Month: January 2008

Planning to watch a David Lynch movie on your iPhone? Fine — but please keep in mind that the director hates you.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKiIroiCvZ0&rel=1&border=1&w=425&h=373]

If you read the news about Napster offering non-DRM mp3 files and felt a kind of psychological whiplash from all the ironies inherent in that brief item, don’t feel bad. I share your pain. Imagine: the idea of an online music provider named Napster offering actual mp3 files for people to download. I would have liked to have been in the meeting when someone suggested a strategy that could easily have been implemented (at least technically) almost a decade ago, when the original Napster was just getting off the ground. Instead, we’ve had years of expensive lawsuits and watched the music industry stumble from disaster to disaster.

Can Ian Rogers — who left grad school to tour with The Beastie Boys, and then later helped to run the company behind Winamp — turn Yahoo Music into something worth paying attention to? A tough assignment, but I’m keeping my fingers crossed, based on the presentation he gave at a music-industry confab in Aspen. The Yahoo Music executive has already made it clear that he has big ideas, and Mike Arrington says that he thinks something big could be coming from Yahoo.

If you read the entire post, however — and I encourage you to do so if you care about music online, even though it is fairly long — it becomes obvious that Rogers is talking about something more than just making Yahoo Music suck a little less (something he wrote about fairly eloquently in an earlier post, also based on a presentation he gave). It’s clear that he envisions a kind of open-source approach to music standards online, and that means not just doing away with DRM, but making it easier for music to be found and identified — and sold — wherever it exists.

In that context, Ian mentions a guy I have recently gotten to know: David Gratton, a Vancouver entrepreneur who founded Project Opus, a social-media venture that is working on an open music-identification standard called JAMM. (David is also the guy behind the MixxMaker music-sharing app for Facebook, which I wrote about yesterday). David’s vision seems to be the same as Ian’s: in a nutshell, make music of all kinds easier to find, tag and share online. Here’s hoping that one or the other (or both) of them succeed.

I’m generally in favour of bashing those who need to be bashed, and I definitely like taking the wind out of the Web 2.0 windbags (you know who you are), but I think the blogosphere is being a little hard on Wikia Search. Mike Arrington says that it’s a letdown, Allen Stern at Centernetworks
says it’s “not ready yet,” and Stan Schroeder of Frantic Industries comes right out and says that it sucks.

About the only person who’s being magnanimous (and can afford to be) is Google blogger Matt Cutts, who welcomes Wikia to the search business, although MG Siegler at ParisLemon says it actually looks pretty decent for something that’s in alpha. I’m inclined to give Jimmy Wales the benefit of the doubt on this one, but not because I’m one of those Wales sycophants that the always curmudgeonly Seth Finkelstein mentions.

As usual, something approaching what I think is a fair viewpoint emerges from the comments section of a blog — in this case, TechCrunch. Mike says that Wikia is disappointing, and in the comments Jimmy says that he warned everyone not to have high expectations about what it would look like, and notes that Wikipedia looked pretty rough in the early days too. That’s the problem with social anything — you can’t just pop out of the cake on day one with a built-in thriving community.

Is it just a bunch of links cobbled together by Nutch and Grub (names that sound like a couple of animated characters from a new Disney blockbuster)? Yes. It’s in alpha, for pete’s sake. For my part, I think I’m going to try and forget about Wikia Search for at least six months and then take a look around and see what’s there. If it’s still a ghost town, then maybe there will be something to get concerned about.

Music has to be one of the most social forms of content — most of us, even if we listen to our favourite music alone, like to talk about it, tell others what we like and why. That’s why things like Last.fm and Pandora are so popular (although I can’t use Pandora because I’m Canadian and they recently blocked us Canucks for licensing reasons).

One of the ways in which people shared music back in the prehistoric pre-Web days was by making custom “mix tapes” for their friends — a theme that runs throughout the great John Cusack movie High Fidelity. So what do they do now? Some people put together lists of mp3s (I got several over the Christmas holidays) and burn CDs for their friends. But both of those approaches are kind of cumbersome.

David Gratton, the former investment banker turned Web entrepreneur behind the Vancouver-based Donat Group and Project Opus, has created a Facebook app that he hopes can serve the same kind of function as a mixed tape — a way of sharing music with friends easily, and allowing them to contribute too.

It’s called MixxMaker, and it launched this week. After adding the application, you upload some files and then share the mix and ask your friends to contribute theirs. For licensing reasons, the files are streaming only, and they can only be shared with your Facebook friends. David has a blog post describing MixxMaker here.

Update:

Just heard about another new social-music app, this one Web-based rather than on Facebook, called Fuzz.com — where you can also share playlists and digital “mixtapes.” I love the fact that when you play a mixtape, there’s an image of an actual cassette, which flips open to show the hand-lettered looking playlist inside the virtual case. Very cool. Thanks for the tip, Jon.

If you follow technology blogs, Techmeme soon becomes almost irreplaceable — it’s like a front page for the blogosphere, one that changes almost minute-by-minute to show where the big fires of commentary are (for better or worse), and where the small sparks that could touch off a new one are coming from. It’s almost biological in a way, and so it’s fascinating to see Amit Agarwal’s time-lapse video of Techmeme, taken over a 50-hour period and condensed into 50 seconds of video.

It looks an awful lot like those Time-Life documentary shorts that show ants in the desert erecting a giant anthill with tiny scraps of fluff and lint (and critics might say the fluff and lint part is right on the money). So what is Techmeme.com building? Consensus, I think. It’s like a continuously running poll. Sometimes the questions are ephemeral, and sometimes they are pretty important. In any case, it’s fun to watch.

Last words have a certain poetic appeal, if only because we imagine them being uttered by the deceased with his or her last breath. But what if you could write your final thoughts in the form of a letter to the world, to be published after your death? That’s exactly what military blogger Andrew Olmsted did, and that post is now up on his blog. It’s like a monologue delivered by a ghost, with all of the witticisms and interjections of a normal blog post — plus a few too many quotes from Babylon 5 for my liking — but the added gravitas of a eulogy. Poetic? Perhaps. Certainly fascinating. There are also some comments from Andrew’s friends and family on one of his last pieces for the Rocky Mountain News.

There’s been a small fuss brewing (not even large enough to be a brouhaha — more of a kerfuffle) around Ning, the social-networking engine run by Netscape founder Marc Andreessen and the lovely and talented Gina Bianchini, and a post about how a large amount of Ning’s traffic goes to social networks based around porn. This was picked up on by Mashable and Valleywag, among others.

Marc has responded in a lengthy post at his blog, and I have to say that I’m glad he did. He takes a refreshingly clear-headed look at the issue, and says several things that I think are worth saying — including the fact that you can’t take as gospel any of the numbers that come from Quantcast or Alexa (especially Alexa) or any of the other traffic measuring firms. Surely we should all know that by now.

His other point is that Ning is content-agnostic — and so it should be. There are social networks based around porn? Big surprise. The Internet is a social network based around porn, for pity’s sake. The reaction from some bloggers has a real high-school tone to it, as though they were reporting Ning to the principal because they caught him looking at a Playboy magazine out behind the portables.

I’m not sure whether Pat Phelan of roam4free has decided to join the Techmeme troll parade, but his post about the “cost of Twitter” is ridiculous on its face. In a nutshell, he takes an estimate of the number of users, multiplies by the average time spent and — after some mathematical sleight of hand — comes up with a whopping $13-billion or so in “lost” productivity. Shocking, isn’t it?

It would be if it were true, but luckily it isn’t. There are a number of problems with Pat’s little thought experiment, including the assumption that all of Twitter’s users are active ones when most estimates are that only 10 per cent are highly-active — as Alan Patrick of Broadstuff notes in a comment on the TechCrunch UK post. Much of the math is also questionable, but let’s leave that aside.

The really dumb part of Pat’s analysis is the assumption that Twitter is a useless waste of time, like Solitaire used to be, or Minesweeper. While it’s true that much of Twitter is aimless chat, there are also some extremely useful aspects to it, including the ability to get links and news updates almost in real time, as many people discovered during the Iowa primaries. You might as well call the phone a waste of time.

The unfortunate fact is that people will find any number of ways to waste time: chatting in the hallway, taking a smoke break every 10 minutes, standing around the water cooler, checking Facebook a hundred times a minute, and so on. Are all of these things a waste of time? Of course they are. But they are also social moments that play an important role in our jobs and our lives (okay, except for the Facebook one).

Computing the loss in productivity assumes that we would be perfectly productive automatons if only our employers could arrange for us to never look up from our desks or think about anything but work.

This seems to be a real music-blogging day for some reason — first there was the RIAA vs. Washington Post post, then the Sony-DRM post, and now we have some stats from indie music darling Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails about his experiment with offering a “pay what you want” album for download. Not long after Radiohead launched its In Rainbows download, Reznor announced his intention to release an album by rapper Saul Williams (which Reznor produced) in the same fashion.

So how did it go? Mixed at best, it seems. Unlike Radiohead, which hasn’t said anything about how many people downloaded or paid for its album (apart from saying that the estimates from comScore were wrong), Reznor has provided detailed numbers, and it appears that less than 20 per cent of the people who downloaded the album paid for it.

As Mark Hopkins notes at Mashable, there are a whole bunch of reasons why this might be, including the fact that Saul Williams isn’t exactly a household name, that he and Trent Reznor don’t exactly have huge crossover appeal with each other’s audience, and so on. There’s no question that a “pay what you want” strategy is likely to work better for an artist with a solid, dedicated community, such as Radiohead.

That said, however, Saul Williams still got more than 150,000 people to listen to his album (compared with about 33,000 for his previous album) and got almost 30,000 of those who downloaded it to pay $5. Reznor says that after paying for the studio time and engineers and so on, no one is “getting rich” from the download experiment — but when did that become the sole motivation for making music? Chris “Long Tail” Anderson has some thoughts here.

After my most recent post on the RIAA and CD copying, I don’t want anyone to get the idea that I’m on an anti-record industry rant, but I have to wonder at all of the rainbows-and-kittens commentary on Sony’s reported move to offer non-DRM tracks. According to BusinessWeek, the label is going to start offering mp3 files with no digital-rights management restrictions, beginning with a Justin Timberlake promotion.

Will this be a noteworthy step, if it actually happens? Sure it will. Sony is one of the few remaining holdouts on offering non-DRM tracks. But before everyone gets all warm and fuzzy about the giant record labels, I’d just like to point out that they are still suing people for downloading and sharing music, and there are plenty more similar suits on the books. Does Sony’s move mean that the industry has suddenly turned over a new leaf, like Scrooge did in A Christmas Carol? Unlikely.

I would imagine the major labels are somewhat chastened by the fact that CD sales were down by 20 per cent or so this Christmas compared to the previous one, and down about 10 per cent for the year (or perhaps even more than that). But that doesn’t mean they are going to start hosting Limewire parties or joining the Electronic Frontier Foundation. In fact, I’m afraid it could actually lead to more lawsuits rather than fewer.

At least with DRM controls, the labels could convince themselves that their job was done, and let technology carry the bag. Now, the industry will have to confront the fact that all of the non-DRM tracks it releases into the wild will be untraceable and completely shareable. Will that convince them that they need to find new business models, or at least modify the existing ones? Perhaps. Or it might make them even more likely to launch a lawsuit.

It’s been almost a week now, but the debate over a Washington Post story about the RIAA going after someone for copying a legally-acquired CD just won’t die. Why? Because regardless of what most of those writing about the issue are focusing on — namely, the WashPo reporter’s refusal to admit that he was wrong — the fact is that the record-industry lobby group is still trying to have its cake and eat it too. They’re crying crocodile tears about how unfair the Post story was, but they refuse to come right out and say that copying is legal under the “fair use” principle.

The background to this one is that the Post said the RIAA’s lawsuit was based in part on the idea that copying of any kind was illegal. Naturally, that got everyone up in arms — including yours truly. Shelley Powers posted a comment accusing me of getting it wrong, and noting that the actual brief in the case referred to copies that were shared using Kazaa. I replied that while that might be the case, the RIAA has made other statements, including those in a submission during a review of the DMCA, that suggest it sees copying as an infringement.

The RIAA’s Cary Sherman responded to the Washington Post writer during a debate on NPR that one of the statements I referred to — the comment by a record industry lawyer during the Jammie Thomas case that making even a single copy was still “stealing” — was based on a misunderstanding (although as far as I can tell this explanation has never been reported anywhere, so it’s hard to fault the Post writer for not knowing that). But the comments during the DMCA review have yet to be explained.

As Ars Technica describes, the submission talks pretty clearly about how making even a single backup copy is an “unauthorized use.” Cary Sherman may protest that the RIAA has never sued anyone for copying a legally-acquired CD, and he may suggest that they have no intention of doing so, but he still refused to say that doing so was actually legal — describing it as “too complicated” to make such a statement.

As Mike Masnick notes over at Techdirt, the RIAA may be correct on the Post story, but that doesn’t change the fact that it is still trying to weasel out of the central issue.

So Robert Scoble has his account suspended by Facebook for using an automated script to harvest his contacts and their email addresses (see my previous post), and all hell breaks loose. Scoble, whose account is later reinstated, is denounced for being a publicity-seeking limelight hog, and for using a script from Plaxo that is an egregious breach of Facebook’s terms of use (since it uses optical character recognition to grab email addresses, which the site keeps as image files). The end of the world? Hardly, as Mark Hopkins at Mashable points out.

In any case, some have sided with Scoble, because they feel Facebook should allow users to export their data, while others argue that the site can do whatever it wants, and when you sign the terms of use you effectively agree that you accept that. Whatever you think of Scoble and Plaxo’s script, however (which seems a little devious to me), there is an important issue at the centre of this Techmeme frenzy, as Scott Karp at Publishing 2.0 and others have pointed out: Who owns your data?

In a post I came across this morning, Paul Buchheit (the guy who created Gmail) makes an interesting point, which is that many other services — including Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail and LinkedIn — allow you to import your addresses from some other program or service. I just finished doing exactly that with Last.fm, and I’ve done it with countless other services as well, including (most recently) an aggregator called Spokeo.

So how come you can do that with every service except Facebook? That doesn’t seem right. The Data Portability Group has extended an invitation to the site to join their push for a single standard. Marc Canter thinks we need better access controls for our data, and Chris “Factory Joe” Messina thinks that we need to move away from using our email addresses as the core of our online identities, and move towards a URL-based system. One thing is for sure: this issue isn’t going to go away.

In his post about Facebook disabling his account, uber-blogger and Facebook tart Robert Scoble admits that he was doing something that breached the site’s terms of use — specifically, he was running a script that accessed the social network and “scraped” data from it. As a result, he got a letter from a Facebook minion telling him that his account had been disabled, asking him to describe his recent activity, and asking him to refrain from any such activity in the future.

(Scoble was apparently trying out a new Plaxo import feature that involves screen-scraping, according to this post from Mike Arrington at TechCrunch. I agree with Mike that Plaxo is to blame here just as much as Facebook).

It’s obvious why Facebook would have such a rule: scraping data using automatic scripts not only puts a load on the site’s servers, but gives potential competitors the ability to potentially suck out the entrails of the social network and move them somewhere else. The interesting part of this whole affair, of course, is that the entrails in question — the engine that makes Facebook such a hot property — are the contacts and information belonging to people like Scoble.

The big question here — which the Scobleizer has cleverly put himself at the centre of — is: Who does that data belong to? It might have been collected and organized in the way it has because of Facebook’s tools, and he obviously agreed to the terms of use that he has since broken, but there’s no question that the information itself should belong to Scoble (and the rest of us). So what rights should he have when it comes to removing that data from a site like Facebook? And who gets to decide?

The bottom line, I think, is that Facebook should make it easier for people to move their data from Facebook to somewhere else without scraping the site using bot-scripts. Whether Scoble’s symbolic gesture will help to push them in that direction remains to be seen.

Update: As Ian Betteridge points out in a comment here, at least some of the data that the Scobleizer is scraping belongs to the 5,000 or so people who added him as a friend. Should they have a say in what he does with it?

And now Scoble has been reinstated by Facebook, and has gotten lots of publicity for himself and Plaxo — but hopefully he has also gotten people thinking about who owns our data, and how we use it.

Amid all the to-and-fro’ing on Techmeme about Twitter and its lack of a business model comes a post from Jason “Mahalo” Calacanis, in which he tells us the secret to building a business model in Silicon Valley. Is it a vision of where the market is going? No. Is it a compelling service with a unique value proposition? No. Is it a twist on some existing service that makes your offering a killer app? No. You have to be “a player.”

In a nutshell, Jason appears to be saying that certain people — such as Twitter founder and former Blogger co-founder Evan Williams — don’t have to have a business model, at least in the traditional sense that their company actually makes money. They just need to build traffic and users until they are so gigantic that someone either buys them or they can create a business based on their huge user base:

“Running a startup is NOT about revenue anymore–it’s about critical mass. It’s about scale. When you’re playing in the big leagues with unlimited access to capital you shouldn’t worry about revenue BEFORE you have critical mass.*

* Note: if you’re not a player like Ev, and you don’t have unlimited access to capital do not take this advice and focus on building revenue streams.”

So there you have it — Business 101 from Professor Calacanis. Is that the approach Jason is taking with Mahalo? If so, I wish him luck, and I hope that he has “unlimited access to capital,” which strikes me as a somewhat unlikely condition for anyone (except maybe Bill Gates) to find themselves in. In any case, there’s a refreshingly contrary opinion from Don MacAskill, founder of the successful image-sharing service SmugMug.com, in the comments on Jason’s post. Don says:

“I have unlimited access to capital, but I still focus on building my business first and my scale second. The “scale first, then find a business model” route only works as long as you’re in a bubble, like we are now. But if that bubble bursts before Twitter both gets to scale and finds their business model, they could be in big trouble.”

If I were Ev Williams, I would pay a little less attention to Jason, and a little more attention to Don. In other words, focus at least part of your energy on building a sustainable revenue model — or even the seeds of one — now. Don’t put it aside and hope that it will magically appear later. And don’t listen to your Uncle Jason when he tells you that you’re a “player” now, and so you don’t need a business model.