TechFold - Bold tech & web commentary

Predictions for 2008, #4: Apple & iTunes Stumbles

Continuing my series of predictions for 2008 (also see number one, and number two, about boingboing and yahoo respectively, and number three about semantic apps): to balance out Yahoo’s prophesized resurgence, someone must fall - and I think Apple’s due.

Actually, this is two predictions in one: firstly, DRM will continue to wither, and the sale of naked MP3’s will continue to take off. From this follows my second prediction - that iTMS (iTunes Music Store) will stumble in sales growth numbers as the DRM-less revolution Apple kicked off allows competitors to sell into the iPod ecosystem for the first time.

The end of DRM’d music is a great boon for consumers, who now have legal options for high-quality, downloadable music that plays anywhere. Indeed, the downloadable music sector as a whole will continue grow (and CD’s will continue to gather dust on store shelves), but I’ll bet that Apple’s iTMS growth will underperform the industry - i.e.: new competitors like Amazon will get get a non-zero slice of marketshare for the first time.

That’s how I know Apple really loves consumers: they’re willing to break down their own ludicrously profitable walls for the betterment of the overall consumer experience. (see: Steve’s open letter)

2008, apple, drm predictions

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Predictions for 2008, #3: Semantic apps will continue to suck

Well, “suck” is probably too strong a work. How about “Semantic apps will continue to be completely irrelevant?”

2007 was a year heavy on buzz around so-called next generation, 3.0, semantic apps - things like PowerSet & Hakia (natural language search), Spock (people search), Twine (who knows), and so on.

Well, after a year of anticipation, each is either unlaunched (powerset), unloved (spock is weak), or unheard of (twine).

Consider the value propositions:

1. Spock promised powerful people search, and so far has delivered a (drum roll)… social network scraper. See “idiocy writ large” for reference.
2. Next gen search engines promised better results than google and so far have delivered… junk. See my off the cuff Hakia vs. Google comparo for reference.
3. Apps like Twine promise to automate the discovery of relationships between your disparate bits of information - but if you listen to the video there’s a lot of buzzwords (semantic graph! open! graph! wikis! ontologies!) and little substance (its got smarts!) beyond keyword parsing.

…so my prediction is that Google will continue to kick ass, the so-called next-gen startups will continue to languish or sit or beta-purgatory, and slowly the concept of “semantic” will fade from the public eye as VC’s find something else to latch onto.

(Quick update: Twine has also committed what I consider to be the cardinal sin of marketing plans - attempting to create their own vernacular, i.e.: in scoble’s video above one “twines” a link, and creates a “twine” about something - arggh. Its as bad as the now defunct Teqlo)

2008, google, hakia, powerset, predictions, semantic, spock, twine web3.0

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Australia Censoring the Internet: mortgaging a nation’s future

At heart, I’m a libertarian: I am firm in my belief that the ills that accompany unfettered access to self-expression and communication are outweighed by the benefits - that the abdication of personal responsibility that seems endemic in our society is a call to community action and education - not an invitation to governments to censor and regulate.

Sadly, those of similar mind are under constant attack; for example, Australia has announced that default censorship of the Internet is coming. At issue are the children who’s parents are no longer deemed capable of seeing to their memetic welfare; instead, the entire nation must bear the cost for their inattention.

As often happens, it seems the Australian government has seized upon a media-manufactured social ill as an excuse to strengthen its powers. The TechCrunch post linked-to above suggests scary motives afoot - that broad filtering is a prelude to future crackdowns against bloggers, policy criticism, and free speech. While that may one day be the case, such conspiracy theories give governments too much credit for forethought. Apply Occam’s razor, and you get a much more utilitarian explanation: like most populations, governments expand when and where they can - purely by virtue of existing. An educated, activist citizenry is tasked with playing the role of antibody and containing their legislative spread. Witness the recent Canadian reaction to music industry sponsored legislation.

Where then are the Australians?

The Australian government has lulled its population by coating its plan in a beguiling, saccharine layer of moral virtue - after all, who doesn’t want to protect the children? (Parents, evidently.) And, criticism has been headed off with an exit clause: those not wishing to see the government’s interpretation of the world may be able to opt-out of the censored view, though the monetary and social cost of that choice are unknown. Wrapping an indecent proposal in a layer of barely acceptable plausibility: a method for selling used cars, not national leadership.

And so continues the slow slide into nanny state societies and the stunning willingness to trade freedom for security (or corporate profit) that has characterized the first decade of the new millennium. Parents are saved from taking responsibility for their children by a government willing to mortgage its citizen’s future.

australia censorship

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Safeway has good, free Wifi

Safeway (the grocery store) features both Starbucks outlets and free, anonymous log-in WiFi access (in Canada/Manitoba/Winnipeg at least). I don’t know what Starbuck’s wireless rates are like in the US, but here they’re exorbitant ($9/hr, etc.) - so if you hang out at the grocery store instead, you can sip the same coffee, nibble the same snacks, and surf for free. I tried it out today, and it was fast and as free as promised. I was only there for about 20 minutes, but there’s no stated maximum time policies or whatnot, and my location had plenty of electrical outlets about.

safeway, wifi wireless

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SimplePie RSS Parsing

I just switched TechWatching from MagpieRSS to SimplePie. Each of these is an automated RSS feed parser built for PHP, and both feature great features like caching, http-last-modified intelligent requests to lessen the overhead of feed-checking, etc. MagpieRSS, for whatever reason, has died on the vine - i.e.: last blog post is October of 2006. SimplePie has stepped up in the meantime to fill the gap.

So - I’m looking forward to not having to deal with a bunch of problems I thought I’d have to hack Magpie to handle - character encoding, CDATA encoded content blocks, inconsistent namespaces, etc - SimplePie does an awesome job of handling feeds and their data. Big shout out to the SimplePie folks for their great work - thank-you.

rss, simplepie techwatching

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Predictions for 2008, #2: Yahoo! Resurgent

Yesterday kicked off my post-Christmas blogging with my first 2008 prediction - that BoingBoing would continue its devolution into a Cory Doctorow bookstore and link farm for BBGadgets.

One thing I didn’t want to continue with Prediction #2 is the tendency to forecast doom and gloom. Its really easy to pick out organizations that are stumbling and place a bet on their demise, and a lot of predictions lists read like a gleeful financial Grim Reaper’s shopping list.

So what are the bright lights for 2008? Believe it or not, I’d like to imagine that one of them is Yahoo. I know this is probably pushing the bounds of credibility, but for what its worth, I think the impact from the removal of Terry Semel will take years to really percolate down through Yahoo’s silo’d organization - and that 2008 will be the year when meaningful change can really take place.

1. Positve: Yahoo’s ditched Semel. Since starting at Yahoo in 2001, Wikipedia claims Semel has made off with $500 million. $500 MILLION. During which time Yahoo has stumbled, stagnated, hemorrhaged management talent, and generally fallen apart. Semel apparently managed to impart zero vision and leadership to the organization.
2. Negative: The management exodus will hurt for a while (Rachel Glaser, Scott Gatz, Neil Budde, Cameron Marlow, Andy Baio, etc.). That’s a lot of knowledge equity and relationship-power to have walk out of your company, and each troubled departure leaves a bad taste in the mouths of those left behind.
3. Positive: Yahoo’s till a traffic bull.
4. Positive: Yahoo has lots of great properties - Flickr, Upcoming, Del.icio.us, Yahoo Mail, etc. - a little vision could combine traffic & properties into a spectacular social-networked experience. Yahoo also has a powerful international presence.
5. Negative: Yahoo still doesn’t seem able to execute on anything. The peanut butter manifesto has faded from the radar, and Jerry Yang’s 12 months of change must be close to over by now - with little material difference to Yahoo’s properties. Is it a product of management flight? Or has execution been delayed while management is reorganized post-Semel?

So: ultimately, by my estimation, Yahoo has the traffic and basic building blocks to return to Internet stardom. The chief thing holding Yahoo back has been management structure and leadership - and I’d like to think that 2008 will be the year that Yahoo starts to get its house in order on both accounts.

2008, predictions, semel yahoo

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Predictions for 2008, #1: Cory D. just don’t quit

Over the holidays, James Thomas pinged me to ask what my 5 predictions for 2008 (cheers, James!). James sees…

1. Mixx takes off vs. Digg [disagree]: I tend to think not; despite all of the posturing about leaving that takes place anytime there’s a digg-directed digg-storm, the user base seems alarmingly loyal. And, arguably the conditions that created the source of digg’s value (its loyal, active community) will be hard to recreate for a knock-off - so far, the only successes in the “community curation” space (arguably) have been Fark, Slashdot, and Digg - each of which was ahead of its time and grew organically.
2. The RIAA floundering [no comment]: Hard to say; are there any verifiable metrics around the profitability of the legit non-drm MP3 sales taking place?
3. Mint dying [agree]: The “winner” of the TC40 is a lame credit-card pushing branded version of a white label financial services aggregator. Everything I’ve read about it is that its a big pile of suck. My financial details will never go near it; I expect few people’s will.
4. Napster dying [agree]: Please, let it be quick.
5. Adobe Flex/AIR taking off [no comment]: I don’t know enough about the rich application development space to agree or disagree. MS’s Silverlight seems to be an also-ran already though.

So: James kicked things off with what I think are some great calls. Without unneccessary preamble, here’s the first of my five, ranked by frivolity, starting with the most frivolous. 4 more to follow over the next few days!

TechFold 2008 Prediction #1

Cory Doctorow’s books will continue to get translated into other languages, and BB will continue to tell us about it, over and over and over and over again, until if we read the un-word “Scroogled” ever again, we’ll start screaming. Latvian, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, Macedonian, Polish, Spanish, Dutch, Bulgarian, German, Russian, and Persian. Please make it stop.

The sub-text here is that between posts about Cory’s books, Gamma-Go! hoodies, BBgadgets, and BBtv, BoingBoing - a leader in blogging as a movement and political advocacy as a lifestyle - is becoming less of the cultural force that it once was, and more of the kitschy merchandise shop that it apparently wants to be.

2008, boingboing, mentallyretired, predictions scroogled

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Coding Horror on Registration Keys

After bitching about incompatible power supplies earlier today, I thought it would be appropriate to point readers to Coding Horror’s take on the aggravation of registration keys. The use of commonly mistaken characters in keys (”O” vs. “0″), excessively long keys, clunky entry forms, etc. all make registration keys more evil than neccessary.

registration software

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Another Tag Silo - Twitter Hashtags

A few days ago, I riffed on how the failure of user-powered tagging was what was driving the need for a semantic web - that jumbled, discontiguous tagging implementations had created a plethora of tag city-states who’s inability to talk on a “national” level had reduced the tagging movement to a curiosity.

Today, another entrant in the form of Hashtags - tags for twitter post. Again, useful within the silo of the twitter-verse, but clunky to extend outwards. You can read more on hashtags via stoweboyd, or stephanie booth, or check out full coverage.

The stated purpose of hashtags is to all one to follow a topical twitter-stream, as was useful for those techies fleeing the SoCal fires this past year. But how much cooler would it be if you could stitch together Twitter content, Flickr coverage, posted videos, blog posts, and news, into a single realtime view of a given situation? That would look a lot like the output of a semantic application.

To do so now would require onerous hard-coding of proprietary hooks into each services API (twitter, flicker, youtube, etc.), with more custom coding to parse out time and geo-relevance data. As I mentioned in my previous article, a two-tiered tagging system composed of machine and human tags, shared in a consistent format, and conforming to common baseline standards would enable this.

hashtags, semantic, tagging, tags twitter

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Power supply standardization

Over the weekend, a friend was relating how a co-worker fried a terabyte RAID array by connecting it to the wrong power supply. Which got me thinking about how lame the entire hardware industry has been in implementing power supplies, plugs, and adapters.

Given that most hardware uses the same electricity in similar volumes, why is it that both of my laptops have different power supply plugs (one IBM, one Toshiba)? And why is it that my IBM T40 power supply is different than my cube-neighbor’s T60? And why does that same person’s Dell have a different plug than the T40, the T60, or my Toshiba? There’s 5 laptops within a 10ft radius of me right now, each of which requires its own brick with a model-specific plug on one end.

Its equivalent to Honda, Toyota, and Ford each requiring a brand-specific nozzle at a gas station. Same gas, different nozzles. Does that sound like a good idea?

You’d think it would be in the hardware industry’s best interest to standardize power supplies in a few simple form factors (small, medium, large?) as has taken place with USB - for laptops, for peripherals, etc. It should be as simple as “if the plug fits, it works.” It would let me charge my laptop off my wife’s adapter at home. It would have prevented the frying of that terabyte drive. It would reduce the number of bricks, cables, and adapters that one must travel with. It would open up the aftermarket, in the way the iPod universal plug has for Apple accessories. And, it would help manufacturers focus on adding value to their products - not spending budget on plugs and bricks.

Basically it looks like all upside to me.

So - the question manufacturers should be asking is where they deliver value to consumers; the answer is not via power cable - that’s just for delivering electricity.

batteries power

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