According to Forbes, Facebook may be launching a music streaming service any day now. Sources familiar with the situation have divulged that the giant social network is partnering up with European-based music service, Spotify.

The service is reportedly going through testing at the moment and could be available two weeks from now. When launched, it will be an integrated feature that youll find on the left side of your newsfeed right below your usual photos and events icons. When you click on the Spotify icon, the service will install on your desktop in the background and give you access to its library of millions of songs.

You would then be able to access the music via Facebook, and even listen to the same music simultaneously with your friends. Its not certain yet whether it will be called Facebook Music or Spotify on Facebook but either way its only available to those in countries where Spotify is supported. Currently, that excludes folks in the United States.

Spotify is still in the process of negotiating with labels here in the U.S., but as weve seen how unsuccessful Google has been with label negotiations for their Music Beta, it could certainly be a long road ahead. It also makes sense that the once rumored Google and Spotify deal didnt pan out.

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Many individuals have found internet to be a very useful tool and it has been found immensely helpful for people and also connects people from all parts of the world. If you want to attract more and more people to know about your business the best possible way is to host your website in the internet. This would allow you to make your Website popular. In order to host your website you could get the help of a web hosting company. These companies would provide a better space for your website on their server. You could either choose to buy your own space or get it for lease. A web host would provide you with data center space. There is a good scope for the hosting services and the basic hosting would involve the simple webpage hosting or small-scale file hosting. In this hosting, you could upload files into a network using the file transfer protocol or using any web interface. These files would generally be delivered with some effort. If you have some personal webhosting services, then you could host it for free. There are many such services which would allow you to host all your files for a free of cost. There are different types of hosting services and you could choose the one that is applicable to your needs. Internet hosting servers could typically run web servers. These hosting services are generally limited to the web. There are lots of companies which needs computers that are constantly connected to the net so that you could send email or do file transfers whenever you need.

The most common hosting service is the ‘free one’ and this is offered my most of the companies and these services are quiet limited when compared to the paid one. Another type of service is the shared webhosting and in this type a website would be placed in a site along with other thousand websites. In this type of service all domains would be sharing the same pool and typically a shared website would be hosted with the help of a reseller. Another popular type of web hosting rating service is the reseller web hosting service and this would allow clients to host their website by themselves. Web hosting rating provides a first class hosting service! Linux (unix) hosting has also become immensely popular these days. Linux is an open source operating system and it is based on the unix.This OS was originally developed from UNIX in order to give a GUI and it is very popularly known for its security. Linux(unix) hosting has thus become very popular and people have started to look out for companies that offer services in Linux hosting. When you have decided to host the site on the internet, it is essential for you to check out factors like hosting reliability and also uptime. The term ‘uptime’ would imply the effort or the percent time that is needed for the host to be accessible via the net and it is desirable to have a uptime of 99.9% for a healthy website.

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To keep up with the growth of cloud computing and virtualization, networks keep evolving. But unlike Twitter’s Trending Topics, IT budgets don’t scale up. In fact one of the major initiatives in many IT shops is creatively reduce their own expense.

To get to a scalable cloud infrastructure where costs are contained, it sounds like the network industry is going to see a time where a “Linux” arrives on the scene. An open source alternative to building networks may disrupt the networking landscape and give network admins an open source network operating system.

Virtualization: It’s in the Network Too

Distributing workload across machines, storage, and environments has required networks to be smarter than ever. Now, the network needs to be intelligent enough to not only route traffic both a bridge and a toll-gate, but to also provision and de-provision all aspects of the environment at a moments notice.

Providers like Rackspace are in the business of using the network to optimize the performance of the entire data center. To be effective in keeping up with dynamic system provisioning, technical teams need access to all tiers of the computing environment to reduce operations overhead.

Hosting providers, such as Amazon Web Services and Rackspace innovate new integration patterns – including ones in the core of the network – to get their job done. Network operating systems that are open, like Extreme XOS enable large scale hosting providers to look deeper into networking gear and start to tune it themselves. And enterprises may follow this trend.

Servers Don’t Sleep at Night, but Applications and Admins Do

For a long time, networks have been used to detect the peers and devices. Many of us use the nearly ubiquitous DHCP (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol), which is the the thing that automatically assigns IP addresses to a PC when plugging into the network.

In an analogy, there is a need for a “super DHCP” is needed that can keep up with the highly virtualized cloud infrastructure per virtual instance. To do this, engineers look deeper to find efficiencies in how the network talks to the hardware and software for the virtual machines.

A good example of benefit for this is where a resource has peak loads during the day. Due to natural usage, the applications compute power is not utilized during the night. Using monitoring and provisioning tools, the network can de-provision the extra hardware and offer it to another service. This “freeing up” allocation saves power and money.

This is a simple example of where virtual data center solutions are being innovated in the industry to figure out how to further timeshare the computing resources. The network has the ability to help manage the scale down to the moment is enabled by it’s reach to everything over IP (Internet Protocol).

The Open Network Wins, Developers Rule

Extreme Networks is betting IT leaders that have become very familiar with Linux and open source Hypervisors like XEN want to tweak the network. For the data center manager that wants to go into the core network engines innovate, there comes a need for APIs, SDKS, and open access libraries.

Extreme’s openness is in the form of web services, many offered that are offered as XML or CLI scripting that allow integrate tools into the core of the network via XML, and configure edge ports for security and VOIP access as dynamic provisioning.

The company offers a code workbench of its own to download widgets to plug into the network. Designed for the open source developer, it shares the familiar pattern that presides in open source community for application frameworks and operating systems code sharing.

Shown in the diagram, Extreme’s network offers real-time provisioning of code widgets in the network.

Play Nice: the Networks Worst Enemy May be Success

Will the network evolve to see an open source player that drives change in pricing and value?

In the rush to enable new efficiencies we wonder if this is an Apple A-HA moment in the making. The question seems to be can the giants in the space balance the fine line of better end-to-end experience of managing the environment and whether vendors do it best. If we follow the Apple example of industry success, and end-to-end play for the network may be in the cards.

Last month, Juniper announced it has created a new business group and commitment to an Junos ecosystem.

Juniper has made a big move towards open source innovation in it’s recent re-branding and at least to one analyst, John Furrier from Silicon Angle, seems to be suggesting that Juniper Judo’ing Cisco, like Google did with Open and Microsoft. That probably doesn’t feel the least bit nice to the market leader, especially when Cisco is priming it’s engines for changing the Internet forever.

Cisco announced opening IOS in 2007 in an effort towards compartmentalizing IOS as part of its overall movement into a more software based organization. With the complex series of network enhancements and feature sets, it will be interesting to see how Cisco views “open” vs. “customizable” and where the control lives for network management and up-time.

When visiting the Cisco IOS website today, we see the standard license and no clear mention of open source licensing. Cisco strikes the balance between open and controlled in it’s a approach to defining what an open network is and where networks will be encapsulated as services.

We wonder if Cisco deliver the capabilities to pull more traffic into it’s end-to-end range, while open networking APIs rise as part of the network service stack. With this market, it’s likely both. At very least, open networking has a role in determining the fate of the network and where territories are being defined.

The Cloud is a Network of Services

The cloud is defining a world where service orientation rules – both the

software and physical layers. And, it is breaking the rules of workload distribution, where network topologies are changing. The requirements of connecting the layer 2 and layer 3 networks, as well as IT leaders that are building solutions for mass scaling (enterprises or service providers) are evolving and being driven by an ability to be efficient at the workload level.

Extreme Networks Technical Brief, Dynamic Network Virtualization Overview, explains the value of plug and play network components in today’s topology.

“By leveraging Extreme Networks ExtremeXOS, a modular, edge-to-core operating system, and our extensibility frame-work including Universal Port Scripting and an XML interface, Extreme Networks is able to tightly integrate the switching network with the virtualization environment to create a virtualization-aware network fabric that automates the network-level virtualization required in next generation data center and cloud computing environments. This unique functionality enables Extreme Networks to provide seamless support of virtualization capabilities across the various hypervisor platforms, including Citrix ZEN, Microsoft and VMware. The highly integrated solution allows the Extreme Networks solutions to trigger responses to virtualization moves as they happen in the network by virtue of a tightly integrated XML-based network management framework.”

Extreme, and now Juniper, are moving in the direction of offering IT administrators control points in networks and protocols to optimize it opens the market.

It looks promising to give administrators vendor leverage in buying services without vendor lock, or waiting for feature releases from the vendor. And, it mirrors the open-source movement in bringing communities together to solve problems and build compatible services.

Open APIs may define the cloud’s network of the future for large hosting providers. We wonder if for the enterprise.

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Social Networking site Facebook is now offering its users the opportunity to share cash with each other, real cash that is.

You can send and receive small payments via a Facebook application called Buxter and the company behind Buxter that will process the transactions is online payments company ClickandBuy.

Setting it up is easy. If you already have a ClickandBuy account, and millions of people across the globe do, then all you have to do to take advantage of the service is set up your Buxter account on Facebook.

If you dont have a Click and Buy account then you need to set one up before you can load cash in or out of your Buxter account.

Transactions on the Buxter system are limited to a maximum of 50 euros or less and are free to process between friends although there are small fees (minimum of 2 euros) for transferring money out of Buxter and into your bank.

You cant make purchases from anywhere though; you will only be able to trade with your friends on Facebook.

To send cash to a friend you simply select your friends name from a drop down menu and enter the amount you want to send. Easy!

People share their statuses, their information and their pictures on Facebook so the question is why not share money there too? said Christian von Hammel-Bonten, senior vice president at ClickandBuy.

He hopes people will use the service to share expenses for things like cinema tickets and restaurant bills or small gifts; its not designed for anything more than that.

Were not trying to compete with national banking systems. This is not somewhere to pay your gas or rent he said.

To receive any cash you send to a friend they just have to accept the Buxter application and enter an email address.

That friend will then be free to transfer the money to any of their friends or into their bank account if they wish.

Buxter is the application that will see Facebook members use the platform not just as a way to stay in touch, but also as a fast, easy and secure way to exchange money or buy and sell products or services said Charles Fraenkl, chief executive of ClickandBuy.

The only currencies offered by the service at the moment are US dollars and Euros but support for the UK pound will be added in the coming weeks.

It will be interesting to see how many Facebook users end up using it.

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