Ambur MacArthur has an excellent update on the fight for net neutrality in Canada this morning, showing some growing momentum against the traffic shaping (read “traffic blocking”) practices of the biggest ISP’s. The government apparently will begin to investigate traffic shaping policies of Rogers and Bell.
There has been a lot of discussion and debate in the U.S. about the traffic shaping practices of Comast, and other ISP’s. I personally use the Verizon FIOS service and love it. For $53 a month (including taxes) I get 5 mbps downlink and 2 mbps uplink via fiber optics directly to my house. I have not had any issues with my connections, but I don’t do very much P2P traffic, which is what the ISP’s predominantly target in their traffic policies.
The FCC in the U.S. is reportedly considering some regulations on ISP’s to better define and reign in traffic shaping, but given the big money (and therefore big lobby and big lawyers) behind the big ISP’s, I think the FCC is unlikely to enact any significant or sweeping regulations (and Karl at the BroadbandReports also wonders the same thing) . The debate will likely go on and change will come in small, incremental steps.
Why?
The ISP’s currently have the advantage, as they control the entryway to the Internet for most consumers and small-to-medium sized businesses. They will do everything they can to protect their revenue as a value-added service provider, though most people see them simply as a commodity provider.
Do consumers love Comcast? Of course not. Comcast, and most other ISP’s and tv service providers, are necessary evils that simply get in the way of what people really want to do by slowing down traffic, offering high-priced services and inferior applications to those that are available on the Internet.
Do consumer need Comcast? Of course they do. Until, that is, technology for alternative means of Internet access becomes more ubiquitous and cost-effective. See WiMax (the next step beyond WiFi) and 4G / LTE (the next step beyond EVDO and GSM/UMTS) wireless technologies as possible game-changers that will enable other companies to offer broadband access.
However, WiMax and 4G are 2-3 years away from any type of widespread availability. Until then, lawyers and lobbyists will fight the good fight on behalf of the big ISP’s as they war against the inevitable transformation of their business from cutting edge technology providers to purveyors of a commodity than can easily be had elsewhere.
Have you ever seen a lawyer or lobbyist move quickly? How about a big corporation change quickly? Or an industry give up its foothold to smaller competitors easily?
I watched Gizmodo’s live coverage of the Apple Media Event / Stevenote extravaganza this afternoon during lunch and conference calls. Of the 3 sites I watched - Gizmodo, Engadget and Macworld - Gizmodo was by far the best coverage. They updated the fastest, had the best photos and the blog post was organized with the most recent updates on top. This made it faster to see the latest info as I didn’t have to wait for the rest of the page to load and all the adservers to dish out their content.
First, for the second most surprising announcement: the iPhone Fatboy, er, uh Nano. The leaked pictures were amazingly accurate - it’s an iPod nano that’s suddenly become vertically challenged and horizontally endowed. It looks a bit weird, but I must say that the thinness of it redeems the overall design and isn’t half bad. I’d like to reserve final judgement until I see one in person.
Next, we had the iPod Classic, which proudly shows off the latest in micro-hard drive technology, sporting an 80G and 160G offering in the more traditional iPod form factor. Interesting, but it seems more like a way to fulfill a big contract with Hitachi (or whoever they buy their hard drives from) and find a way to use some left over hard drives. This will make a very nice portable storage device that also plays music, however.
Then, the least surprising announcement of the day is the iPod Touch - essentially the iPhone without the phone, a bit thinner and with some extra flash memory. There is an 8G and a 16G model and both have WiFi. I surely saw this one coming, as I’m sure most people did. The 8mm depth and extra memory compared to the iPhone are nice extras.
That brings us to the third biggest surprise of the day - the mobile iTunes Music Store. While not as unthinkable - to me, at least - as the iPod Fatboy coming true, I didn’t see it coming today. I don’t think I need to espouse the coolness of being able to buy music right from your music device, but no one else can do this (see Zune).
And, to add to my boring enumeration of surprises, I’ll say the fourth biggest surprise of the Stevenote was that Steve wants one to pay another $0.99 just to make a 30 second ringtone from a song we’ve already paid $0.99 for. Forget that.
The Starbucks integration and FREE access to a STORE (insightful comment originally made by Jason Chen on Gizmodo’s coverage) when in Starbucks is very interesting and I think very innovative. It’s a sign of Apple’s interest in partnering with others, in a very controlled, Apple-beneficial way, but still partnering. Returning to my strange rankings, I’ll put this as the most interesting and innovative announcement of the day.
Which now brings me to the #1 most surprising announcement of the day: iPhones for $400. 33% price reduction after 68 days on the market where demand has been almost unfulfillable. Simply amazing, especially for Apple.
I’m guessing they are feeling some of the upcoming pressure from competitors, e.g. Helio Ocean, Nokia, new HTC models and other yet-to-be-revealed knock-offs. There will be a much smaller gap between the iPhone and other wanna-be’s compared with the distance between the iPod and other also-rans. Maybe putting 16G in the iPod Touch made the 4G iPhone simply unmarketable and the 8G seem a little bit flash-challenged compared to the 8G and 16G iPod Touch.
The big question in my mind is did the Apple Master have this up his black turtle-necked sleeve from the beginning or was this a sudden change in pricing strategy? His Jobsness doesn’t do much on a whim, especially when it involves eating into his extremely rotund profit margins, but it certainly feels a little strange and early to slash the price on your flagship of innovation.
Whatever the reason, I’m just about as close to getting my hands on an iPhone now as I am to eating another one of those Almond M&M’s sitting innocently in my pantry. Both will cost me (I’ve efficiently downed my weekly - perhaps monthly - allotment of 45 of these goodies this morning while on my endless stream of conference calls) but both are now within reach.
I’ve been very disappointed that my budget hasn’t yet supported an iPhone, and now I’m extremely excited that’s it’s actually within my reach now.
Beans and rice for lunch through the end of the year? Well, after today, I’ll be able to eat Subway again by Thanksgiving!
I have to use a windows pc at work. I bring my Mac along to work for comfort and to actually do stuff when I need to.
I’ve started using Skitch on my Mac last week (thanks for the invite, Blake) and love it. It’s only a Mac app, though, so I’ve tried using Jing from TechSmith for windows. The Jing Project has some of the same aspirations as Skitch, but is not quite as snazzy.
One of the most unsnazzy things about Jing is that it simply crashes on my windows pc. It requires .NET 3.0, which I installed last week. I opened a support request with TechSmith, who were very responsive. They suggested I uninstall .NET 3.0 and .NET 2.0, then reinstall them.
How Microsoftmoric - just uninstall and reinstall. Just restart. Just kick it hard. Then maybe it will work.
Well, it worked for a few days, now it’s just crashing every time I start it up again.
The crazy thing is that the Microsoft error reporting dialog comes up, and it offers to show me what the error report contains. This would be the debug info that the Jing support people could use to actually help debug this problem. Hmmm, this could be useful.
The nice error reporting dialog will show me the debug info in a small little window, but I can’t select it or copy it. It’s just there and then goes off to some database in Redmond somewhere.
After some digging, I found where it writes the actual error / debug file. However, the DW20.exe process locks that dump (.dmp) file during the error reporting and prevents me from opening it or copying it to actually get at the data. After it send the report to Redmond, it then deletes the file.
How incredibly dumb and frustrating. Microsoft won’t let me get at my own debug data when something goes wrong.
The Microsoft help pages don’t. The only idea I came up with is to manually kill the DW20.exe process in the middle of the error report, which unlocks the .dmp file. The .dmp file is either encrypted, though, or encoded in binary because I can’t read it in notepad.
I did open a new support requrest with TechSmith and give them this error file. Hopefully they have some developer magic to read this file.
It’s experiences like this that prove that Microsoft doesn’t put the user experience first in their design. That’s why people love Apple - they are focused on the user experience. And that’s why using a PC and dealing with Mircrosoftic idiosyncracies can be so frustrating.
Interestingly, my complaint here is about Microsoft, not Jing, even though Jing is the application that is crashing. When you have a platform that is untrustworthy and unfriendly, users direct their frustration at it more than at the stuff that doesn’t work on top of it.
Apple certainly isn’t perfect, but at least I can get debug data when something goes wrong.
I suppose it has to come, but it surprises me just a bit. Twitterspam.
I’ve had about 5 new followers on Twitter in the last couple of days who are doing nothing more than pimping their products - health supplements, get-rich-on-the-web programs, etc. I call it Twitterspam.
I suppose it makes marketing sense - Twitter is an easy way to get your “message” out to potentially a lot of people. It’s nice that one doesn’t have to follow the Twitterspamers so we don’t really have to see their updates, but I guess I’m just a little disappointed that spam has found its way into the reaches of an app like Twitter.
Much as RSS 2.0 was a format used to communicate between various UserLand products that turned into a lingua franca for an industry, the Twitter API may end up having significance outside the confines of the startup that’s launching it.
Perhaps the Twitter API - or the Twitter platform itself - could be the model for a “social presence” primitive that could be used for all apps that want to integrate presence information, as I opined yesterday.
As Dave also suggests, it sounds like a good subject for a BarCamp …
Facebook is becoming the newest social network place-to-be-seen. The recent opening up of their API to provide various types of apps has a lot to do with the current popularity. Robert Scoble has a great list of his favorite Facebook apps - as compared to the list of the TechCrunch interns, who approach things from a 20-something perspective.
I’m chronologically in-between the interns’ twenty-something and Robert’s forty-something perspective, but I do like almost all the apps on Robert’s list better - and those that I haven’t tried yet I’d be interested in doing so.
The problem Facebook presents us with now is that it’s yet another social platform that vies for our attention. Twitter, Pownce, Jaiku also compete for one’s online social allegiance, and if you’re one to follow the herd or are easily distracted by shiny objects (and their online counterpart of new web services), then you’ll find yourself quickly overwhelmed by all the social networking you’ve suddenly become obligated to do.
I believe the next progressive step we need to make in the social network space is a way for them to easily work together. We have figured out how to connect people easily around specific themes, interests, or causes and create an online community. We can enrich each other’s lives by finding new and easier and cooler ways to connect with other people and get to know.
The next step should be to connect the networks.
Example. We now have this idea of “social presence” and status. Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce and Facebook all provide a system to update people about what you’re doing. However, I want to be able to choose which platform I use for my “social presence” and then have that update to any other platform I use.
All of this is somewhat hackable today (Facebook can update Twitter, Twitter can’t update Facebook without a lot of hackery). But it is not easy or intuitive.
Could we define a set of meta-actions that we apply to social networking and then create standards around these? Let’s start with “social presence” and define an open API with a set of primitives for how any app could update another one with “presence” information.
I bet smarter people than I could do this, and I think we need to in order to make social networks truly usable.
BTW, you can find me on Twitter and on Facebook, but not on Pownce, Jaiku or MySpace.
The company I work for (which I make a reasonable effort to not mention on this blog, but which isn’t necessarily a dark secret) has begun to support internal employee blogs. By “support” I mean “provide a means to make happen”, but not “encourage by implementing a simple yet effective architecture familiar to most bloggers.”
My company is a telecommunications and networking infrastructure provider, and we have a lot of intellectual property that we must maintain. We’re struggling to figure out how to create cutting edge technology and freely participate in the technology marketplace of today, which includes openness, direct communication, collaboration, user-generated content etc. etc. - while still protecting our IP (intellectual property).
So we’ve taken a small step by implementing something more like a web forum system tweaked up to look like a blog. It supports real html, comments and attachments. However, it’s an SSL-encrypted webpage behind our firewall, there’s no RSS and the internal URL’s look like a mashup of misspelled Russian words and symbols that are at least 20 characters long.
In short, it’s extremely inconvenient for others to access the content - you have to have a specific URL of the employee blogs page. In stead of RSS, the system offers an email subscription, which is certainly better than nothing.
I understand why our company isn’t allowing externally-visible employee blogs, and can understand the security concerns even behind the firewall - at least to a point. But the restrictions significantly hinder the power of a blog - easily accessible, open posting API (e.g. Wordpress or Moveable Type) and syndication.
I’d like to offer my very humble input to our IS team but would like to seek others input about the best practices for setting up blogs behind the firewall. For example:
are there some proven ways to implement RSS with both authorization and encryption?
what blogging platforms are most conducive to a behind-the-firewall application?
how have other companies developed an internal blogging policy (I’m not even considering external blogging policies at this point) where there is a lot of IP discussion involved, even internally?
If anyone has input on this topic I’d love to hear it! Thanks.
I previously posted about a list that Christian Mayaud had posted of web 2.0 apps – those new-ish websites, web apps, web services that use nice colors, social and collaborative content, AJAX, rounded corners, and innovative ideas that are mostly still in beta.
Christian’s list was taken from Bob Stumpel, an entrepreneur listed in the OpenBC networking site, who has started and is continuing to maintain a list of “Everything 2.0”. What began as a simple list has now grown into a group of lists, separated into alphabetical groups by category (e.g. Audio, Email, Marketing, Search, etc.):
What, exactly, qualifies as Web 2.0 for Bob’s list? To quote from the Everything 2.0 Forum:
Let’s not be dogmatic. Any sign of: - collective intelligence - collaboration/sharing - community/social software is good enough. And anything Ajaxian is just an extra endorsement.
In addition, you can hear Bob interviewed on a recent OpenBC podcast by Daniela Waschow.
This is definitely an engaging list and a wonderful way for web 2.0 fans to spend their free time (and once you start perusing through the list, you’ll definitely spend some time!).
I also want to get in a plug for an incredibly useful tool for tracking your on-line identities as you surf and register with all these web 2.0 sites. I’ve written about it before, but Roboform is the best Windows-based identity and password management system I have seen. It’s a completely separate application from your browser, but it cleanly integrates as a toolbar into your browser. And, you can copy all your secure login data to a portable USB drive via the Pass2Go app, and then plug it into any Windows computer and instantly have all your logins and passwords available. Roboform has a free version that supports up to 10 logins, and a full paid version with an unlimited number of logins. I wouldn’t go on-line without it!
As you probably have seen, Google got into the web2.0–ish calendar game this week with the appropriately yet blandly named Google Calendar. I thought I would give it a look and throw my input into the discussion by specifically comparing it to 30Boxes as I performed a common calendar task – creating a set of events and then sharing them with a group. The bottom line for me – Google Calendar may win over a lot of people just because it’s Google, but 30Boxes (30B) is by far the better solution.
First, a disclaimer: I use Outlook almost exclusively for my calendar needs, since I utilize a Windows platform for work. I’m also using the Outlook 2007 beta, which has some truly significant improvements over Outlook 2003, one of which is support for icalendar (webcal://…) online calendars. So, I consider myself a power-user when it comes to calendars, but my scope is fairly limited to Outlook.
I thought I would put Google Calendar to the test today with the schedule of my son’s t-ball team that I coach. I entered each of the games, opponents, locations, and who was responsible for bringing the snack (the most important part of the game when you’re 6) into a new calendar quite easily.
If you’re a list-maker or fervent del.icio.us tagger, you may be trying to keep track of some of the newest apps and services that are riding the wave of so-called Web 2.0. I’ve become tired of the Web 2.0 moniker and have decided to avoid using it whenever possible, since it has become such a broad-reaching and very undefined term.
It is precisely because it is broad reaching, undefined, and web-pop-cultureish, however, that it makes sense to use to name a collection of such apps and services that Christian Mayaud posts on his Sacred Cow Dung blog. This list came to Christian from Bob Stumpel from openBC.
Check out the list of Everything Web 2.0 from Chris’ blog, and find out how many items on the list:
you have heard of
whose websites you have visited
you have registered with / for
you use regularly
I found some great new stuff already, and plan to work my way through many parts of the list. Be warned: it’s a long list and it will “ruin your weekend” as Chris points out.
At the recent CocoaDevHouseDallas event, several of us got together to collaborate on the design and development of a new note-taking app for the Mac. After a lot of whiteboarding and discussions, we wanted to capture some of the requirements and use cases that we had come up with for this app. The problem was, all of this info was distributed across the minds of 4 or 5 people who had commented and discussed the design of the app.
Since this was a group focused on developing in Cocoa, the Mac object-oriented development framework, everyone had Macs … except me. I was along for the ride with my Tablet PC in hand (which, by the way, caught a few people’s interest). There is a Mac app called SubEthaEdit, created by The Coding Monkeys in Germany, which is a collaborative real-time text editor for Macs.
At one point in the evening, then, at CocoaDevHouse, several people fired up SubEthaEdit on their Macs and began listing the requirements and use cases that they remembered from our discussions. After several people added their ideas to the list, we had a fairly long list of items, created and modified in real-time, that we could then save.
Pretty cool. Well, SubEthaEdit is a Mac-only app, and the developers apparently don’t plan any port to other OS’s like Windows or Linux. However, thanks to Tyler from CDH, I’ve found a close equivalent that will work on Mac OSX, Windows and Linux.
Gobby is a free open-source app that allows for real-time collaborative editing of text documents. Although it is easiest to install on Windows – there is a pre-built Windows installer, but you have to compile from source on OSX and Linux – you can share and collaborate on a doc with multiple users on multiple platforms.
I’ve tried it out on 2 Windows machines and it works great. You can check out some screenshots on the Gobby homepage, and I’ve added a few of mine here as well.
User list of all users currently connected:
Editing screen with changes shown in each user’s specific color.
One disadvantage of Gobby compared to SubEthaEdit is that you have to manually enter the host name or IP address to connect to a shared session, whereas SubEthaEdit will find a list of people to connect to if you’re on a local network using Bonjour (an Apple networking utility). However, with Gobby you can manually specify a specific port to use, and you can specify passwords with each session / document on which you collaborate.
I mentioned that Roboform, was going to add support for Flock. Well, after releasing an adapter over the weekend that supported Flock 0.5.11 but not 0.5.12, the current version, today they released the adapter to support 0.5.12. I have installed it and it works!
Now, I’m going to try using Flock for a more extended period of time and write blog posts from it, use the shelf for collecting items that I want to write about, etc.
Now, should I….
You can get the Roboform adapter for Flock on their supported browsers page.
I have mentioned my intrigue with the Flock browser before, and how a big barrier for me to use Flock was the fact that you could not use Roboform, a very nice password management utility that I use, with Flock. I actually opened a support ticket with Roboform regarding their support for Flock, and just heard back from them today with some interesting news.
Roboform plans to add support for Flock in their next Roboform adapter release, which they mentioned as being “less than a week” away. I am very excited, and others should be as well, because I know many people use Roboform to manage their passwords and help protect their privacy on-line. Without the ability to easily port your password management between browsers, you are definitely hindered in what you can do with a browser.
With Flock being at such an early stage of development, why would Roboform want to spend their resources to support it, when so much is potentially subject to change with the app? I think there are 3 very good reasons, and whether these were actually their motivations or not, I can’t say, but I think the implications suggested by them will be true regardless:
In my previous post with this title, I mentioned how I had thought through the way I had setup my interactions on the Internet in 4 distinct ways, with varying degrees of privacy. How much you share of yourself when on-line is something you must consciously and purposefully decide, or risk letting someone else decide it for you, e.g. via default settings in various applications you use.
I want to explain the 4 different profiles, or faces, that I have on the Internet and suggest that these are reasonable ways to organize the different ways of sharing yourself on-line. As I consider my on-line interactions in the past, I see that I have blurred the lines between these four profiles without even considering it, and I think it was overall to the detriment of my privacy. I have come to believe that the more you can choose the specific manner in which you want to interact or share yourself for each on-line experience, the smarter you will be about your privacy, and the more secure you will be.
Are you a Mac fan / enthusiast / developer, have great ideas on collaboration or collaborative apps? Do you live in or near Dallas? Are you available this Saturday, March 4, from late morning until …. whenever? Do you want to meet other tech-minded people in Dallas?
If you answer yes to one or more of these questions, be sure to check out the CocoaDevHouse Dallas event this Saturday. You can find out more on the wiki, and RSVP on upcoming.org. I’m planning on attending, and I don’t even use a Mac! But, as you possibly can tell, I am a fan of the Mac and the Mac community.
First, for the second most surprising announcement: the iPhone Fatboy, er, uh 
Next, we had the 
Then, the least surprising announcement of the day is the 
I have mentioned my intrigue with the 