Category: Internet/Web Companies

My Love of MyWare

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Let me just say this. I love MyWare and use it all the time.

What is MyWare? MyWare is software you install on your computer, knowingly, that tracks what you do. It’s usually confined to a niche area like music, video, or web browsing. I am a sucker for it. I use MyWare for my music (last.fm), my searches (a9), my desktop (Google Desktop), my chats (Google Chat) and I even my credit card as MyWare as i only use it pay for stuff so i can track every penny.

Even offline there are services that do this are great and i love them. The Garmin workout tracker is great. Whenever you run outside, it plots your actual course, speed and heartrate (among a bunch of other very useful stats). When i first heard about Wayfaring.com, i thought it was a cell phone geographic tracker and i was pretty pumped (it’s not).

At Ruckus, we were building a MyWare product to help college kids find new music by populating a user’s profile with their actual listens. Last.fm similarly aggregates the data and they do the aggregation better, but at Ruckus, we did a better job of allowing users to find music using the data.

I think the trends of MyWare reflects the online social networking of society. More and more people are confortable putting their persona online. In the case of MyWare, it goes one step farther by placing actual, real usage online, not just what you want people to see. This lends some authenticity to the data and can show a more accurate dipiction of a person. There are obvious privacy concerns when you get to location and all desktop applications, but there are some low hanging fruits that i’d love to see put online.

WMA / Janus – the Muppet?

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Everybody knows itunes and how it works. But, the 2nd most popular format forjanice_trans.jpg music is Windows Media Audio, aka WMA. Why? Because with WMA you can protect it in very sophisticated ways. You can rent the music by the month (like Napster and Rhapsody) or you can purchase it outright to be played back on 5 computers (like on Buy.com). Any way a distributor wants to protect an audio file, you can do it with WMA. The industry term for this protected format is Janus.

10-12playsforsure_lg.jpgThis is a neat technology for business (although quite clunky for users) and it is being used all around the internet. The codename “Janus” however was never meant to be mainstream, so, starting early in late 2004 Microsoft started branding all protected WMA devices and files as being “Plays for Sure” – all devices were Plays-For-Sure compliant, all files, all everything had this attached. For Sure

janice.jpgI always thought the “For Sure” part of this was strange. I stared thinking about it more and eventually realized that it reminded me of the muppet that always ended phrases with “For Sure!” For the longest time i couldn’t remember the muppets name, then it came to me – her name was Janice! Even better, Janice was the musician Muppet. On TV, she regularly jammed with Linda Ronstadt, Elton John, and Linda Lavin.

You see: Janus -> Plays “For Sure” -> Janice. All having to do with music. Am i reading too much into this? Maybe, but i think it’s a terrific coincidence.

Songbird's Here

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There’s a new media player that’s been released called Songbird. iTunes has dominated as the go-to media player for people to play music. And with WMP, Winamp, Yahoo Music Engine and others (J. River) it would seem that the space is pretty saturated. How could a new player even hope to catch up, let alone beat these other players?

The answer is the open-source community. Similar to how Firefox has used the legions of developers to create a great product with many extensions/plug-ins to be better than Internet Explorer (IE), Songbird hopes to do the same to WMP and iTunes. In fact, Songbird is built on top of Gecko (Firefox’s core engine) so it’s basically a media playing browser that is open for developers around the world to use.

Version 0.1 was release 2 weeks ago and 0.1.1 was released this week. While still not as feature rich as other players you can see the potential and let me tell you, it’s only a matter of time before great extensions and services leverage its openness to create a superior experience to iTunes and WMP. extn_birdmeditating.png

Gmail Chat Is Awesome

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I think this flew under the radar for a few days for me before i fully appreciated how great a move this is for Google. I figure it will take about 6 months or 1 year before there’s an article in Time/Newsweek/Fortune about how great Google is for things like this (and maps, search, etc). First off, after search, Gmail is the only real application that i really like from Google.* It’s a great application – they really thought through how people use email and introduced some very nice features that i hadn’t seen on webmail services before, such as 1) threaded email messages – which appear that way in your inbox, 2) labels instead of folder – others still haven’t caught on to the subtle difference, 3) unlimited storage, 4) Unlimited session time – no need to sign in every 20 minutes.

The last point, which i always took for granted, is the key to their new Google Chat. I didn’t know the power until they started building for a me a buddy list on my left-hand side. Then i started receiving IM’s from them (Google IM’s, that is). Whoa!
I’ve been using AIM for a decade now and although other IM clients are far superior, i didn’t think i’d see anyone overtaking it because of the network effect. What i didn’t realize is that Google is doing the smart thing by leveraging the fact that there’s a huge user base logged into Google all the time. Why not convert GMail into an IM client? AIM is adding on email.

Think how many companies could have done this before? Outlook knows everyone’s email. It could have built a buddylist in the side and allowed you to IM (using MSN Messenger technology) anyone in your address book who is also using Outlook or using MSN. That would have been huge.

My prediction is that Google Chat/Talk will become the #2 IM Network in 2 years. AIM will hang on b/c it has all the youngsters already.

* Note: I have a bias against Maps because of my past relationship with Keyhole (which Google bought to make Google Maps).

Google vs. MS: Web Terminals Will Win

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I was looking at Intel’s new core, and i heard about Sun’s new Sparc. It’s clear that microprocessors continue to get faster and better, and seem to be mostly utilized on the server side. Laptop and desktop machines don’t need more power because there aren’t that many applications pushing that envelope. For instance, i have a wimpy 1.2 Ghz machine and it does fine. But browser applications are becoming more and more demanding and Operations centers need more and more power from their boxes – which they will be getting with these new chips.

In my opinion, this foreshadows Google and Yahoo’s besting of Microsoft. MS has been very successful for years at making desktop applications, and have ridden the proecssor advances accodingly. There is a fundamental change going on today. All the new applications being build, all the new tools people are using, they aren’t desktop applications. They are browser applications. Compare MS applications Word, Excel, and Outlook (Email/Calendar) to Writely, NumSum, Gmail, and CalendarHub. These new browser applications are still new but you can see how they are just as powerful and networked in ways that MS apps aren’t.

What’s interesting is that this is not a new vision or direction. Sun was there 10 years ago when they touted the Java terminal. They were just 10 years too early

AOL's State of the Union

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Time Warner just announced their quarterly numbers. Although TW profits went up, AOL subscribers continue to drop down to 19 million. Just a few years ago they were over 35 million and now they’ve shed around 16 MILLION members. Why is this? Could it be that all the areas they were once dominant in they are now not even second tier? In this new world of social media and collective intelligence AOL is nowhere to be found. As a former employee (2000-2004) at both AOLTW Corporate and AOL Broadband i’ve seen some things. Here’s my take:

  • Social Networking & Blogging. Currently being dominated by MySpace, thefacebook, and others such as Friendster, yahoo 360, etc.. AOL plans to launch something with AIM soon (AIMspace), but i’d say they are about 3 years too late. Why would anyone switch from MySpace to AIM? Tied in closely with this is blogging. So many people, novices and professionals are looking for a place to put their thoughts, rants, and memories. So, while Google is buying Blogger and Yahoo is partnering with Moveable Type, AOL is sticking with their AOL Journals which is very limited in custimization, doesn’t have RSS, and can’t be hosted. I think they either need to get serious or get kill it.
  • Music Services. There are several viable music services out there. For the moment, let’s ignore the fact that everyone and their mother is using iTunes. What else is there? There are music subscription services such as Rhapsody, Yahoo Music, Napster, MusicNet, and eMusic (description of each below). AOL has rested on MusicNet for the past 4 years and last year bought up MusicNow for around $10 million. They had roughly 250k-300k MusicNet subs and i doubt they have anything close to that with MusicNow. At least with MusicNow they are building in community features (i think with MusicStrands), but does it tie into the AIM social network – doubtful. Does it tie in to AIM? Probably not. Is it featured on AOL anywhere? No, not really. When you’re this far behind, the best thing you can do is call in the community. This is what Yahoo’s done with the YME. They know they’re behind in terms of features and functionality, so they made a robust plug-in architecture so the rest of the world can help them catch up. This is why i think Yahoo will be the biggest player after Apple.
    • Rhapsody has been around the longest, is the most web-based and gotten in bed with MS. They have some interesting radio features but for the most part is somewhat klunky. It will be interesting to see what happens with this once MS gets their paws all over it. Supposedly, all MSN music will be powered by Rhapsody.
    • Yahoo Music (with Yahoo Music Unlimited) is slick. As i mentioned above, iIt has some great API’s and ties in well with Y! Messenger. The subscription service is cheap ($60 a year). Unfortunately it has very little subs, but that could change if the WMA issue gets better.
    • Napster is getting better and better, but still has relatively few social aspects. It has a good library and great branding but not much else.
    • eMusic is differentiated with an mp3 library. It’s not all-you-can-eat but it is ipod-compatible which makes a HUGE difference in this world 45 million iPods. They don’t have any mainstream artists but have almost all the indie artists.
    • MusicNet has the largest subscription library but it is simply a fulfillment engine. It powers services such as Virgin, Cdigix, and even Yahoo!. But there is no community here.
  • Advertising. This is when i realized that AOL will always be the JV squad in the internet game. Yahoo was serious about music and went out and bought MusicMatch for $500 million in 2003 and Launch Music (good article) for $12 million in 2001. AOL waited 4 more years then invested $10 million for a MusicNow library. Then advertising emerged as a viable and powerful revenue stream, Yahoo! spent 1.6 billion on Overture and AOL spent a few hundred million on Advertising.com – forever relegating them to minor league ball. Not that they’re doing incredibly poorly, but will they approach anything like Google’s Adsense? The old AOL would have bought whoever it needed to stay on top.
  • Mail. AOL’s golden nugget is the screenname. Users won’t switch because they don’t want to lose their email address and they pay $24 bucks a month for it. Meanwhile Gmail comes out with (basically) unlimited storage – for FREE. Then Yahoo and Hotmail counter with equal storage. Gmail and Yahoo continue to make their services better and better with slick javascript (gmail is the AJAX gold standard) and the new Yahoo Mail Beta is supposedly amazing. What is AOL doing? They make mail the most click-intensive application ever. You need 3 seperate windows to just send a message. And to make it even worse, your mail still expires after 28 days. Wtf? When will they wake up and realize that on a scale of 1-10, AOL is batting about a 3. Let’s break mail down even more:
    • Authentication. AOL requires you to sign on each time you come to it’s site. Sounds reasonable. However if you go to check your mail multiple times a day, it gets annoying. Neither Yahoo nor Gmail makes you do that. Even if you check “remember me” – it doesn’t.
    • Session Time. Gmail lets you stay signed in all day (and actually b/c of this launched a slick app – check out my future post). AOL signs you out after 15-20 minutes. Why are they making it such a pain to read your mail? Should services try to delight the customer?
    • Inbox. Time to bring in some AJAX. The interface is slow and ugly.
    • Integration with other services. No AIM, no real precense, no easy to access address, nothing.
  • Video. This is one space where AOL is doing ok. If you look at the types of video becoming available on the web from amateur (caught-on-tape) on one end to amateur narrative films (iFilm) in the middle to professional content on the other end. AOL is focussing directly on the far end of professional content only. They have deals with many major players to stream the video (NFL, CNN, E!, NBA, WB, etc.) however they make it hard to find the video or to use it anywhere outside of AOL. Their new hi-Q initiative using Kontiki is very interesting because it downloads and dramatically improves up the quality of the video, but the there isn’t much content available in Hi-Q yet – it’s currently only trailers and music videos. My question is where’s the focus on short video clips? There’s an explosion of content coming from short clips such as SNL’s Lazy Sunday that is being distributed through YouTube, Veoh, and now MySpace. This is where the eyeballs are. This is what users are passing around and looking for on the internet. However, AOL is focused on bring TV to the small internet screen. IP might be a delivery mechanism for that someday, but eventually it’ll be viewed on a big screen. I’m much more optimistic about Tivo/Netflix or MS Media Center applications. They have made some big investments in video search. But i don’t know any users to use video search. Basically there are only a few players that host a lot of video (YouTube, Google, and iTunes) and users go to them and search. If something isn’t there, they’ll check one of the others.
  • Instant Messaging. AOL just released Triton, a much needed upgrade over the AIM application that hadn’t been changed for over 4 years. It is still cluttered with Ads, doesn’t integrate blogs or music. Also, check this out: there’s an AOL address book, but now there’s also an AIM address book (powered by Plaxo). And, to make their AOL Mail even more insignificant, there’s now AIM mail which is the exact same thing, but for free. How could you not expect users to be confused when you can’t even integrate AIM with AOL? I’ve started using Yahoo Messenger lately and found it to be just as full featured but with less bugs and easier to use. Google Talk is simplier and easier to use too. Obviously all the users are on AIM so that’s going to be the dominant player for years to come, but it’s horrible how they’ve failed to extend the AIM platform – no API’s, no major improvements, and increasing more cluttered with shameful attempts to suck cash out of it (games, voice, ads, etc.)

This is a long synopsis of a large multi-faceted company but it pains me to see how each step of the way they continue to build creative and useful applications to benefit their members.

Thoughts?