Four short posts: 12 May 2009

[Stealing Nat's "Four short" format again...]

1. I went to Google and searched for a non-location-specific term today (I can't be more specific since the search was for a birthday present for my wife, but let's pretend it was "baseball cards," since that was the general form -- a noun with nothing geographically-specific about it). On the first page of results was a list of shops in my neighborhood that sell that thing (in our pretend example, baseball card trading stores). The specificity of the local results was quite good. Now, I know full well that my IP address identifies my location all too accurately, and that Google and many other sites track that information -- and I've known that for a long time. Nonetheless, seeing my neighborhood right there in the search results made me want to never use any Google site again. Call it "uncanny valley" or "rubbing your face in it" or whatever you want -- it was just too close to home in the most literal sense. I'm off trying Yahoo Search as an alternative -- not that I have any reason to believe Yahoo treats such data any differently, but simply because having alternatives is a good thing. (For the record, I'm a noted privacy freak and I don't pretend to speak for anyone else on this topic. I know that resistance is futile. I continue to believe that there is a great divide on sensitivity about privacy -- you've either had your identity stolen or been stalked or had some great intrusion you couldn't fend off, or you haven't. I'm in the former camp and it colors the way I view and think about privacy online. It makes me indescribably sad to see how clearly I and others in my camp are losing this battle.)
2. I'd really like to end up on Wrong Tomorrow for predicting that the iPhone OS will be dominant for the next decade. Who knows? Prediction is completely impossible, which is one of the things that makes life fun. The tech industry seems particularly predictable, though, in that it just keeps acting in waves. The iPhone OS seems to be playing its cards right. Go ahead, commenters, freak out like you did the last time I said this. :)
3. I noted to a friend the other day (while encouraging him to go work there) that I measured Twitter's value by seeing Tweetie (an awesome iPhone Twitter client) ascend to one of the four apps in the bottom bar of my iPhone. Those bottom bar apps are the ones I use all the time (the others being the phone, SMS, and email apps). Tweetie replaced Safari, the web browser, which is pretty amazing as a symbolic shift. No other third-party app -- including my own company's app -- has made it into the bottom bar for me. Who says Twitter isn't valuable?
4. In contrast, using Twitter makes Facebook like watching repeats on local TV when you're home sick. I really hope the automated and out-of-control cross-posting comes to an end soon. Facebook wins for posting private messages and having inline replies; Twitter wins by letting you see the data some way other than through the official orifice (desktop clients, iPhone apps, SMS, etc). I would accept separate message streams for different types of data; or the death of Facebook in my friend group -- whatever. Unfortunately I doubt I'll get either wish.

Four quick posts: 11 April 2009

[I love Nat's "Four short links" format and am ripping it off to try to get myself blogging again. Instead of links, these are four blog posts I've been meaning to write but haven't.]

1. It turns out Facebook is not completely useless if you're married! And no, I'm not talking about the world's most overvalued Scrabble platform, and I don't mean "I'm in an open relationship." Instead, I was shocked this week to find that Facebook is better than Flickr for sharing private photos. I've considered myself a member of the Flickr generation for some time now, but when posting pictures of my daughter, I set them to "Friends and Family" only. My Flickr contacts seem to get pictures mostly via RSS, and since no RSS message is posted for private photos, they never see my shots. Facebook, though, by making their Newsfeed a site-only feature, brings people to their site every day, which in turn lets them see my private postings. I posted a picture on Flickr and wound up with zero favorites and one comment (as it turns out, from a Flickr employee who happens to be a contact); I later posted the same picture on Facebook and got 8 favorites and 11 comments. Flickreenos: you should put a message in RSS feeds that says, "Marc just posted a private photo -- click here to see it." Or, you know, add a Scrabble app.


2. Is there any doubt the iPhone has totally won the mobile platform war? I don't really get why Palm is even bothering to launch the Pre. "It's the App Store, stupid." It took the original Palm OS about 12 years to reach 50,000 applications developed for Palm OS; in under a year, the iPhone OS already has 25,000 applications available. The App Store promises to fulfill many developers' dream -- to work alone and strike it rich. Palm is competing by trying to match the UI, and that won't work. The Android team made a smart move recently by working on a home automation platform; changing the playing field is probably their best bet.


3. Related: the App Store has an inscrutable, time-consuming, whim-dependent approval process. The App Store newsgroup postings are full of angry claims that this is a bug, but I bet it's a feature. If you can't get an app approved until it's working perfectly, and you have to wait a week or two -- or more -- between approval rounds, you're much more likely to put a lot more effort in up front to get it right. That raises the quality level across the App Store. Palm is talking about lowering the bar for development of apps, and I bet that will fill their platform with crap-ass, low quality one-offs, and people will learn to distrust apps as being valuable; instead they'll just be widgets.


4. Nearly all of the things that have gotten me excited online over the past year involve making media faster and easier to consume over the air (OTA): Boxee, Roku, Kindle for iPhone, even sad-sack Hulu. A lot fewer Amazon boxes are showing up at my house, even though I'm buying plenty of media from them through Kindle and Roku. OTA-media FTW! Now we just need a DRM revolution so I can actually own this stuff instead of getting a lame-ass license.

Kindle Above the Level of a Single Device

Hey, I'm happy to see this in the news today:

Amazon.com will begin selling e-books for reading on Apple’s popular iPhone and iPod Touch. Starting Wednesday, owners of these Apple devices can download a free application, Kindle for iPhone and iPod Touch, from Apple’s App Store. The software will give them full access to the 240,000 e-books for sale on Amazon.com, which include a majority of best sellers.

I complained about "The Kindle Hardware Tax" earlier. Glad to get a tax cut. Thanks, Amazon.

Now, about that DRM......

Hulu's Superbowl Ad and the Boxee Fight

[A note to start. My company, Wesabe, is funded in part by a venture firm, Union Square Ventures, which is one of the funders of Boxee, a character in the drama described below. That said, I've never met or spoken with anyone from Boxee, and have only ever talked to Union Square about them to ask for an invite. I don't have any access to any inside information about Boxee. This post is based instead on the time I spent working at Lucasfilm from 1997 to 1999. Well, really, the following isn't based on Lucasfilm itself, but instead on my conversations with the major studios (of which Lucasfilm is not one -- Fox/Disney/etc., who control distribution, are) about this topic of video on the Internet, which was just starting to be hotly debated at the time.

Some of the comments below also come from participating in discussions about copy protection and Divx, which, if you'll remember, was at that time a self-destructing DVD-like format that would let the studios control how long you could watch their entertainment. No, seriously, it started to self-destruct when it was exposed to air and these people all thought it was certain to win over DVD. Wrong, but instructive.]

The secret to understanding why Hulu's "content providers" -- and boy do they love being called that -- have instructed Hulu to block Boxee users from their "content" -- again, not what they would call it -- isn't some big secret. In fact, it was broadcast during the Superbowl, in Hulu's excellent Superbowl ad:

[Update: I'm told you can't see that embedded video unless you live in the US. If you don't, can you see this YouTube copy? I'll laugh if that works. Let me know. Update again: Yeah, you can watch the Hulu ad from anywhere on YouTube. That's awesome. It's even Hulu's YouTube account that posted it!]

Here's the relevant part, as spoken by Alec Baldwin:

Hulu beams TV directly to your [sardonic gesture to the camera] portable computing devices, giving you more of the cerebral-gelatinizing shows you want, any time, anywhere, for free.

Emphasis added: portable computing devices. Not to your TV -- from your TV. To your dumb-ass laptop, you smelly, hairy, friendless, gamer-freak nerd. (Sorry, I hate to talk about you that way, but that's how they think of the Internet. I think you smell great.) To your TV is something completely different, and from the "content providers'" point of view, completely wrong. Aren't Apple and Tivo and YouTube bad enough as it is?

Boxee was featured in an awesome New York Times article one month ago, with a picture of their product on a big-screen TV, and Hulu's logo clearly visible in the upper right corner. I can almost hear some lawyer somewhere in Hollywood screaming, "I thought Hulu was a WEB SITE! I do NOT see a WEB BROWSER in this PHOTOGRAPH!" at the sight of it. Boxee's blog post on the controversy says they heard from Hulu about this two weeks ago; I'd bet Hulu heard from that lawyer two weeks before that -- the morning the article appeared. Those calls are fun.

You'd think the "content providers" would know already this -- Boxee -- would happen; even with Hulu gone from Boxee, I can still watch Hulu on my TV, albeit with a much lamer interface. Hooking a computer to a TV is easy enough. Maybe they did know, and just waited to see how Boxee would get along until it got too high-profile to ignore. I doubt it, though. Most entertainment lawyers don't go for the idea, "Let's allow it for a little while and see what happens." They instead argue, "Let's stop it immediately and see if we have a better option we can control more, later." I'd guess Hulu had a deal to show "content" on computers, and the "content providers" balked when those computers started talking to their precious televisions.

So why does Hulu exist at all? Hulu must have seemed like the "better option" for getting people to watch TV ads on their computers -- better, perhaps, than the iTunes Music Store selling the same "content" piecemeal and getting price control over video as they have for music. Or, perhaps, than YouTube, selling and showing ads without the studios necessarily involved in any way. Let's control ads on the Internet by putting them on our "content" through Hulu, an entertainment industry company, not a smelly nerd company. Great. It's a plan.

Maybe BitTorrent came up in the discussion, but I doubt it -- BitTorrent is for smelly nerds. This isn't about you folks. This is about the mass market. Those people can't be disrupting their TV watching with some WEB SITE they saw in the NEW YORK TIMES.

So that's my guess about why Hulu blocked Boxee: those ads you see on Heroes are higher margin when you see them on your TV than when you see them on Hulu, and the only reason they're on Hulu is to make money from Heroes when you watch it online, so Apple or Google doesn't make that money instead. They were meant for your "portable computing devices" and not your precious TV. Now go back to the couch until we call for you again.

I'm sure Hulu is totally pissed. They pretty much said just that in a somewhat more stilted way. The real insult, though, is calling the people who made them cut Boxee off "content providers." They might as well have told the studios they are the moral equivalent of the guy schlepping reels around the projector booth. Someone will win this war eventually, they seem to be saying, and you could have helped make it us. Now you have a choice: someone else -- not you, someone smart -- will win instead, or you can change your mind.

That's pretty much my view, too. DVDs (mentioned in the note at the start) became a big boon for the studios, once their crazy ideas about self-destructing Divx discs went the way of the Dodo. The studios have a very long history of betting against technology people want, and on technology people don't want. This is just another such case. The technology people want always wins in the end -- no duh -- and usually benefits the businesses who fought that technology to the death. Here's hoping the technology people want -- Boxee -- doesn't wind up benefiting the studios fighting it now.

The Kindle Hardware Tax

There's a lot of news about Amazon's new Kindle 2 today, and it does look like a nice upgrade. I still don't want one, though. What I want is Kindle software. I'm hoping the early suggestions that Amazon is thinking that way prove true.

I use my iPhone for ebooks all the time now. I buy through Stanza, a very nice app, which is backended into Fictionwise. The buying experience between the two is pretty much terrible -- syncing down to the phone is painful, and having to enter your full credit card number to "unlock" the DRM makes me angry and frustrated at the same time -- but it's certainly good enough to make me excited about ebooks. I recently found myself wetting my fingers to turn the pages of a Stanza book I was reading -- the illusion that I'm reading a book is convincing.

Amazon has an interesting set of choices to make about how to proceed. This market seems like a pretty clear case of Tim's core Web 2.0 idea of "software above the level of a single device" -- do they really believe they can own the ebook device market and the ebook format market? do I really want to buy their hardware to read all the ebooks I read? I'm skeptical. I think if Amazon really makes Kindle books available on any hardware, including their own, they'll win. If I have to buy a $350 device -- or even a $99 device -- carry it, charge it, pay for otherwise free blogs on it, and so on, that won't work for me and someone else will win instead.

My devices have a history of merging or dying. I was an early adopter of the Palm Pilot, but stopped upgrading after the Palm V, which kind of worked for me, until the Treo came out, merging my phone with the PalmOS. That won out until the iPhone, which merged my phone, organizer, and iPod. The Kindle asks me to separate out a merged-in app for the benefit of -- well, what benefit? The display? It's nice, but not nice enough to take on the cost and the bother of a separate piece of hardware.

Amazon has every opportunity to trump the Fictionwise/Stanza book-buying experience -- Stanza's experience certainly isn't "One-Click." Worse, the prices in Fictionwise are higher than Kindle -- not to mention print -- for many of the books I've compared. For example: the last book I read on Stanza, The Art of Racing in the Rain, works out as follows (highest price to lowest):

[UPDATE: after posting this, I noticed that the price on Fictionwise for Stanza (stanza.fictionwise.com) is $2.84 more than the main Fictionwise site (www.fictionwise.com) price. Weird! I've updated the table and comments below.]

Kindle prices in that one case are beating both new and used print prices, and are trouncing the Fictionwise/Stanza price for apples-to-apples comparison. A number of other books I checked are substantially more expensive on Stanza than they are in hardcover, paperback, used, or Kindle.

I'm already paying for cell phone service, so it might well cost Amazon less to sell me a Kindle book than it would to sell the same Kindle book to a Kindle owner, assuming their profits aren't all in the device itself. Presumably they have better price negotiation power with the publishers, based on their existing print book sales, so they might well be able to compete on price for some time. Oh, and: I would totally pay $20 for a well-made Amazon Kindle iPhone app if it gave me access to books at Kindle prices. It seems like costs add up well on Amazon's side.

While the new Kindle upgrade is nice, owning another device is a kind of a tax. They need to care a lot less about the hardware business than they do about the software service. They're positioned to win on the latter and lose on the former.

Seeing political links in color

Andy Baio and Joshua Schachter teamed up to create a totally interesting project for the political season: a way to immediately visualize the links from political blogs on Memeorandum based on how they tend to link -- to more conservative (shown with red tint) or more liberal (shown with blue tint) blogs. They write:

...we used a recommendation algorithm to score every blog on Memeorandum based on their linking activity in the last three months. Then I wrote a Greasemonkey script to pull that information out of Google Spreadsheets, and colorize Memeorandum on-the-fly. Left-leaning blogs are blue and right-leaning blogs are red, with darker colors representing strong biases.

I love the idea of getting a quick, visual indicator of a blogs' social peers (in the link sense). Check it out.

Daylife's API for the News

Several years ago, my friend Upendra Shardanand tried to get me to join him in starting a company that would remake the way news is created and understood -- overturning the worst, ambulance-chasing tendencies of modern journalism, and building tools to help people track and understand the topics and people that shape their lives. I begged off in order to pursue my own startup, but it was the hardest "no" at which to arrive, since I respect Upendra so much and so admire what he was looking to build. Though we've chosen to pursue different topics, we have in common a desire to make the world better through entrepreneurial projects, and Upendra's effort definitely would have won me over had I not already started down my own road.

Happily, Upendra has built and launched a company, Daylife, around his ideas about the news industry, and I'm proud to be a Daylife advisor. There's an excellent article about Daylife in the current issue of BusinessWeek, talking about some of their early successes.

This month, Daylife is sponsoring a developer contest around its API, which provides a rich programming interface around news topics, people, and places. I'm one of the judges for the contest, along with Brian Behlendorf, Clay Shirky, Jeff Jarvis, and others. It makes me very happy to see some of the API samples, many of which remind me of ideas I heard kicked around back when Google News first launched. (Coincidentally, there's an interesting article about the stagnation of Google News in today's New York Times.) Daylife has also put together a list of Lazyweb ideas for the contest, my favorite of which is this design for a tracker of news about evil dictators.

I'm looking forward to seeing what people come up with for the contest, and I'd encourage you to check it out and submit a project. I started playing around tonight and quickly came up with three ideas for Daylife API projects that would help my startup. It won't take too many people doing the same before Upendra's idea of changing the way news works starts to take shape in the world.

Startup Camp Companies Selected

Mark Jacobsen from O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures asked me to post this announcement about Startup Camp:

We received an overwhelming response to our call for participants in the first annual OATV Startup Camp which will be held prior to this year's Foo Camp. There were so many great submissions that cutting the list to seven startups was extremely difficult. The companies selected include:

• Collective Knowledge
• EduFire
• LReady
• Neo Technology
• Reductive Labs
• Replicator
• Stonewall

If your company is listed above, you should have received an email from us with a formal invitation to the OATV Startup Camp and Foo Camp. If you applied and are not listed above, we thank you for your application. There were too many good proposals and we simply did not have enough room to invite more.

We also want to thank the following startup veterans who have agreed to lead various sessions at the OATV Startup Camp:

• Michael Arrington: founder of TechCrunch; co-founder of Achex, Zip.ca and Pool.com
• Dale Dougherty: co-founder of O’Reilly Media & GNN; publisher, MAKE magazine
• Esther Dyson: founder of EDventure Holdings, PC Forum, Release 1.0
• Mark Fletcher: founder of Bloglines and ONElist
• Marc Hedlund: co-founder of Popular Power and Wesabe
• Dave McClure: founder of Startup2Startup, conference chair for Graphing Social Patterns and Web 2.0 Expo
• Howard Morgan: founding investor of Idealab; partner at First Round Capital
• Tim O’Reilly: founder of O’Reilly Media
• Kathy Sierra: co-creator of the Head First series of books
• Evan Williams: co-founder of Pyra Labs (blogger.com), Odeo, Obvious Corp and Twitter

Waxy on "Infocom's Unreleased Sequel to Hitchhiker's" (playable samples included!)

Andy Baio strikes again:

From an anonymous source close to the company, I've found myself in possession of the "Infocom Drive" — a complete backup of Infocom's shared network drive from 1989. This is one of the most amazing archives I've ever seen, a treasure chest documenting the rise and fall of the legendary interactive fiction game company. Among the assets included: design documents, private emails, employee phone numbers, sales figures, internal meeting notes, corporate newsletters, and the source code and game files for every released and unreleased game Infocom made. For obvious reasons, I can't share the whole Infocom Drive. But I have to share some of the best parts. It's just too good. So let's start with the most notorious — Milliways: The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, the unreleased sequel to Infocom's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. For the first time, here's the full story: with never-before-seen design documents, internal emails, and two playable prototypes.

Man. Disclosure: I know and like Andy a lot, and I've already linked to him once this week. But come on. This is awesome.

What I like most about what he's doing with the Waxy.org site is that he's creating an interesting kind of online journalism. In an earlier entry this week he headlined a scoop "Exclusive:" and I told him I liked that -- it signaled that he wasn't just echoing things found on other blogs (what I'm doing now). He continues to find things that are new and interesting to the world in which he's writing, so unlike the echo chamber that so many others do -- which, he says, is just what he is trying to do. That's fantastic, and I'm really happy to see him, and support him, pursuing that goal.

Waxy: "Google App Engine ported to Amazon's EC2"

Andy Baio posts what might be a response to Tim's concerns about Google App Engine. Interesting!

I loved Daring Fireball's one-line description: "So much for the lock-in argument." There's definitely still a concern if/when people find themselves addicted to the services Google provides beyond simple app hosting -- as Andy writes:

The App Engine SDK doesn't use BigTable for its datastore, instead relying on a simple flat file on a single server. This means issues with performance and no scalabity to speak of, but for apps with limited resource needs, something as simple as AppDrop would work fine.

Seems to me that this is where Google should head: getting developers addicted to all the services Google engineers already enjoy. They've started down that road and that seems to be the best approach for making App Engine competitively distinct.

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