A team including former Google, Yahoo and Facebook employees is launching a startup that will provide professional support for Hadoop, an open-source computing platform that makes it easier to write programs that process large amounts of data.

Yahoo is among the companies that use Hadoop, which employs the Google-developed MapReduce framework, in their operations.

Now Cloudera’s founders are betting that there is money to be made supporting other Hadoop installations, whether on a customer’s own set of machines or Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).

“Think Red Hat for Hadoop, but that is just the beginning,” co-founder Amr Awadallah, wrote on his blog this week. Awadallah was previously vice president of engineering on a BI (business intelligence) team at Yahoo charged with improving the user search experience and making more money off the search site.

Former Googler Christophe Bisciglia is also on board. Bisciglia was a main driver behind the Academic Cluster Computing Initiative, a Google-IBM project that has provided Hadoop-powered machine clusters for academic use.

In addition, Jeff Hammerbacher, previously manager of Facebook’s data team, is a co-founder of Cloudera. “The [Facebook data] team made a lot of contributions to Hadoop under his stewardship, most important of which is Hive (a SQL structured data layer on top of Hadoop),” Awadallah wrote.

Other company founders include Mike Olson, former CEO of Sleepycat, a company known for the open-source Berkeley DB database engine. Oracle bought Sleepycat in 2006.

Cloudera won’t immediately feel the expected effects of the struggling economy on venture capital spending, Awadallah said. “We are in the process of wrapping up our funding (we don’t need any more cash at this point), and will soon announce our investors and technical advisors.”

Other details about the company’s plans, such as pricing models, were not available. Cloudera could not immediately be reached Wednesday for a follow-up interview. The company will be based in the San Francisco area, though a specific location was not listed at its Web site.

News of the startup’s plans sparked generally positive reactions from industry observers.

“Given the current economic outlook it’s great to see a new open source start-up rearing its head, and the list of founders indicates that this one has a good chance of survival,” 451 Group analyst Matthew Aslett noted in a blog post Wednesday.

Redmonk analyst Stephen O’Grady weighed in via e-mail. “It’s clear that demand for the services that Hadoop provides is only going up. Most enterprises, even large ones with substantial investments in IT, lack the scale-out skills common to eBay, Google, Yahoo, et al. Commercially available and supported Hadoop would be one attractive solution to that problem.”

Internet company Yahoo said on Sunday that it was considering a “number of value maximising strategic alternatives” and would evaluate any proposal made by Microsoft Corp..Yahoo recently rebuffed a $33 a share takeover offer from Microsoft. Microsoft said earlier on Sunday it has proposed an alternative deal to Yahoo rather than a full acquisition.

In a statement, Yahoo said it had confirmed with Microsoft that it was not interested in pursuing an acquisition of all of the company, but it was considering alternatives and remained open to pursuing any deal in the best interest of stockholders.

The board “will evaluate each of our alternatives, including any Microsoft proposal, consistent with its fiduciary duties, with a focus on maximizing stockholder value,” it said.

Yahoo Inc is working to rewire the dozens of services across its site so that users can manage all information about themselves in a single place and share it with friends across the Web.”We are not building another social network,” Chief Technology Officer Ari Balogh told attendees at the Web 2.0 Expo conference in San Francisco on Thursday. “We are building social into everything we do.”

The effort is part of a larger plan to make it easier for users to share information about themselves with other Yahoo users and on websites that run applications using Yahoo features, seeking to help the world’s biggest Internet media company keep pace with social networks like Facebook and MySpace.

Yahoo is spelling out this evolving strategy in the face of Microsoft Corp’s looming, $44 billion unsolicited takeover offer.

Microsoft has set a deadline of Saturday for Yahoo to agree to a deal on those terms or face a hostile takeover campaign. The software giant said on Thursday it will announce whether it plans to proceed with a deal or pull out next week.

Unified user profiles and the effort to make it easier for users to share information with their friends is part of the company’s broader “Yahoo Open Strategy” due out later this year, Balogh said. The plan would give users simple privacy controls to decide what data they reveal about themselves.

“We are going to unify all profiles throughout Yahoo,” said Balogh, whose appointment as Yahoo’s CTO was announced on January 29, a day before Microsoft first proposed its $31 per share cash and stock offer to merge with Yahoo.

Yahoo plans to make it easier for users to share information about themselves with other users and on websites that run

Ian Rogers, vice president of video and music applications at Yahoo, is leaving the company to launch a start-up, Rogers said on his blog.

During his time at Yahoo, the company released the Yahoo Media Player, purchased FoxyTunes, and launched a new version of Yahoo Video.

His new company, Topspin Media, is a venture-funded start-up that aims to “help independent artists make a living.” The company, which Rogers founded with Peter Gotcher and Shamal Ranasinghe, is developing Web applications that enable distribution and marketing of digital content.

A few months back, in a blog post recounting a presentation he gave for music industry players, Rogers summed up some of his thoughts on how those folks should finally come to grips with the Web. Matt Rosoff of CNET’s Blog Network gave a thumbs-up to many of Rogers’ points–for instance, spend on improving quality, not on marketing–but took issue with his call for a new set of standards for labeling media files and playlists, and for sharing data among social-networking and user-generated-content services.

Yahoo! supports OpenSocial; Yahoo!, MySpace and Google to form non-profit OpenSocial Foundation

Community organization to assure neutrality and longevity of specification for building social applications across the web

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CALIF.March 29, 2008 –Yahoo!, MySpace, and Google recently announced they have agreed to form the OpenSocial Foundation to ensure the neutrality and longevity of OpenSocial as an open, community-governed specification for building social applications across the web.  Yahoo!’s support of OpenSocial and role as a founding member of the new foundation are landmarks for the rapidly growing specification which will now offer developers the potential to connect with more than 500 million people worldwide.

The OpenSocial Foundation will be an independent non-profit entity with a formal intellectual property and governance framework; related assets will be assigned to the new organization by July 1, 2008.  The foundation will provide transparency and operational guidelines around technology, documentation, intellectual property, and other issues related to the evolution of the OpenSocial platform, while also ensuring all stakeholders share influence over its future direction.