has received a facelift with some subtle UI improvements, added the ability to share certain file types with friends and added new tools for organizing real-time streams and groups. Cliqset is also launching a Firefox extension (Chrome coming soon) and a new version of its Adobe Air desktop app.

At its heart, Cliqset is designed as way to let people share, discover and discuss content online. You can import streams from tons of different services (including Twitter, Facebook and RSS feeds) and each new item in the stream can have its own real-time discussion from other Cliqset users.

What I have always liked about Cliqset is how easy it is to monitor your different social streams. With its new “streams” feature, the granular control over what you see is even more refined. You can create streams of certain users containing specific types of posts (videos or photos, for instance) or streams of certain services. This makes monitoring and discovering information much easier to process.

Cliqset now lets you share certain types of files with users, too. So you can upload a music file or PDF or Word document, and Cliqset users can play back the audio in their stream or preview portions of the PDF or open the office document on the fly.

Cliqset’s Firefox extension offers an easy way to watch your real-time Cliqset stream and share links, videos or comments. I can’t wait for this to come to Google’s Chrome browser, which the Cliqset team said should occur very, very soon.

If you haven’t used Cliqset before and are looking for a good way to manage your different streams and the people who you follow, I definitely recommend signing up and giving it a shot. With the latest wave of updates, the service continues to come into its own.

Tags: Adobe Air, cliqset, facebook, social aggregation, software, twitter

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"We’ve always focused the stream on real-time updates, but before today you needed to refresh your browser to see the most recent posts since logging in," explains Adam Hupp at the Facebook Blog. "The stream now updates automatically and gives you the option to view new posts with a prompt at the top of the page immediately below the Publisher."

You can click on the link that says "Show X new Posts," and the posts will be expanded into your stream.

Hupp says user feedback played a big role in the change, and that this feature has been one of the most commonly requested ones. People will no doubt still complain about the redesign, but don’t count on that going away anytime soon.