Mark Everett Hall

Let no nasty tweet on Twitter or sarcastic product review on YouTube go unnoticed. Now service-savvy firms can detect whether the tweeterverse and online video critics are in a snarky or sunny mood when it comes to their brands, products and services. Plus, if those companies want to, they can do something about it.

Today RightNow Technologies Inc. in Bozeman, Montana, announced its Cloud Monitor feature as part of its overall service. With it, says Jason Mittelstaedt, chief marketing officer, companies will be able to apply SmartSense, the company's automated emotional detection software, to text comments appended to YouTube videos as well as tweets on Twitter. He says expect to see support for other social networks such as Facebook and Digg, in the future.

Widely known in Europe and Asia, Panda Security SL of Madrid is making a big play to make big bucks in the U.S. PC security market by offering a free service to consumers.

Starting today at www.cloudantivirus.com consumers can download a free "thin client" to their Windows machines that communicates with Panda servers online for the latest updates to fight the most current malware. According to researchers at the University of Michigan, it takes an average of 48 days for antivirus firms to release protection once malware hits the Internet.

Microsoft Corp.'s long hold on power in the software industry has depended on its solid grip on developers. Programmers have written uncountable desktop and client/server applications over the decades that have inextricably linked independent software developers and corporate IT shops to Microsoft. Now the company aims to do the same for cloud-based software by luring loyal programmers to its Windows Azure environment.

Still in beta, Azure features both proprietary tools that Windows developers will recognize and standard technologies that could appeal to programmers outside of Microsoft's orbit. Whether that strategy will work remains to be seen, since Microsoft trails Salesforce.com, Amazon.com, Google and others in entering the cloud, which Merrill-Lynch & Co. has estimated will be a $95 billion market by 2011.

Illustration: Jeffrey PeloApparently there are 23,000 bloggers who have registered to write vendor-paid "reviews" of products and services. That's according to the blog on SponsoredReviews.com, a service that connects hungry bloggers to paying vendors and then takes a 35% cut on the transaction.

23,000.

I worry that President Obama's use of his BlackBerry will rob future Americans of history. I know it's fashionable among tech writers to laud the President for sticking to his guns and become our first Crackberry in Chief. But electronic communications are fragile, as we learned from the previous administration's cavalier, one might even say illegal, regard for keeping records. By depending on his smartphone, I believe, our current president's missives are in real danger of being lost to future generations.

I'm not saying the Obama administration will be as secret and deceptive as Bush's proved to be with e-mails and other official correspondence. But by depending on a Research in Motion's proprietary service, who can guarantee that 100 years from now its file systems will be able to be accessed by the technology in use by scholars and writers in 2109?

There are plenty of people who are, to put it mildly, skeptical about software as a service specifically and cloud computing in general. Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation, comes to mind. Ian Betteridge of the Technovia blog is another. And there are plenty more.

Luis Villa sums up the shortcomings of computing in the Internet cloud. But he also brilliantly describes the cool stuff cloud computing offers to users today; options not possible to those ideologically closed thinkers like Stallman, who has labeled SaaS and such a "trap" and "worse than stupidity." However, Villa has a more subtle mind than Stallman and finds unique value in the cloud. Think Facebook. Think Google Earth. Anyone interested in SaaS and cloud computing should read it.