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It's Time for a New Terms of Service Regime
Yesterday's flare-up about the Terms of Service for Google's new browser Chrome, followed by the company's rapid backtracking on the demands it was making of users, left many people wondering about Google ToS in general.
digg_url = 'http://digg.com/tech_news/It_s_Time_for_a_New_Terms_of_Service_Regime';digg_bgcolor = '#ffffff';digg_skin = 'normal';Is it ok for service providers to require that they be exempt from the copyright norm of no re-use without explicit permission? We don't think it is.
Chrome's original ToS made far reaching claims to rights for promotional re-use and sharing with partner companies of any data sent through the Google browser. When users cried fowl, the company apologized and said that this standard condition for all Google services wasn't appropriate for a browser. It's not uncommon for services online to make such demands - but we argue that there's a better way for this to be done.
Google's Response
Google responded today by removing the section in question from the Chrome Terms of Service (see below), but they defended its general applicability as part of the company's Universal Terms of Service. They claimed that they have to have a license like this in order to deliver content to consumers as part of the basic functioning of services.
Engineer Sam Greenfield isn't buying it, writing that Google includes permission to use content to promote services and demands "perpetual" and "irrevocable" permission for reuse. Both details don't jive with the companies current explanation of its actions.
It seems that overprotective lawyers are being overprotective lawyers here and a very different solution is needed. It's just disingenuous to claim that rights to reuse are being claimed just in order to perform basic delivery.
The Limitations of Copyright
Why can't Google ask permission of the people whose content they want to reuse for promotional purposes?
As is the case with people interested in reusing the content of others anywhere, it may be that asking for explicit permission just takes too long. That's one of the problems created by copyright law in the US, and increasingly around the world. Many people are open to having their content reused, but it happens legitimately far less than it might because its just too hard to get a hold of people, communicate with them about it, etc.
For a service provider to take its ball home and refuse to play unless users accept ath "those copyright laws don't apply to us" is taking the easy way out. It also denies control over content to the people and the situations where reuse may not be appropriate. Passwords, financial information and browsing history were the examples that came up in regards to Chrome - but what about other "work" like user photos and videos? In some circumstances users would be happy to let a service provider reuse these things, in others they wouldn't.
YouTube's Terms of Use use very similar language and have faced similar questions from users. We covered these same types of issues again when Google Docs was released. This is an ongoing issue.
The Flickr Solution: Creative Commons
If you've ever visited the front page of Yahoo's photo sharing service Flickr, you've seen that the company highlights a different user photo each day. Do they email those users and request permission? No, they just select from photos that have already been given a Creative Commons license by the users that uploaded them.
Flickr hasn't been free from controversies of its own regarding copyright. API level access to non CC photos, for example, has rankled some peoples' sensetivities. The way that Flickr handles reuse of photos for promotion on the front page is great, though.
Creative Commons licenses are built on top of existing copyright law and communicate the conditions for future re-use of content. Our favorite CC license, the attribution license, says to anyone interested that they can reuse an item of content so long as attribution is given to the original creator. Other CC licenses grant permission to reuse content only in non-commercial settings, or so long as the content isn't altered. There are a variety of conditions that can be communicated ahead of time, making reuse quick and easy, with no explicit communication required.
How About Some User Education?
Flickr could do a better job of educating users about the CC licensing options they have when they publish their photos, but at least they make it relatively easy to do. Ought not all the services we use online make it easy for us to apply licenses beyond the simplest copyright by default to our content? We can't think of any better way for all parties to win.
Imagine an in-browser way to apply more flexible licenses to any content being published. That would make far more content available for reuse by everyone from individuals to giant companies like Google, but it would also keep control over content in the hands of creators.
Times Are Changing, Terms Need to Change With Them
It's a changing world we live in. The line between content creators and content consumers is far, far more blurry than it's been in recent history and things don't look like they're going to change back. Online service providers recognize that, but they aren't engaging with the situation in a way that suits the times and empowers the users legally like their tools are technologically.
CreativeCommons is just one option - the point is that the Terms under which we use these services online need a new paradigm. None of these services is irreplaceable and we don't need to grovel thankfully at whatever conditions are imposed on us as users.
It's time for a new Terms of Service regime that recognizes the way we're using these tools, facilitates collaboration and respects user rights. Wiggling a blank check for vendors into an otherwise impenetrable wall of copyright-by-default isn't really good for anyone.
Title image: Workbench Melee, CC by Flickr user Flattop341
Google and Privacy: A History
Google's finally gone and done it - they've built and released a browser, the most fundamental window to the computing experience of a new era. That's big news, but the small print is raising some concerns. What appears to be a recycled Terms of Service (from Google Docs) gives Google a long list of rights to reuse and share with other companies "any Content which you submit, post or display on or through the Services." Update: Since this controversy has erupted, Google has removed the offending section of the Terms of Service. It seems that the default Google service TOS includes these kinds of claims, even though they may not be as appropriate in some circumstances as in others.
Google's Matt Cutts dropped by our previous coverage to say that "no, we don't want rights to everything you send through Chrome." Can Google be trusted though? Below we review just the most recent history of privacy concerns raised about Google. It's a mixed bag, but we argue that given this context, no individual case should be taken lightly.
Last November we wrote about how Google could fight Facebook by taking the high road regarding user privacy. A year later it might seem like user control over information is a more reasonable request, but neither concept seems to be getting a lot of respect.
There are big important questions about privacy online that need to be addressed. We discussed what some of those general questions were in January. Looking at them in regards to the particular steps taken by the Google giant is important as well.
The Creeping Crawl of the Social Graph API
In February of this year, we raised concerns about the new Google Social Graph API, which was going beyond indexing the formally declared social connections that the company focused on and in fact pulled in social graph data from MySpace and who knows where else. That controversy has died down, but our concerns still linger about this admittedly very useful sounding program.
Health Records and Privacy
In May Google launched Google Health, and privacy advocates shuddered in fear. In the end, we found Google Health's privacy protections to be very strong. Perhaps it was because they were so strong that the whole application felt overly cautious, tame and unexciting. It's a difficult balance to strike.
Handing Over Usernames
In July Google gave up YouTube user names to Viacom in a copyright lawsuit. Privacy watchdogs complained that Google should have resisted the pressure.
Streetview
Streetview, the van-shot images of city streets around the world, has also faced criticism from privacy advocates. It faced a legal challenge in the UK in July. Last month Google faced allegations of streetview photographers driving past no-trespassing signs onto private roads - though the company claims such incidents were a mistake and have removed the found photos of private land.
We'll Tell You Who Your Friends Are
One issue that made a small number of people very angry was the loose handling of Google Reader shared items. People you've emailed with repeatedly or who were otherwise understood as a contact using some Google algorithm were suddenly shown all the items you marked to "share" in Google Reader. Previously, shared items were something you exposed selectively by sharing an obscure URL for your shared items feed. Google's initial response was to tell people to stop sharing if they didn't like it, but last month the company finally implemented a more nuanced solution. Points for Google, after a fight.
Code of Compliance
Also in August, Google joined with Yahoo and Microsoft in working on a "Code of Conduct" that offered some luke-warm commitment to protecting free speech during the Olympics over the companies' networks. The wording of the proposed agreement was very vague.
It Goes On and On...
This is just a short look at a few of the privacy issues people have raised about Google's practices. Beyond the particular practices, though, there are inherent risks brought about by the huge amount of information Google controls. As we wrote in our post "Questions to Consider in the Coming Privacy Wars"
Hello, Google. Hello Google Search, Maps, Sky, Streetview, GMail, Docs, 23andMe genetics, Talk, Goog411, Google Scholar... surely I'm still missing a lot of the data that Google has collected about us.Is data centralization in the hands of a single vendor an inherent threat to privacy? Yes. To draw an analogy, trusting the "Do No Evil" line is like saying you'd support a President that you like changing the constitution to allow warrantless wiretapping. Centralization of power, even if it's exercised benevolently at any given time, is not in our best interest in the long term. In fact, I'd argue that it's highly irrational.
That's the context we see all this happening in. So if Google and Matt Cutts want to say "trust us, what we want is not what it looks like in a literal reading of that agreement you just singed on to" - well then we ask you, readers, to judge for yourself. It makes us feel very funny.
We love Google apps, but with great power...comes a responsibility to do something really extraordinary to protect our privacy while still delivering such great services. We're still waiting for that.
Nail an API, Get a Sweet Job: FriendFeed Hire/Acquires FFToGo, RSSMeme
There are a lot of great reasons for a company online to offer an Application Programming Interface (API) for outside developers to build on, but one we're starting to see more of is an API as the ultimate recruitment tool.
Red hot lifestreaming service FriendFeed announced this afternoon that the company has hired Benjamin Golub, the creator of FriendFeedToGo, the mobile interface of choice for FF users.
Golub is also the creator of RSSMeme, a memetracker that tracks the hottest shared stories on Google Reader. We wrote about RSSMeme this spring when that service launched an API of its own.
More obviously relevant to FriendFeed is Golub's project FFToGo.com, which this author uses throughout the day every day. The app does a great job making the native javascript-heavy interface for FriendFeed usable on a mobile phone.
The guy knows how to parse and make usable streams of data that are flying around from user activity. He should fit in very well there.
If you'd like to meet up with ReadWriteWeb staff on FriendFeed, see our profiles there and the RWW Room.
Photo of Golub by Megen Vo.
Can The Fire Still Burn?
We're excited to see what Golub does at FriendFeed, though his distinct work will likely be harder to discern than it was when he was an outsider. When Marco Kaiser, creator of the very popular Twitter interface Twhirl, was the subject of a hire/acquire by video chat service Seesmic in April - we said the coming together offered a vision of the future of the web. That may be, but Twhirl releases feel different now and the app is being replaced on the desktops of many early adopters by the insurgent Tweetdeck.
What will happen to these fireball projects once they are brought into the fold? We hope that at least some of the fire will still burn, but at the very least it's evident that offering and building on an API are good ways to find good developers from around the world and a good way to get a job if you are a very good developer.
Comparing Web Platforms
It's great to hear that Marc Canter is writing a book, called 'How to build the Open Mesh'. He's been working for years on this vision with his product PeopleAggregator. He's just posted the four Appendices that conclude the book in his blog. It's a great overview of the major web platforms: Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft Mesh, and Facebook/MySpace.
Here are Marc's comments, via his post, and you can click the images to see the diagrams. Disclosure: I used to do some consulting work for Marc's company, during 2005-06.
“What does Google’s Open Mesh look like?”
Most of the infrastructure, services and applications that Google offers work all by themselves and are not dependent upon anything else. Google has launched OpenSocial and built Google Friend Connect.
Yahoo!
“How is Yahoo building the open mesh?
Yahoo probably has the most comprehensive, well architected approach towards building their own open mesh. They've left lots of room for us without getting in our way. Now they just have to execute those plans!
Microsoft
“Will Microsoft connect their Live Mesh to our Open Mesh? …[and what about the rest of Microsoft?]
Live Mesh totally rocks and it'll probably become a key element of our open mesh. It'll gateway us to mobile, car, living room, game machines.
Facebook & MySpace
“Aren’t Facebook and MySpace really Closed Meshes?” … [ and how can we connect to them?]
Sending out tentacles or satellites isn't the same as being open.
Statistics: Online Music Apps
To complement the poll we ran this week about streaming music sites, we sourced data from comScore about the Internet Radio industry. comScore's data shows that the big Internet companies still dominate, specifically AOL Radio and Yahoo Music. In contrast, our poll - the second annual time that we've run it - shows that last.fm and Pandora are the favorites of our readers.
digg_url = 'http://digg.com/music/Statistics_Online_Music_Apps';digg_bgcolor = '#ffffff';digg_skin = 'normal';Is this a case of geek trends being at odds with mainstream? Or is it that the mainstream hasn't yet caught onto the cool music sites? Let's check out and analyze the stats from both comScore and our poll....
Here are the full stats that comScore provided us, for the year July 07 - July 08:
| Unique Visitors (000) | |||
| Jul-07 | Jul-08 | % Change | |
| Total Internet : Total Audience | 180,078 | 189,134 | 5 |
| Radio | 47,392 | 61,458 | 30 |
| AOL Music | 15,284 | 23,884 | 56 |
| Yahoo! Music | 23,075 | 18,725 | -19 |
| Clear Channel Online | 10,697 | 9,394 | -12 |
| PANDORA.COM | 2,551 | 4,834 | 89 |
| Interactive One | 512 | 3,515 | 587 |
| CBS Radio | 3,469 | 3,240 | -7 |
| NPR.ORG | 1,717 | 2,538 | 48 |
| Citadel Broadcasting Corporation | 1,373 | 1,885 | 37 |
| BATANGA.COM | 1,239 | 1,810 | 46 |
| Disney Music | 1,721 | 1,598 | -7 |
| Cumulus Media Inc. | N/A | 1,058 | N/A |
| Emmis Communications Corporation | 1,269 | 1,044 | -18 |
| Entercom Communications Corporation | 786 | 789 | 0 |
| ONTHERADIO.NET | 704 | 622 | -12 |
| LIVE365.COM | 963 | 582 | -40 |
| MediaSpan Group Inc. | 1,428 | 482 | -66 |
| RADIOTIME.COM | 147 | 446 | 203 |
| AMERICANPUBLICMEDIA.ORG | 303 | 386 | 27 |
| 1CLUB.FM | 205 | 384 | 88 |
| Spanish Broadcasting System, Inc. | 236 | 352 | 49 |
Note that last.fm isn't categorized as 'Internet Radio' by comScore and as far as we know, it isn't part of CBS Radio listed above. We asked CBS (which owns last.fm) to send us the comScore data they have on last.fm, and here it is for the same period:
Notable Trends
AOL Music, with 23.9 million unique visitors in July 08, is the strongest. It recorded a 56% increase over the past year, so its growth is very good. Yahoo Music is second with 18.7M uniques in July 08, however it has decreased 19% annually since July 07. Clear Channel Online, the largest operator of radio stations (amongst other things) in the US, is a clear third with 9.4M audience in July 08.
As for the online streaming sites that began as startups, despite its continuing legal woes and the fact it can't be heard throughout much of the rest of the world, Pandora's US growth has been very impressive: an 89% increase from last year, to 4.8M unique visitors in July. Its competitor last.fm had just over 3M unique visitors in July 08, and 62% annual growth.
We also checked Compete and their stats are fairly similar, in terms of the trends, to comScore's. Compete has Pandora at 81.8% annual growth, with last.fm at 72.6%:
So the overall trend here is that both Pandora and last.fm are showing strong growth. But AOL Music continues to set the pace. Yahoo Music must be worried about its decline.
ReadWriteWeb Poll: last.fm and Pandora Still Most Popular
Our poll asked: what are your favorite online music streaming services? We ran almost the same poll last year. The results have shown that there is more diversity this year in the number of online music services that our readers tune into. While Last.fm and Pandora once again came out a clear first and second (respectively), other apps made a strong showing. Last.fm got 19% and Pandora 15%. Last year last.fm was at 31% and Pandora 29%, although last year's poll wasn't multi-choice.
Of the smaller services, Highnote, lala.com, Seeqpod all polled at the 8-9% range this year. Non-radio services such as Imeem and iTunes Music Service drew around 4-5%, while small but trendy services Hype Machine and Muxtape both came in at 4%.
So last.fm and Pandora are still favorites among the early adopter and tech-savvy people that read our site. But it's great to see so much interest in the many new online music startups (some of whom we didn't manage to fit into our poll, it must be said). As a matter of interest, here are some Compete stats for a few of the well performing smaller sites in our poll:
Hype Machine is perhaps the one to watch here, with 177% growth annually and on an upward trend. It grew 10.2% last month alone.
Conclusion
So AOL and Yahoo still dominate music streaming in the US, but last.fm and Pandora are beloved by many of our readers, and are growing fast in comScore too. We asked our panelists in our podcast show this week (link below) which sites they think will be popular this time next year. We'd like to ask the same question here. Do you see any dark horses amongst the smaller services, that may even show up in next year's comScore charts?
See also: Future of Online Music - Industry Players Discuss. This presents highlights from our podcast show earlier this week, in which senior representatives from Yahoo Music, Imeem and Rhapsody discussed online music trends.
Future of Online Music - Industry Players Discuss
In yesterday's episode of RWW Live, our live podcast show, our topic was online music and we had 3 very special guests on the show: Dalton Caldwell, founder and CEO of Imeem; Lucas Gonze, founder of Webjay and until recently a senior member of the Yahoo Music team; and Rob Williams, Senior VP of Music Software at RealNetworks. Also on the show were Sean Ammirati (host), Richard MacManus and Marshall Kirkpatrick. The audio is archived below for your listening pleasure.
In this post we feature some of the highlights from the show, which included many interesting factoids about Imeem, Yahoo Music and Rhapsody. But more importantly there was a lot of fascinating discussion of online music trends and where the music industry is headed.
What Are The Killer Features for Online Music?
The show started with a discussion about the killer feature set for online music, based on a post Marshall wrote recently. Marshall noted that the user experience in online music is not as good as it should be in streaming music websites.
In reply Lucas said that the listening experience has changed since around 2000 - e.g. people who follow mp3 blogs enjoy the personalities and the "constant sense of flow" of new music. In terms of streaming music, he said that there is a close connection between the songs and the community - it isn't intended to be decoupled. He said an ideal listening experience now is one that mixes music with fun, the social aspects.
Dalton said that Imeem started out as a social network, then the music came later - not the other way round. They slowly added music features, as people asked for them; and that has steered the product. He said that online music shouldn't be about consumption, but online community and self-expression. He thinks sites that are primarily community focused, rather than just listening to lots of music, are the ones that have succeeded most in online music. He also said technical advantages are key - he pointed to Imeem's acquisition of Snocap and its upload technology.
Sean asked Dalton a bit more about how Imeem got into music. Dalton replied that originally Imeem was meant to be a social network where people could express their tastes in media, whether that be video, music, etc. But they have turned into a music specific site, due to how their market evolved.
Rob from RealNetworks talked about how Rhapsody has had success in web services. He said they're continuing to build out their APIs across a range of devices. He spoke about their partnership with iLike. He says music discovery, social networking and music creativity are important features these days. The way they do things is work on the backend and partner with lots of companies. One point that resonated with us was that online music services should work more together, in a federated way. e.g. you can move personalization data around and get recommendations across the likes of last.fm, Imeem, Rhapsody etc. He mentioned OAuth and OpenID as some of the standards being used to do this.
Developer Platforms
Lucas segued off Rob's point about standards, using that to point out a key difference between Imeem and Rhapsody. He said that Rhapsody is a 'pure play', it's for obtaining music. Whereas Imeem is a social network that uses provisioning to complement its strategy. So which of these two things will be better business models?
Rob's response was that Rhapsody has a developer program which it is using to expand its reach. He said that Imeem focuses on developers too, but they focus more on web developers whereas Rhapsody targets hardware developers too. Dalton agreed that they focus on web developers.
Marshall asked Dalton for an update about the Imeem developer platform and specifically how it compares to the "wide open" Seeqpod API, which has been leveraged a lot. Dalton replied that there are 2 ways the Imeem platform is encompassed - the 'off website' version and the 'on Imeem' one. The widget and embeds is being integrated into eg Slide's Top Friends, and Apture (a blog plug-in that features an Imeem player). In terms of the 'on Imeem' API, that hasn't been shipped yet. That will be similar to Facebook's platform, so that developers can build new media experiences inside Imeem.
Business Models for Platforms
Sean asked a question from the podcast audience, about what Imeem's business model is for their platform. Dalton replied that the vision is to make it mostly ad-supported. They also want to do rev share. They still have to complete building out the technology for ad serving for online music. He doesn't think the subscription model would work for their audience.
Lucas said there is a lot of skepticism in the music industry (labels, artists etc) about ad-supported revenue.
Marshall mentioned that recorded music is just a loss leader, and monetization can be made with tours, merchandise etc. Rob replied that for artists there is a lot of money in that. So he said there are really good businesses being built off the online music platforms - eg recommednation engines like last.fm, connecting artists to their fan base (e.g. iLike), Ian Rogers' new company topspinmedia.
Dalton said that at Imeem they're trying to change the relationship people have with music, focusing not on monetizing consumption, but monetising self-expression and attention in music.
Imeem screenshot
Lucas said that the value in online music isn't in the download, but in all the things around it - socialising, shows, etc. So the business is in supporting the user to do all those things.
DRM & Interoperability
Marshall brought up the topic of DRM. He said that there seemed to be 3 different points in the spectrum of DRM in online music:
a) Rhapsody embraces DRM the most and the requirement that subscription be ongoing;
b) Imeem playing in the middle with Google Open Social integration;
c) Yahoo focuses on open standards
So Marshall asked how long will big players be able to use their large audience to compete with small more open players?
Lucas said that he no longer speaks for Yahoo, but they've changed over the last six months to "embrace openness and become a connector". Yahoo Music eschewed its own subscription product and made a deal with Rhapsody. He said that interoperability with Imeem would probably also be a popular move within Yahoo. He said though that there is immaturity of current open products, specifically mentioning OpenSocial. Secondly, companies like Yahoo need to figure out how to make money from the open strategy. He said that Rhapsody's strategy is very open, but the big question is can that be extended to record labels and artists as well as users.
Rob didn't agree with the characterisation that Rhapsody was pro-DRM. He noted that at the end of June they launched a DRM-free music store (ReadWriteWeb coverage here). He also said that they're big supporters of the ad model. He also said that partnerships are an important part of their strategy, e.g. powering Yahoo Music and iLike (which gets them into Facebook). He told us that some demographics accept ads, but they've had issues eg with the Facebook crowd. So he said a blended approach is what they're pursuing - part ads, part track sales, part subscriptions, part discovery/buying track for your phone, etc. He said that music is a $10b market in the US, but so far only $1b of that is online.
Rhapsody DRM-free store
Legal Battles With Record Labels
At this point I asked a question about the legal issues with online music, specifically pointing out that there is a 'have' and 'have not' situation in online music currently - with larger sites like Imeem, Yahoo, Rhapsody being able to make partnerships with record labels and avoid the legal issues plaguing the likes of Pandora, Muxtape and other small startups.
Lucas said there are two markets emerging: large scale, partnerships with labels, big traffic but low profit margins (Yahoo, Imeem, et al); the second market is small scale, uses media like artist sites, works in the "grey area" in terms of legal issues, has smaller traffic but higher margins. He points to Hype Machine as an example of the latter, which isn't paying anything [to record labels]. He said these two margins are emerging in parallel. He said that Muxtape was a red herring, as it was trying to become a big service, i.e. get too big to fail and so cut a deal [with labels].
Muxtape woes with the RIAA
Lucas said in a couple of years the wall between the large providers and small ones will start to go away, as music becomes more "webby" and interoperable.
Dalton said that small companies need to steer clear of the major record labels in order to survive.
Rob said that the backend, platform approach will make this easier, as small companies can use the big platforms provided by Rhapsody and others. So that is one way to avoid the legal hassles of music acquisition from music labels. Dalton said that he agrees, noting that at Imeem they try to "abstract away all the complexity" around licensing and streaming and hosting. He also said they acquired Snocap partly to get access to their registry of music from the major record labels as well UGC (user generated content) music. This enables them to build a platform that scales from UGC music to major record label music. So he says there should be no reason for startups not to use a platform in a couple of years.
Marshall brought up the issue of international. Rob said it's very tough, they have enough problems dealing with US laws around rights to use music. He said Pandora has had lots of issues with international laws. He said it probably will be never fully global, so it will stay in "the grey area" for many countries.
Who Will be the Leading Online Music Services 1 Year From Now?
To wrap up the podcast, Sean asked everyone about the current poll we're running on RWW (see below). last.fm and Pandora are still the most popular apps with our readers, so Sean asked which apps will be the leaders a year from now?
Rob said that he hopes Pandora is still around and the statutory radio issues get worked out across the industry. He said there will probably be a number of new contenders, and he hopes there will be much more cross-service users (i.e. the ability to use more than one service).
Lucas said that Hype Machine has the opportunity to get pretty big.
Dalton said that the line between social networking services and music services is blurring, so he thinks apps that aren't just about music may become most influential - e.g. iPhone apps.
Marshall said he has high hopes for Hype Machine (our initial review and update) and also thinks Songbird (our review) has potential, with so many developers and an open framework.
I said that music discovery is key for me, finding new music. The likes of last.fm, Pandora, Imeem, Hype Machine are doing this for me now, but given Imeem's rapid growth recently there will probably be another 1-2 services that emerge over the next year that take discovery to the next level.
Hype Machine, beloved by a few in the panel
Listen
You can listen to the entire show here (select Episode 6):
Note about the podcast: We experienced technical issues with our podcast hosts Talkshoe during the recording, which affected our live listeners. Many people either couldn't login to the call or were thrown off midway through (including the host Sean!). We sincerely apologize for this, and we are looking into an alternative solution for upcoming shows. We're pleased to say though that the archived recording is 100% intact!
Vote
Don't forget also to vote in our current poll: What are your favorite online music streaming services?
What are your favorite online music streaming services? (multi-choice)
( surveys)
Image: She sings, she sings by gwen
Has Yahoo! Buzz Lived Up to the Buzz?
Since our initial review of Yahoo! Buzz earlier this year, not much has changed about the service. At the same time, however, the perception, acceptance, and impact of the service has changed drastically. The service has shown that it can send enormous amounts of traffic (very talkative traffic), and has displaced Digg as the most active 'social news' community. In the process, they added widgets and rss, and most recently (and most importantly) have opened up participation to everyone.
digg_url = 'http://digg.com/tech_news/Has_Yahoo_Buzz_Lived_Up_to_The_Buzz';digg_bgcolor = '#ffffff';digg_skin = 'normal';Since they opened the submission process to everyone, the buzz surrounding the site has really been at a high. Desperate publishers and marketers who were previously locked out of the supposed 'traffic mecca' have joined the service in droves and have already started the practice of vote-begging in the hopes that enough votes will get them promoted to Yahoo's main page. Here's what you need to know about the current state of Buzz.
Note the important distinction between the Yahoo! main page and the Yahoo! Buzz main page, and the distinction between content made popular (i.e. promoted to the Yahoo Buzz main page) and Y! featured content (which is content cherry picked from Buzz to be featured on the Yahoo! main page).
ReadWriteWeb's one (and so far only) appearance on the yahoo.com frontpage - Wikipedia story bottom right
- Yahoo! Buzz is not a social experience. The process of being featured on Yahoo! Buzz is socially driven (based on votes, shares, and search patterns), but if you consider the site's place in the overall structure of Yahoo's strategy, the experience isn't social. Yahoo! Buzz is the picking ground for the content that ultimately gets featured on the Yahoo! main page, which means it is social in the exact same way Slashdot Firehose is social. Your votes may get a story to the main page of Yahoo! Buzz but after that it's up to an editor's judgment whether a story gets featured on the Yahoo! main page or not. So the final result, or the process of getting featured on Yahoo's main page is not entirely social. Furthermore, there Yahoo! has turned off the comments so there are no conversations, and because there is no networking aspect to the site, there are also no relationships.
- Your votes don't mean much. Number of votes is one of the metrics used to determine content popularity. Even then, I've learned that the impact of votes is arbitrary. I know people whose content was featured on the Yahoo! main page with 0 votes, and people whose content didn't even get to the Yahoo! Buzz main page after 75 votes. The other metrics are the number of times content is shared via email and on other social sites, as well as search volume.
- Exposure is very limited, inequitably distributed. The Yahoo! Buzz main page presently is less significant than even the upcoming/most page on Digg. Although being on the page may increase your odds of catching an editor's eye, you don't get any exposure unless you are featured on the Yahoo! main page. Furthermore, such an insignificant number of stories cross from Yahoo! Buzz to the Yahoo! main page that for the average person, participation in the quest for exposure is an act in futility.
To summarize, Yahoo! Buzz is social insofar as a community of users gets to submit content, and vote/share it. Anything more than that, Yahoo! Buzz doesn't do.
That said, the site also doesn't pretend to be anything more than what it is. It doesn't consider itself to be a competitor to other social news and networking sites, in fact it allows you to and even recommends you to share Buzzed stories on other social sites and then counts 'shares' as another metric to measure content popularity. As the popularity of Yahoo! Buzz grows and more people start frequenting the Yahoo! Buzz main page to read and at some future point discuss stories, that will all change. Until then, that page is just a stepping stone to the Yahoo! main page, which is the end goal.
Who should participate on Yahoo! Buzz?
From a content producer's/publisher's perspective, Yahoo! Buzz should without question be used by anyone publishing multiple posts a day on a site, or anyone that owns a network of blogs publishing content for different niches (heck you can automate the submission process). Networks like Hearst Digital Media and Conde Nast Publishing come to mind, but the strategy should also work for networks like Weblogs Inc. and Gawker Media. From a community member's perspective, Yahoo! Buzz's features are so limited that they would probably appeal to someone with a passive interest in social news, or someone just entering the space and wanting to get his or her feet wet. If you are interested in making friends, participating in heated discussions, etc., look elsewhere.
What kind of content works on Yahoo! Buzz?
It's a wry twist in the story. The people most interested in exploring Yahoo! Buzz and participating on the site are the digerati. But the kind of audience Yahoo! Buzz is designed to cultivate is quite the opposite. Before you give up in frustration, understand that the audience the site is supposed to appeal to is the same audience for the Yahoo! portal for news and entertainment. That's why you won't see a lot of insider Silicon Valley news featured and instead you'll see content from mainstream news outlets (a lot of syndicated content from Yahoo! News) about mainstream news events or entertainment.
What's the future of Yahoo! Buzz
Yahoo! Buzz is an interesting service because it has become an awkward balance between social news and mainstream news, where some of the basic social news and networking elements are intentionally missing. At the same time, it is also interesting because although the site made some buzz for supposedly dethroning Digg, the prevailing social news champion, the site doesn't compete with it and is not cannibalizing the social news audience. If anything, people who use Yahoo! Buzz may very well over time switch to sites with more robust social news and networking capabilities.
This is a guest post by Muhammad Saleem, a social media consultant and a top-ranked community member on multiple social news sites. You can follow Muhammad on Twitter.
Everything You Thought You Knew About the Business of YouTube Was Wrong
Have you turned up your nose at YouTube for being born from low quality, financially unsustainable, pirated content? If you've made that argument in conversation before (and we now many people do) - new claims from YouTube itself now indicate that you'd be wrong.
The official Google Blog made a post this morning following up on a New York Times story last week where the company claimed that 90% of the owners of copyrighted content are now advertising against pirated video they own when they find it using YouTube's new content ID technology. The news upends many long held beliefs about the site.
Argument: Content ID is Next to Impossible
Many have argued that YouTube wasn't capable of finding all the pirated content uploaded to its site - that it's been an arms race pitting human monitors and shoddy ID technology against a sea of users uploading content. Video maverick Mark Cuban has argued that YouTube's claim it can't identify content was refuted by the fact that it manages to keep porn off the site and thus that the company couldn't plead ignorance about copyright either.
Right: We don't know if there's some direct financial overlap between Katy Perry's publishers and the ringtone site advertising on this video of hers, but at 600K views we're pretty sure the video's rights holders have seen it and chosen to let it remain on the site. Is that "what good girls do?"
Now it appears that YouTube's newest content ID technology is doing quite a good job of finding copyrighted content. That alone is a game changer.
Argument: Media Companies Don't Want Low Quality Versions of Their Content on 3rd Party Sites
It's also been argued that many media companies are unwilling to have their content appear online in any form other than high quality files on their own webistes. That way they can maximize ad revenue and protect their brands. YouTube's claim that 90% of content owners who find their work on YouTube are running ads on the site instead of demanding it be removed indicates a sea change in big copyright holder attitudes.
Scarcity is no longer a tenable strategy in a world of digital content and file quality is clearly not as important to consumers as many content producers believed it would be. Imagine what the web would be like if music producers took a similar strategy with mp3 files on other sites. Those same parties are undoubtedly among the participants in YouTube's new program, using the ID technology to find songs being used along with user created video. Unfortunately, the music industry may be too greedy to support this same kind of model throughout a whole ecosystem of websites. Witness the plight of Pandora, a wildly popular service that's trying to play by the rules.
Argument: YouTube Wouldn't Be What it Is Without Pirated Content
One of the most commonly made critiques of YouTube is that it was only able to ramp up fast because it caught copyright holders by surprise; that it was born of illigitimate uploads of pirated TV shows and movie clips.
The latest turn of events leads us to wonder whether this question was turned around the wrong way. Couldn't we just as well assert that YouTube was lucky to survive before a time when copyright holders understood that they had options with content that they owned rights to on the site? Had copyright holders come down hard and fast in the earliest days, as they did in later months surrounding the Google acquisition, then YouTube wouldn't still be pushing the envelope and opening new doors for distribution and monetization today.
There's a world of possibilities beyond even what's being done today by the most open minded copyright owners. The Times article mentions Electronic Arts, for example, who encourages users to upload Spore related content and then uses YouTube's ID technology to find it and highlight the best stuff. Any number of other campaigns have tried to get people to use a common tag in their metadata or upload through a dedicated portal powered by the YouTube API. YouTube is a chaotic place, though - companies may get the greatest connection with their fans by letting those fans upload how they like and using YouTube's ID tech to find them afterword.
This is Big
This isn't just about copyright and advertising, this is about a new paradigm that big copyright holders may be catching up with. From video to user data, it's not about scarcity and silos anymore. It's about keeping your users and fans through better service and compelling value-ads. Let's hope this YouTube experience is more than just a flash in the pan and that the industry is genuinely moving in this direction.
The Case for an Apple iNetwork: Welcome to the Social
There has been a lot of speculation recently about an impending update to iTunes. Version 8.0, among other things, is supposed to finally bring a recommendation engine to the digital media player application. While that's interesting from a music discovery perspective, it is even more interesting to consider what this could mean in terms of an iTunes+iPhone based social networking experience.
digg_url = 'http://digg.com/apple/The_Case_for_an_Apple_iNetwork_Welcome_to_the_Social';digg_bgcolor = '#ffffff';digg_skin = 'normal';iTunes (launched 2001) and the iTunes music store (launched 2003) have come a long way since they were first launched. The application has gone through various iterations, gaining significant features such as podcasts (2005), videos (2007), games, and applications (2008) along the way. In the process, selling billions of songs, millions of movies, and over 10 million applications in the first week of the app store's launch. Needless to say Apple has built an experience that with all it's parts combined is unparalleled in both its features and the breadth of its catalog of content.
The Software Side
While most of that is common knowledge, what most people overlook is the glaring lack of any community aspect to iTunes. There are millions of people, many of them with similar tastes, flocking to the same destination every day, yet they never interact with each other... because they can't. If Kevin Rose is to be believed, however, (as discussed on TWiT 157) that all is about to change with iTunes 8.0.
He says, '... the one thing I hear about iTunes 8.0 is that it's gonna do something along the lines of, um, looking at your music, and, uh, kind of recommendations based on certain things.' In other words, the next version of iTunes will monitor your media purchasing and consuming habits and correlate them with everyone else using the system to figure out which songs you will probably like but haven't bought/listened to. If you're a fan of collaborative filtering systems or internet radio (Pandora, Last.fm, etc), you're probably familiar with the idea already and that iTunes may be considering implementing this doesn't come as a surprise (I found myself wondering why this wasn't introduced 2-3 years ago).
While this feature itself isn't social and can be implemented entirely on the back end, the implementation required for that functionality is so close to a networked experience (monitoring of habits and correlation across users) that they might as well take a small next step and add a visible social layer with which those users can interact. In fact, if you look at the results from a 2006 iTunes survey, you will see the people want to be able to see what people with similar interests and tastes (i.e. friends) are purchasing and consuming, so they can experiment with and pick from the same selection. More specifically, consumers want:
- The ability to view a friend's wish list, with permission.
- The ability to view what a friend is currently listening to, with permission.
- The ability to view a friend's playlist, with permission.
- The ability to view a friend's recent purchases, with permission.
- The ability to view a friend's favorite artists, with permission
What's also interesting about this approach is that it reaches the exact opposite conclusions of EMR's UK social networking study [PDF]. The study implies that social networks will be the content distribution channels of tomorrow, but the relationship may actually work better in the other direction. With the addition of networking and recommendation features to iTunes, the application could become the most efficient, most engaging, stickiest (always-on), and most profitable social network almost overnight.
But Apple's social networking potential doesn't end there. Remember Microsoft's 'welcome to the social' campaign that centered around the launch of its Zune digital media player? If you don't, you're not alone. The goal behind the campaign, 'to create a shared, social experience that will be shaped by the collective imagination of consumers and will inspire discovery of new music and artists,' was actually a formidable one. Unfortunately an inferior device, coupled with disasterous software integration made the campaign a $100 million failure.
Enter Apple.
The Hardware Side
With a formidable install base, great hardware and one of the most versatile mobile operating systems around, the iPhone is ready to herald in the future of mobile social networking. Furthermore, with 3G/EDGE/WiFi/GPS capabilities, the iPhone is a great tool for both networking as well as wirelessly sharing digital media like the Zune promised (but failed miserably at). Not only does the device work seamlessly with the iTunes software, but Apple's DRM is more consistent and perhaps more forgiving that Microsoft's (which was partly responsible for crippling the Zune's ambitions).
The Cloud
With a firm grasp on the software side with iTunes and on the hardware side with the iPhone, Apple is in good shape. Their killer app, however, could end up being the cloud. Apple already operates MobileMe (previously .Mac) which faciliates the management of contacts, calendars (events), email, photos, and any other files or digital media. Admittedly the service has been an utter failure since launch, but Apple has acknowledge the failure and is on the path to fix its shortcomings.
The previously discussed iTunes social networking and collaborative filtering (recommendations) system, coupled with the iPhone's versatile wireless communication and media sharing capabilities, topped off with media and information management (and sharing) in the cloud, the combo is no doubt ready to be our digital life (and relationship) manager. The only limitation of the network, however, (and it will be a deal breaker for many) is that unlike every other social network today, the experience will come at a steep cost. Knowing Apple though, I have no doubt it will be an experience worth the cost (especially considering what they had to deal with at the MobileMe launch).
This is a guest post by Muhammad Saleem, a social media consultant and a top-ranked community member on multiple social news sites. You can follow Muhammad on Twitter.
The Future of the Desktop
Everything is moving to the cloud. As we enter the third decade of the Web we are seeing an increasing shift from native desktop applications towards Web-hosted clones that run in browsers. For example, a range of products such as Microsoft Office Live, Google Docs, Zoho, ThinkFree, DabbleDB, Basecamp, and many others now provide Web-based alternatives to the full range of familiar desktop office productivity apps. The same is true for an increasing range of enterprise applications, led by companies such as Salesforce.com, and this process seems to be accelerating. In addition, hosted remote storage for individuals and enterprises of all sizes is now widely available and inexpensive. As these trends continue, what will happen to the desktop and where will it live?
This is a guest post by Nova Spivack, founder and CEO of Twine. This is the final version of an article Spivack has been working on in his public Twine.
Is the desktop of the future going to just be a web-hosted version of the same old-fashioned desktop metaphors we have today?
No. There have already been several attempts at copying the old-fashioned "files and folders" desktop interface to the Web, but they have not caught on. Imitations desktops to-date have simply been clunky and slow imitations of the real-thing at best. Others have been overly slick. But one thing they all have in common: None of them have nailed it. People don't want to manage all their information on the Web in the same interface they use to manage data and apps on their local PC. The Web is an entirely different medium than the desktop and it requires a new kind of interface. The desktop of the future - what some have called "the Webtop" - still has yet to be invented.
The desktop of the future is going to be a hosted web service
Is the desktop even going to exist anymore as the Web becomes increasingly important? Yes, there has to be some kind of place that we consider to be our personal "home" and "workspace" -- but it's not going to live on any one device.
As we move into a world that is increasingly mobile, where users often work across several different devices in the course of their day, we need unified access to our applications and data. This requires that our applications and data do not reside on local devices anymore, but rather that they will live in the cloud and be accessible via Web services.
The painful process of using synchronization utilities to keep data on our different devices in-synch will finally be a thing of the past. Similarly an entire class of applications for remote-PC access will also become extinct. Instead, all devices will synch with the cloud, where your applications, data and desktop workspace state will live as a unified, hosted service. Your desktop will appear on whatever device you login to, just as you left it wherever you last accessed it. This shift harkens back to previous attempts to revive thin-client computing - such as Sun Microsystems' Java Desktop - but this time it is going to actually become mainstream.
The Browser is Going to Swallow Up the Desktop
It's a classic embrace-and-extend story - the Web browser began as just another app on the desktop and has quickly embraced and extended every other application to become the central tool on everyone's desktop. All that remains is the desktop itself - and the browser is quickly making inroads there as well. In particular Firefox, with it's easy extensibility and huge range of add-ons, is rapidly displacing the remaining features of the desktop.
If these trends continue, will the browser eventually swallow up or simply replace the desktop? Yes. In fact, it will probably happen very soon. There just isn't any reason to have a desktop outside the browser anymore. What we think of as "the desktop" is really just a perspective on our information and applications - it's really just another "page" or context in our digital lives. This could easily exist within a browser. So instead of launching the browser from the desktop, it makes more sense to launch the desktop from the browser. In this way of thinking, the desktop is really just our home page - the place where we do our work and keep up with our world.
The focus of the desktop will shift from information to attention
As our digital lives evolve out of the old-fashioned desktop into the browser-centric Web environment we will see a shift from organizing information spatially (directories, folders, desktops, etc.) to organizing information temporally (feeds, lifestreams, microblogs, timelines, etc.). The Web is constantly changing and the biggest challenge is not finding information, it is keeping up with it.
The desktop of the future is going to be more concerned with helping users manage information overload - particularly the overload caused by change. In this respect, it is going to feel more like an RSS feed reader or a social news site than a directory. The focus will be on helping the user to manage and keep up with all the stuff flowing in and out of the their environment. The interface will be tuned to help the user understand what the trends are, rather than just on how things are organized.
Users are going to shift from acting as librarians to acting as daytraders.
As we move into an era where content creation and distribution become almost infinitely cheap, the scarcest resources will no longer be storage or bandwidth, it will be attention. The pace of information creation and distribution continues to accelerate and there is no end in sight, yet the cognitive capabilities of the individual human brain are finite and we are already at our limits.
In order to cope with the overwhelming complexity of our digital lives, we are going to increasingly rely on tools that help us manage our attention more productively -- rather than tools that simply help us manage our information.
It is a shift from the mindset of being librarians to that of being daytraders. In the PC era we were all focused on trying to manage the information on our computers -- we were acting as librarians. Filing things was a big hassle, and finding them was just as difficult. But today filing information is really not the problem: Google has made search so powerful and ubiquitous that many Web users don't bother to file anything anymore - instead they just search again when they need it. The librarian problem has been overcome by the brute force of Web-scale search. At least for now.
Instead we are now struggling to cope with a different problem - the problem of filtering for what is really important or relevant now and in the near-future. With limited time and attention, we have to be careful what we look for and what we pay attention to. This is the mindset of the daytrader. Bet wrong and you could end up wasting your precious resources, bet right and you could find the motherlode before the rest of the world and gain valuable advantages by being first. Daytraders are focused on discovering and keeping track of trends. It's a very different focus and activity from being a librarian, and it's what we are all moving towards.
The Webtop will be more social and will leverage and integrate collective intelligence
The Webtop is going to be more socially oriented than desktops of today -- it will have built-in messaging and social networking, as well as social-media sharing, collaborative filtering, discussions, and other community features.
The social dimension of our lives is becoming perhaps our most important source of information. We get information via email from friends, family and colleagues. We get information via social networks and social media sharing services. We co-create information with others in communities. And we team up with our communities to filter, rate and redistribute content.
The social dimension is also starting to play a more important role in our information management and discovery activities. Instead of those activities remaining as solitary, they are becoming more communal. For example many social bookmarking and social news sites use community sentiment and collaborative filtering to help to highlight what is most interesting, useful or important.
Sites such as Digg, Reddit, Mixx, Slashdot, Delicious, StumbleUpon, Twine, and many others, show that collective intelligence may be the most powerful way to help individuals and groups filter content and manage their attention more productively. The power of many trumps the power of one.
The desktop of the future is going to have powerful semantic search and social search capabilities built-in
Our evolving Webtop is going to have more powerful search built-in. It will of course provide best-of-breed keyword search capabilities, but this is just the beginning.
It will also combine social search and semantic search. On the social search dimension, users will be able to search their information and rank it via attributes of their social graph (for example, "find documents about x and rank them by how many of my friends liked them.")
Semantic search on the other hand will enable more granular search and navigation of information along a potentially open-ended networks of properties and relationships. For example you will be able to search in a highly structured way -- for example, search for products you once bookmarked that have a price of $10.95 and are on-sale this week. Or search for documents you read which were authored by Sue and related to project X, in the last month. The semantics of the future desktop will be open-ended. That is to say that users as well as other application and information providers will be able to extend it with custom schemas, new data types, and custom fields to any piece of information.
Interactive shared spaces will replace folders
Forget about shared folders -- that is an outmoded paradigm. Instead, the new metaphor will be interactive shared spaces. These shared spaces will be more like wikis than folders. They will be permission-based environments where one or many contributors can meet, interact synchronously or asynchronously, to work on information and other tasks together.
There are many kinds of shared spaces already in existence, including discussion forums, blogs, social network profiles, community sites, file sharing tools, conferencing tools, version control systems, and groupware. But as we move into Web 3.0 these will begin to converge. We will store information in them, we will work on information there, we will publish and distribute information through them, we will search across them, and we will interact with others around them.
Our next-generation shared spaces will be nestable and linkable like folders, but they will be far more powerful and dynamic, and they will be accessible via HTTP and other APIs such as SPARQL enabling data to be moved in and out of them easily by other applications around the Web.
Any group of two or more individuals will be able to participate in a shared space that will appear on their individual desktops, for a particular purpose. These new shared spaces will not only provide richer semantics in the underlying data, social network, and search, but they will also enable groups to seamlessly and collectively add, organize, track, manage, discuss, distribute, and search for information of mutual interest.
The Portable Desktop
The underlying data in the future desktop, and in all associated services it connects, will be represented using open-standard data formats. Not only will the data be open, but the semantics of the data - the schema that defines it - will also be defined in an open way. The value of open linked-data and open semantics is that data will not be held prisoner anywhere: it will be portable and will be easy to integrate with other data. The emerging Semantic Web and Data Portability initiatives provide a good set of open standards for enabling this to happen.
Due to open-standards and data-portability, your desktop and data will be free from "platform lock-in." This means that your Webtop might even be portable to a different competing Webtop provider someday. If and when that becomes possible, how will Webtop providers compete to add value?
The Smart Desktop
One of the most important aspects of the coming desktop is that it's going to be smart. It's going to have to be. Users simply cannot handle the complexity of their information landscapes anymore - they need help. There are a range of tasks that the desktop should automate for users including: organizing information, reminding users when necessary, resolving data conflicts, managing versioning, maintaining data quality, backing up data, prioritizing information, and gathering relevant information and suggesting it when appropriate.
Most other features of the future desktop will be commodities - but intelligence will still be difficult to provide, and so it will be the last remaining frontier in which competing Webtop providers will be able to differentiate their offerings.
The Webtop is going to learn and help you to be more productive. As you use it, it's going to adjust to your interests, relationships, current activities, information and preferences. It will adaptively self-organize to help you focus your attention on what is most important to whatever context you are in.
When reading something while you are taking a trip to Milan it may organize itself to be more contextually relevant to that time, place and context. When you later return home to San Francisco it will automatically adapt and shift to your home context. When you do a lot of searches about a certain product it will realize your context and intent has to do with that product and will adapt to help you with that activity for a while, until your behavior changes.
Your desktop will actually be a semantic knowledge base on the back-end. It will encode a rich semantic graph of your information, relationships, interests, behavior and preferences. You will be able to permit other applications to access part or all of your graph to datamine it and provide you with value-added views and even automated intelligent assistance.
For example, you might allow an agent that cross-links things to see all your data: it would go and add cross links to relevant things onto all the things you have created or collected. Another agent that makes personalized buying recommendations might only get to see your shopping history across all shopping sites you use.
Your desktop may also function as a simple personal assistant at times. You will be able to converse with your desktop eventually -- through a conversational agent interface. While on the road you will be able to email or SMS in questions to it and get back immediate intelligent answers. You will even be able to do this via a voice interface.
For example, you might ask, "where is my next meeting?" or "what Japanese restaurants do I like in LA?" or "What is Sue's Smith's phone number?" and you would get back answers. You could also command it to do things for you -- like reminding you to do something, or helping you keep track of an interest, or monitoring for something and alerting you when it happens.
Because your future desktop will connect all the relationships in your digital life -- relationships connecting people, information, behavior, preferences and applications -- it will be the ultimate place to learn about your interests and preferences.
Federated, open policies and permissions
This rich graph of meta-data that comprises your future desktop will enable the next-generation of smart services to learn about you and help you in an incredibly personalized manner. It will also of course be rife with potential for abuse and privacy will be a major function and concern.
One of the biggest enabling technologies that will be necessary is a federated model for sharing meta-data about policies and permissions on data. Information that is considered to be personal and private in Web site X should be recognized and treated as such by other applications and websites you choose to share that information with. This will require a way for sharing meta-data about your policies and permissions between different accounts and applications you use.
The semantic web provides a good infrastructure for building and deploying a decentralized framework for policy and privacy integration, but it has yet to be developed, let alone adopted. For the full vision of the future desktop to emerge a universally accepted standard for exchanging policy and permission data will be a necessary enabling technology.
The personal cloud
One way to think of the emerging Webtop is as your personal cloud. It will not just be a cloud of data, it will be a compute cloud as well. When you need to store or retrieve information it will provide that service. When you need to do computations, it will provide that to you as well. The cost of harnessing the capabilities of your cloud may be based on a monthly subscription or it may be metered, or it may be ad-supported.
Your personal cloud will have a center - provided by your main Webtop provider, where your address will live -- but most of its services will be distributed in other places, and even federated among other providers. Yet from an end-user perspective it will function as a seamlessly integrated service. You will be able to see and navigate all your information and applications, as if they were in one connected space, regardless of where they are actually hosted. You will be able to search your personal cloud from any point within it. It will look and feel like a single cohesive service.
The WebOS
No discussion of the future of the desktop would be complete without delving into the topic of the WebOS. The shift from desktop to Webtop - the move from a local desktop to a hosted desktop - is a necessary step towards the entire operating system moving to the Web as well. Many of the services that comprise an operating system are already available as Web services, but they are not yet integrated into a single cohesive WebOS. However it seems clear that the major players are aware of this opportunity and are positioning their services to capture it. Just as the desktop OS wars were won by capturing the "high ground" of the desktop, I would not be surprised if the same principle holds in the battle to own the WebOS. Whomever wins the Webtop will win the whole stack.
Who is most likely to own the future desktop?
When I think about what the future desktop is going to look like it seems to be a convergence of several different kinds of services that we currently view as separate.
It will be hosted on the cloud and accessible across all devices. It will place more emphasis on social interaction, social filtering, and collective intelligence. It will provide a very powerful and extensible data model with support for both unstructured and arbitrarily structured information. It will enable almost peer-to-peer like search federation, yet still have a unified home page and user-experience. It will be smart and personalized. It will be highly decentralized yet will manage identity, policies and permissions in an integrated cohesive and transparent manner across services.
By cobbling together a number of different services that exist today you could build something like this in a decentralized fashion. As various services integrate with each other it may simply emerge on its own. But is that how the desktop of the future will come about? Or will it be provided as a new application from one player - perhaps one with a lot of centralized market power and the ability to launch something like this on a massive scale? Or - just as with the previous desktop hits of the past, will it come from a little-known upstart with a disruptive technology? It's hard to predict, but one thing is certain: it is going to happen relatively soon and will be an interesting process to watch.
Image via Arnaldo Licea
What Would the Perfect Streaming Music Service Look Like?
Pandora's on the ropes, Imeem is taking off, Grooveshark relaunched today with recommendations and a long list of cool features, Blip.fm threatens to make Muxtape look like old news - the streaming music market online is expanding and contracting faster than a stadium rocker's pupils.
digg_url = 'http://digg.com/music/What_Would_the_Perfect_Streaming_Music_Service_Look_Like';digg_bgcolor = '#ffffff';digg_skin = 'normal';What if the perfect service rose from the noise and gave you exactly the user experience you wanted? What would such a service look like?
Let's call out our dreams, in hopes that they might become real. Here's a list of things we'd really like to see come from these kinds of services.
Note: it's not clear how viable any of this is going to be if small players aren't able to compete with innovative features. If you haven't yet, read the bad news about Pandora. Justin Dorfman has a good little blog post about things you can do to save Pandora.
Assuming that the pace of innovation online in music streaming can continue, here's what we're looking for in our dream service.
Quantity and Breadth of Music
The music business fights a constant battle against homogenization and in favor of the long tail, or at least some people in it do. It's hard to judge the quantity and breadth of music on a given service, it's a "I know it when I see it" kind of phenomenon.
Obviously many people want to make sure all the big hits are included, but we'd love to see the crowd pleasers be followed up with high quality music just being discovered. The infinite distribution of the web should make this a fundamentally different content experience than commercial radio has been.
Services that allow users to upload MP3 files offer a powerful opportunity to engage the long tail of musical tastes. That's becoming an increasingly common feature.
International Support
We'd be doing our friends in the rest of the world a real disservice if we said any music service was perfect if it didn't make itself available to listeners anywhere on the planet. For all the love it gets, Pandora is limited to US users. Copyright in music rears its ugly head again.
Continuous Playback
Services like Seeqpod and Imeem require too much intervention. It's preferable to at least have the option to click play and leave your music player alone for hours. Hey Muxtape, how about letting me turn on a mode that automatically follows all the fans and "fan of" connections from any collection I start with?
DRM Free Purchases
We love Amazon MP3 for its DRM free downloads and highlighting DRM free links to buy is one of the many things we love about MP3 blog aggregator Hype Machine. Sometimes streaming just isn't enough and you want to buy tunes. There are any number of ways to get music files for free, but when you find an artist you really respect - it's nice to send them some money.
We like the GrooveShark model of P2P downloads with revenue distribution to artists. The revenue sharing among listeners seems a little silly and we'd probably prefer lower prices, but whatever.
Good Recommendations
Music recommendation is something many, many people have aimed for. Few have nailed it like Pandora and Last.fm. Grooveshark rolled out a new recommendation feature today, but after just a little bit of use we found it unsatisfactory. The service generally has too much down time and it wasn't clear what recommendations were based on.
Social Features
It might sound silly, but there are two reasons that Last.fm really rocks and the social features are one of them. It's easy to discover other users and to listen to what they listen to. We've had a lot of fun going through our FriendFeed connections and seeing what different people we know online like to listen to.
Compare this to Pandora, where social features are buried in the back of the feature set and the gestures that result in populating your social profile (bookmarking songs or bands) aren't at all the most common gestures that users make (thumbs up or down). Even though there are millions of users, Pandora feels like a solitary place.
RIght: Sometimes we like to listen to what Chris Pirillo likes to listen to, just to see what makes him tick.
Atractive and Easy to Use Feedback UI
Pandora makes it easy to like or unlike songs, even if you haven't created an account. It's UI is more attractive than Last.fm's and these two services are among the only ones to really make the feedback UI simple and powerful.
Quality Ancillary Content
In addition to the social features, the second thing that makes Last.fm awesome is the additional information about artists. It's nice to be able to browse bio and background info, to see photos, etc.
It's nice to be able to view the lyrics of the song you're listening to sometime. LyricWiki is ok for this. Favtape pulls in lyrics from LyricWiki when they are available. The service plays your favorites from Pandora or Last.fm, using the Seeqpod API. It also links out to ringtone download sites. It's pretty cool.
We want to love IdioMag more than anyone for this. This little service grabs your publicly available musical taste data from other services, like Last.fm and Pandora, and then builds a "personalized music magazine" for you. For whatever genre you like, IdioMag identifies new and interesting bands, then plays them through an interface that supplements the music with photos from Flickr, videos from YouTube and text from syndicated blog posts. It even uses the dominant colors from the photos to determine the color scheme for the associated "pages." It's totally hot, in theory. In practice the writing tends to be unbearably bad and layout ends up being sloppy. We hope the service will improve because it's a great idea that we honestly tell people about weekly. Idiomag and Grooveshark are doing some cross-promotion for each other; we're happy to see that.
Playlist Publishing With Good Interface
Everyone likes to share good music with anyone who will listen. It's one way we win cool points and express ourselves. From the austere Muxtape to the super cute if unscalable casset tapes of MixWit, there's a world of interface options.
There's no reason for a service like Seeqpod, who are already being sued anyway, to offer such an awful playlist publishing widget. We're guessing that almost no one ever uses that part of the service.
Band in Town Notifications
When a band we're listening to on a service is going to be in our town any time soon, we'd love to know. It's a real lost opportunity whenever a service doesn't provide this kind of information - there are any number of ways to get it.
A Space for New Bands to be Discovered
How about a service that scans my iTunes library and my online listening history, determines my genres of interest and then never plays music from artists I've already listened to. Or makes sure to play some that I haven't.
Desktop Notification
You know how good online IM programs will sound a tone and show a message in your browser tab when a new message comes in? That way you can be using other applications but still know what's going on with your IM. Music apps should do something like that. Growl notification of artist and song title would be awesome.
MP3 Blog Discovery
Have you seen the Hype Machine? It's an MP3 blog aggregator and it's fantastic. Any music discovery system should include links to recent blog posts about the song you're listening to. It's a great way to learn about an artist and discover related music.
Oh So Much More
Friends of RWW have also told us they would like good mobile access and a clear path to revenue sharing with artists. What would your dream service for music streaming look like? Let us know in comments - maybe someone else will read this discussion and build it.
Photo at top "I Love My Music" by Flickr user shankar, shiv.
Study: Fastest Growing US Companies Rapidly Adopting Social Media
A one year follow up on a study of social media adoption at 500 of the fastest growing companies in the US has found that familiarity with and use of blogs, podcasting, wikis, online video and social networking has skyrocketed in 2008 to nearly double what it was in 2007. 77% of respondents now report at least some use of a social media tool in their business.
digg_url = 'http://digg.com/tech_news/Fastest_Growing_US_Companies_Rapidly_Adopting_Social_Media';digg_bgcolor = '#ffffff';digg_skin = 'normal';The University of Massachusetts Dartmouth Center for Marketing Research performed the study for Inc. Magazine and their findings confirm what previous studies have argued as well: social media use is now a major, mainstream activity.
The Findings
The study was written up on Robin Good's excellent blog Master New Media.
According to the study's authors, "26% of respondents in 2007 felt that social media is "very important" to their business and marketing strategy. That figure rose to 44% in approximately one year. It is clear that this group of fast-growing companies considers the use of social media as a central part of its strategic plan."
Social networking is the most familiar of the technologies. In 2007, wikis were the least familiar but they have since leapfrogged over podcasting.
It's notable that the study's authors found much more extensive use and growth in use in the fastest growing 500 US companies than they found in the Fortune 500, the largest companies. It would be a logical fallacy to argue that the fastest growing companies are growing fastest <