Archive for the ‘Media’ Category
Is Pownce emerging as the new Twitter? March 3rd, 2008
There must be something in the air (pun not intended!) or it is that time of year again. SXSW is coming up in two weeks and I wonder if any particular service will emerge from SXSW as the Twitter of 2008? You may remember that Twitter rocketed in popularity during and after the 2007 SXSW and has been cruising since then. Unfortunately Twitter has also been plagued by a series of outages to the point where it is no longer news that Twitter is down anymore. That isn’t great news for Twitter and it must be really frustrating for the Twitter people that the service isn’t coping with the phenomenal demand.
It was probably only a matter of time before talk returns to Twitter alternatives like Pownce (although people who I have read who are talking about Pownce and Twitter are talking about each as having their place in the ecoystem rather than Pownce being a Twitter killer). There is a little buzz at the moment about Dave Winer’s post raving about the updated Pownce API.
Sorry Ev and Biz and Jack, but they got your number over there at Pownce.
I’ve been asking Twitter to support payloads for months now, and now I have what I was asking for, but it came from Pownce, and it’s beautifully implemented, far more than what I was asking Twitter for.
…
Twitter was my first love, but now I’m seriously considering a fling with Pownce.
Leo Laporte chatted to Winer on This Week in Tech 134 (looking forward to that one) and I am sure there will be even more about this in the coming days. What I am wondering is whether Pownce is going to suddenly pick up loads of users in the coming weeks due, in part, to frustration with Twitter going down so often. While Pownce and Twitter are intended for different things, you can use Pownce for status updates and IRC-style chats that people use Twitter for. There is even a mobile client for Pownce in addition to the AIR app. I am not saying Pownce is going to overtake Twitter and become the new black. I just think it will be really interesting to see what happens next.
Technorati Tags:
pownce, twitter, dave winer, twit, leo laporte
Posted in Applications, Blogging, People, Sharing, Tools | Comments (0)
Lifestreaming is all the rage back home March 2nd, 2008
I’ve been on a lifestreaming kick for a couple months now, in fact I’ve been talking about lifestreaming in one form or another since I started using Jaiku about a year ago. The basic idea is that a lifestream is a stream of content from a variety of services in one location so your friends/followers can visit one site and see which photos you uploaded, what your Twitter updates are, your latest blog posts and more. Here are a couple examples of lifestreams, they really explain the whole idea pretty well:
First, my Plaxo Pulse lifestream
Next, my FriendFeed lifestream
There are a couple issues and questions that emerge from what seems to me to be a surge of interest in lifestreaming. The one question I find myself asking is about the value of “traditional” blogging when much of the content people might blog about are fed directly into the lifestream. What I mean here is that before my various lifestreams (I think I have 4 or 5 running concurrently in various locations) I would blog about just about anything that happened that I wanted to talk about. If I took a cute photo of my puppies, I would blog about it on my personal blog. If I found a great link or blog post and wanted to mention it, I’d blog that too.
Of course there are services like Flickr, del.icio.us and StumbleUpon to do those sorts of things too but that also meant that my followers would have to subscribe to or visit each of those services to keep up to date. That isn’t really a big deal in this age of RSS feeds but if someone has more than a couple people to keep tabs on, the process of tracking all those feeds/sites becomes a pretty time consuming one.
Social networks like Facebook can do a pretty decent job of giving people a single point of contact. If most or all of your friends are on Facebook then you only really need to visit one site to keep up to date on what everyone is doing. It is a great idea the immense popularity of these sites is a testament to that. The big thing, for me, is being able to put my stuff out there and have multiple points of contact to enable me to reach out to the most people. Not all of my friends use Facebook. Some use Jaiku, Pulse and, increasingly, FriendFeed … just to name a couple examples. Facebook is great but it doesn’t really allow me to distribute my content freely so I plug my various content streams (such as Flickr, YouTube, Twitter, blogs, interesting feed items, bookmarks, Last.fm profile and many others) into my various lifestreams and create multiple (and hopefully consistent) update streams for my friends using those services. If course friends are free to subscribe to the original content streams too. These items are convenient ways to keep up to date of pretty much everything I do online.
So, back to blogging. With all this source content zooming through lifestreams of one sort or another, does blogging become less relevant? Would you blog less if you used a lifestream as your primary content distribution channel. Although this post has the makings of “Blogging is dead” post, I think anyone thinking along those lines is likely getting caught up in some hype and/or drinking too much of the Koolaid. As this post clearly shows, there is still very much a need for longer form blog posts or even blogs that are more customisable than the lifestreaming services permit. The value of a lifestreaming service is its utility and the content stream itself. Blogs can take it a step further and some bloggers create fantastic experiences on their blogs that enhance their posts. Lifestreams really won’t kill blogs, they will, however, help spread blog content further if you plug your blog feeds into your lifestreams. Each of the services we use have their place in our information/content creation activities, the challenge is working out those roles and using them effectively/efficiently.
As I was writing this post John McCrea (VP of Marketing at Plaxo) raised a really interesting issue in a comment on one of my status updates on Pulse:
I think there’s an interesting tension between lifestreaming in public and richly sharing with one’s family and friends. An interesting strategic question for Plaxo as to which is more important for us in the near term.
To me this question begs other, interesting questions about the value of more personal lifestreams to a service provider. There is a lot of focus on business and on people who are tech savvy and who don’t think twice about sharing everything with everyone but what about the majority of people who just want to share their stuff with their small group of friends or their family members and not the rest of the world? I don’t think there is enough attention on this invisible majority. Six Apart focussed specifically on these people when it released Vox which Mena Trott, one of Six Apart’s founders, said was a blogging service her mother could use. A lot of these people who are using the Web use services like Facebook and it works out really well for them. My mother in law uses Facebook to see what we are all up to. Introducing lifestreams to these people is the next step although it may still take a year or two before ordinary (as opposed to us geeks) people start exploring lifestreams more consciously (people who use Facebook are lifestreaming to a degree anyway, they just don’t think about it that way).
Depending on how you present lifestreaming to this massive potential group of users and how you build a sustainable revenue model around that group, this could be a tremendously lucrative model. It sounds a bit cold to talk about it that way but money is what keeps businesses, well, in business. Once the money is taken care of there is more time to focus on making the service appealing to these non-technical users.
These are just a couple thoughts I have had and I am sure there will be more ahead. What are your thoughts? Do you use any lifestreaming services? Are you going to try them out?
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blog, facebook, lifestream, plaxo, pulse, vox, mena trott, john mccrea, friendfeed, trends
Posted in Blogging, Blogs/Sites, Lifestreaming, People, Sharing | Comments (3)
Facebook still excite you? February 25th, 2008
Scoble has asked a question that has been in the back of my mind for a little while now:“What do you think about Facebook? Has the patina worn off for you?”
I have found that my visits to Facebook have grown less and less frequent, mainly because the time has reduced to such a point that I barely have time to update my own social spaces, never mind monitor other people’s updates. What I also find myself doing is spending more time on Plaxo’s Pulse which is starting to mimic some of Facebook’s functionality.
Facebook is a great social service and I think my wife has Facebook open just about all day. I have over 300 friends on Facebook but I just don’t have time to track what everyone is doing over and above the myriad applications people are using and inviting me to use. It can get a bit much sometimes. It also doesn’t help that I prefer using services like Flickr, YouTube and Twitter for photo and video sharing and status updates. Pulse recently added Twitter/Pulse status update synching which is really handy (although Pulse’s updates use the old “Paul is …” format and although you can delete the “is”, you have to think carefully about what you post so it comes out right in Twitter).
In a way it is a bit silly to not take advantage of the community of friends I have on Facebook but the service doesn’t excite me as much anymore, especially when I hear that Facebook cans people’s accounts for getting too chatting with their friends or whacks you if you post too much external content to your Facebook profile.
Technorati Tags:
facebook, plaxo, pulse, social graph, social network
Posted in Sharing, Tools, Web 2.0 | Comments (2)
You know the song from the MacBook Air ad? February 9th, 2008
It turns out this is the song from the MacBook Air ad:
The artist is an Israeli singer Yael Naïm whose self-titled album is up there on the iTunes Store. I think I’ll take a look at more of her music …
Technorati Tags:
yael naim, macbook air ad, macbook air, naim, yael
Posted in Entertainment, Media, People | Comments (0)
Google’s Social Graph API February 4th, 2008
Google released its Social Graph API a little while ago and I first noticed it when I read about Plaxo’s update to users’ public profiles. The goal of the Social Graph API is pretty straightforward and consistent with current trends towards data portability:
With so many websites to join, users must decide where to invest significant time in adding their same connections over and over. For developers, this means it is difficult to build successful web applications that hinge upon a critical mass of users for content and interaction. With the Social Graph API, developers can now utilize public connections their users have already created in other web services. It makes information about public connections between people easily available and useful.
Here is an introductory video from Google about the Social Graph API which is useful background stuff:
The idea of a lifestream (aka the Social Graph although I still don’t like that term) appeals to me as a model for a social web application and this API is obviously an important part of that.
Technorati Tags:
social media, social network, social graph api, social graph, google, lifestream
Posted in Infrastructure, Sharing, Web 2.0 | Comments (0)
Amazon to buy Audible January 31st, 2008
Ok, I should really be working but I wanted to mention this tidbit which I found to be pretty interesting. Amazon has said it is buying Audible, a pretty big downloadable audiobook retailer. I wonder how this will impact on Apple both in the greater scheme of things and also because I believe there is an Audible presence in the Apple iTunes Store.
I buy my audiobooks from Audible directly and load them into iTunes for transfer to my iPod. I don’t see Amazon disabling support for iPods in Audible but I wonder how this acquisition will play out. Amazon is going head to head with Apple for market share in the music download biz through Amazon MP3 which is also due to open up internationally later this year.
Clearly Amazon is intent on gunning for Apple in the consumer media space and if the Amazon MP3 service becomes available here in South Africa, legitimately, I wouldn’t lose any sleep over a decision to use that service for my music, especially considering that Apple doesn’t deem us South Africans worthy of the iTunes Store. This deal reminds me of that video that did the rounds a little while ago about the future of the Web and how Google eventually takes over the world as the primary source of all information and knowledge (anyone know where the video is? I can’t find the silly thing). At one point in the video there is talk about Google buying Amazon to form Googlezon … although there is a close tie between Google and Apple so could there perhaps be a three way one day?
Now I am tempted to go buy an audiobook …
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amazon, apple, apple supplier, ipod touch, itunes, audible, audiobooks, ipod
Posted in Companies, Media | Comments (0)
Ronaldo Lemos @ Google January 28th, 2008
I came across this video of a talk given by iCommons chair, Ronaldo Lemos, at Google in November last year. The talk is titled titled “Cultural Production and Digital Inclusion in Developing Countries” and I thought I would share it with you.
It is quite a thrill to have the opportunity to work with people like Ronaldo and the other directors of iCommons (including, but certainly not limited to, Larry Lessig, Jimmy Wales, Paul Keller, Tomislav Medak and Catharina Maracke) and I am really looking forward to watching this talk in its entirety (no, I haven’t watched all 52 minutes just yet …).
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presentation, ronaldo lemos, ronaldo, lemos, google, cultural production, developing countries
Posted in Media, People, Sharing | Comments (1)
Amazon MP3 to the rescue January 27th, 2008
I have ranted about how decent music downloads are hard to come by here in South Africa, at least legal music downloads. There is the iTunes Store workaround but then that isn’t exactly in accordance with Apple’s terms of service. There are a couple options available like eMusic but the catalogues are rarely chock full of mainstream releases.
Thankfully there is light at the end of the tunnel. Amazon has announced that its Amazon MP3 service is going to open up to international customers sometime this year.
“We have received thousands of e-mails from Amazon customers around the world asking us when we will make Amazon MP3 available outside of the U.S. They can’t wait to choose from the biggest selection of high-quality, low-priced DRM-free MP3 music downloads which play on virtually any music device they own today or will own in the future,” said Bill Carr, Amazon.com Vice President of Digital Music. “We are excited to tell those customers today that Amazon MP3 is going international this year.”
Launched on Amazon.com in September 2007, Amazon MP3 offers Earth’s Biggest Selection of a la carte DRM-free MP3 music downloads, which now includes over 3.3 million songs from more than 270,000 artists. Every song and album in the Amazon MP3 music download store is available exclusively in the MP3 format without digital rights management (DRM) software and is encoded at 256 kbps to deliver high audio quality. Amazon MP3 customers are free to enjoy their music downloads using any hardware device; organize their music using any music management application, such as iTunes(R) or Windows Media Player(TM); and burn songs to CDs for personal use.
This service is currently restricted to US customers and enables them to purchase DRM-free, 256kbps MP3 files which you can play on the device of your choice. Amazon MP3 is one of the few real competitors iTunes has and if Amazon opens the store up more than the iTunes Store then I can see Apple having a tough time hanging on to its dominance in the digital music download market.
I will certainly be there with my credit card to buy music from Amazon if the store becomes available here. Songs cost between $0.89 and $0.99 and albums cost between $5.99 and $8.99. To boot, Amazon is selling music from all 4 music labels and you can be pretty sure this is partly the music industry’s response to Apple’s refusal to introduce flexible pricing for music historically.
What a win!
(Source: Engadget)
Technorati Tags:
apple, amazon, amazon mp3, music downloads, mp3, drm-free, no drm, announcement, legal music downloads, itunes
Posted in Companies, Entertainment, Media, Sharing | Comments (8)
XMPP (a.k.a. Jabber) is the future for cloud services January 27th, 2008
I read this post on the Jive Software blog titled “XMPP (a.k.a. Jabber) is the future for cloud services”. A lot of the technical stuff goes a bit beyond me so this summary on Read/Write Web by Marshall Kirkpatrick was pretty handy. As I understand the whole idea, XMPP (also known as Jabber), the protocol that powers Google Talk and a couple other IM apps/services may be better suited to many new media services and applications than the protocol that is so dominant on the Web at the moment, HTTP. The important aspect of XMPP is that it enables a two way communication process rather than the one way flow that we see with HTTP (ok, I know that isn’t strictly correct but this is how I think about it) so instead of you initiating contact with a Web service using your browser by clicking a link or something like that (HTTP), a Web service can contact your machine first, let it know there are updates and initiate an update process (XMPP). Maybe a better way to explain it is like this:
- When you want to update a page in your browser you need to click “refresh”. You initiate the process of communicating with the web server the page is on and request the updated page data; and
- When you use an XMPP IM client like Google Talk, for example, the IM server will contact your Google Talk app and send it updates without you having to do anything. This process is more efficient than constant polling the server to check for updates.
XMPP opens up possibilities for people wanting to develop services and apps that spontaneously update as and when updates are available rather than constant polling a server for updates. The one application of this that appeals to me is my feedreader. Your feedreader polls the various feeds you subscribe to for updates on a schedule and downloads new feed items when they are available. Imagine what happens if your feedreader runs on XMPP:
Ask yourself what a decentralized, open source infrastructure for real time communication could offer. A lot. As an RSS-head, I’d love to see XMPP let my various RSS clients do more faster and get bogged down in fewer unnecessary activities. RSS is all about speed for me but clients can only do so much so often when they have to pester someone else’s server every time they want to check for new information. Those delays can be of real consequence.
Receiving your feeds as and when they are published may not be a priority for you but this is a pretty good illustration of some of the possibilities. It is also pretty interesting that Google’s Android Mobile OS incorporates XMPP, at the very least because I can certainly see how XMPP could be a great protocol for widespread mobile applications, particularly where those mobile devices are constantly using a cellular connection or wifi.
I doubt very much that this is the end of HTTP but rather it could be the expansion of a generation of apps and services running on this dynamic protocol. It is probably the sort of development that could once again fuel speculation that IM (or the likes of IM) could overtake email as our dominant means of communicating across the Internet. Not sure about that but it is an intriguing possibility although I am not sure that an email replacement that shortens the already pretty quick delivery times of our messages is a good thing. It is bad enough that email creates an expectation of much faster responses to messages we receive (so much so that productivity gurus recommend you only check your email every couple hours or so to maintain some semblance of meaningful productivity) but if we start exchanging data between people using XMPP-based solutions that expectation becomes more unmanageable.
Where XMPP will probably be a tremendous benefit will be for machine to machine communications, the kind of services that are not immediately apparent to us humans and perhaps even running behind the scenes. IM is in your face, you see the updates coming in and either have to respond to watch messages pile up to be dealt with later. The feedreader example may be a good application for XMPP not because of the immediacy of the updates but because it could mean that my less powerful device can pick up updates automatically and on the fly using a more efficient update process. I can imagine that waiting for a mobile device to scan through hundreds of feeds could take time to update whereas a feedreader running on XMPP is almost always up to date so I can grab my device and run instead of waiting a couple minutes for an up to date sync.
Of course there are probably dozens of more useful applications of XMPP that haven’t even occurred to me that we could see rolling out.
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xmpp, jabber, protocol, internet, web, http, android, im
Posted in Feeds, Infrastructure, Sharing, Useful stuff | Comments (1)
Interesting things about NetNewsWire 3.1 January 26th, 2008
There is some useful information about NetNewsWire 3.1 on inessential.com This item caught my eye because of a comment Stii made on Wired Gecko a little while ago about NNW not playing YouTube videos. It turns out that this feature is available, just turned off by default:
It plays video and Flash
The most common feature request in the feedback I read today is that NetNewsWire should play video, Flash, YouTube, etc.
It does. It’s turned off by default, but it’s easy to turn on.
Open Preferences, click Browsing. Click the News Items tab—to enable Flash and video, make sure the box next to Enable plug-ins is checked.
Click the Web Pages tab and repeat to do the same thing for web pages.
A couple things to know, though:
1. On some machines, you may have to enable plug-ins for both news items and web pages in order to make them work in web pages.
2. Plug-ins are off by default because they’re unstable and eat lots of memory. (Flash in particular.) So if you run into memory or crashing issues, the first thing to try is turning off plug-ins.
I have been using NNW every day and although it does seem to be a little unstable on Leopard (at least, my installation of Leopard), I am really happy I gave it another try. I have asked that a future version or update to 3.1 enable automatic downloads of images. That would really make this a true offline feed reader and make me happier than my puppy on my lap (he is only happy when he is on my lap … go figure).
I was thinking the other day that with a wide enough screen I could see myself using Safari less and less to browse web pages I connect to through NNW. I am not sure which engine NNW uses for web pages (I imagine something like Webkit?) but having everything integrated into one app is really handy.
Do you have any thoughts about NNW or its Windows sibling, FeedDemon? Let me know.
Technorati Tags:
feed reader, feeddemon, feedreader, netnewswire, youtube, flash, safari, web browser
Posted in Feeds, Useful stuff | Comments (1)