The latest from TechCrunch
- Amazon, Music, And A Sunny Forecast For The Cloud
- Facebook Comments Epitomizes Everything I Hate About Facebook
| Amazon, Music, And A Sunny Forecast For The Cloud | Top |
| Editor’s note : Guest author David Porter is the CEO and founder of 8tracks , the handcrafted internet radio network. Last week, Amazon launched its Cloud Drive , with an emphasis on music storage. While there have been a number of "jukebox" services these last 10 years (Napster 2.0, MusicNow, Virgin Digital, Yahoo Music Unlimited, MTV Urge, MOG, Spotify, Thumbplay, Rdio), relatively few "locker" offerings have emerged—although rumors of new locker services from Apple and Google sound promising. Last week, Amazon leapt ahead of both rivals in launching Cloud Drive , a service that allows you to stream, for free, any songs purchased from Amazon. It also allows you to upload up to 5GB from your existing music collection for free storage and streaming; if you pay an additional $1 (or more) per year, you get an incremental 1GB (or more) of storage. Amazon has not (yet, at least) negotiated direct licenses with content owners for Cloud Drive. While it is creating quite a stir , remember that music in the cloud isn't new. Jim Griffin envisioned the "heavenly" jukebox more than a decade ago, and Listen.com executed a subscription-based version of the concept in the form of Rhapsody in 2001. During the same period, myplay and My.MP3.com introduced the music locker, another vision for music in the cloud but populated with a user's existing music collection, without the subscription fee. Offering cloud-based access to your music collection obviously extends its value, making it available from another computer or a mobile device, and ensuring you don't lose it if your hard drive crashes. For Amazon, it makes sense to pursue a locker service: they've perfected cloud-based content storage and delivery for thousands of web-based startups with Amazon Web Services (AWS). Amazon Web Services (AWS) already provides hosting and data transfer. What's interesting, however, is that the consumer-facing Cloud Drive is actually cheaper than its existing business-facing offering. While Cloud Drive charges only $1 per GB per year (beyond the free allotment), AWS charges $1.08 per GB per year for storage alone. If each song in a person's uploaded collection were streamed once per month, on average, AWS would require an additional $1.20 per GB per year for data transfer (or roughly $2.28 per GB in total). Since Cloud Drive could well generate less than half the revenues as AWS for the same offering, it seems Amazon is offering the storage as a loss leader to gain digital music market share. Amazon undoubtedly hopes to wrestle away some market share from Apple's iTunes, particularly in view of the growing base of Android users not yet served by a Google download store. Its bold "first move" without licensing deals from the music labels could complicate and delay negotiations at Apple and Google. Early adopters of Cloud Drive—especially Android users—might then consider the switching costs and choose to stick around even once Google and Apple launch their own competing services. In addition, while I'm personally bearish on the mainstream prospects for the subscription-based, on-demand model, it's also worth noting that a music locker may provide a more logical transition from the a la carte world of ripped CDs, iTunes, and Amazon’s MP3 store to the celestial jukebox of Rhapsody and Spotify. At some point, it will make more sense for hardcore locker user to switch to unlimited music subscription services. For instance, a Rdio subscription costs $60 a year, which is the same as keeping 65 GB of music on Cloud Drive (5GB for free + 60GB at $1 per GB per year). But will Amazon get away with offering Cloud Drive without a license? I think there's a good chance it will. While there's no doubt some grey areas are not yet adjudicated, it appears the labels can live with (i.e. won't sue) a service that allows people to upload music from their own collections, provided there's a unique copy of each track stored and no related features that make it easy to infringe. My.MP3.com was sued and lost because it allowed users to "beam" CDs in their computer hard drive, providing access to the "bits" ripped from CDs purchased by MP3.com (rather than the user's CDs). This feature also made it easy to replicate a friend's CD collection in the cloud. In contrast, the plain-vanilla locker service of myplay was never sued. Likewise, the current suit against MP3tunes , another music locker service founded by Michael Robertson, focuses on a user's ability to "sideload" music they don’t own from around the web, plus the use of a single copy for each track streamed. However, so far, mspot and Amazon—not to mention myriad other services like Google and Dropbox that have broader storage purposes but are often used for hosting music—haven't been sued. Although, the industry has been experimenting with different models for online music services for a decade, I am hopeful that the entry of Amazon, and soon Apple and Google, will finally bring music to the cloud in a meaningful way. CrunchBase Information Amazon 8tracks Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| Facebook Comments Epitomizes Everything I Hate About Facebook | Top |
| So it’s been a month now since we introduced Facebook Comments round these parts, time enough to have given it some serious consideration. And my conclusions are as follows: …are you kidding me? This is the best a $75 billion company could come up with? Isn’t Facebook supposed to be the new home of software’s best and brightest ? Is this some kind of elaborate practical joke? The whole point of a comment is to make new information or a new opinion available. Good luck with that. As far as I can tell you cannot deep link to Facebook comments, and searching through them is at best a pain and can verge on outright impossible. A memorable comment on my last post included the phrase “I’ve been inside the sarcophagus at Chernobyl”: when I mentioned this on my Twitter feed, I was deluged by “couldn’t-find-it” replies, because it takes three clicks to reveal that sentence… and there is no way to make that comment more visible. You can’t even sort comments by date – in case, say, you’ve gone back to a previously viewed post, and you want to see what’s new. Facebook’s Simon Cross patronizingly explains why (scroll down – I’d link directly to his comment, except, oh, that’s right, I can’t): “The plugin automatically sorts the comments based on relevance to the viewing user based on friends, friends of friends and most active posts. We currently feel that a chronological view is not the best view for the viewing user to give them an immediate sense of relevance.” …which kind of makes me want to burn down his workplace and then salt the charred earth so that nothing ever grows there again. God forbid that they even pay lip service to the notion that users might perhaps be given options —for then they might start to use them, and then where would we be? Sheer anarchy! Far better to reduce everything to a single dumbed-down inescapable standard, relentlessly mediocre and devoid of any color or possibility, like a tapioca straitjacket. I’ll grudgingly grant that there has been one giant benefit: the army of trolls who used to plague TechCrunch have been reduced to a tiny grunting handful (most of whom log in with fake Yahoo accounts) thanks to Facebook’s insistence on real names. I actually even had mixed emotions about this - @rezendi Jon Evans @ tristanwalker @ erickschonfeld Objectively, yes, but I actually kind of miss the trolls. They added unintended hilarity. March 5, 2011 1:13 pm via Twitter for Android Reply Retweet Favorite - but I can’t deny that the overall level of conversation has gone up a notch as a direct result. Balanced against that, though, is the single most infuriating and baffling thing about Facebook comments: they only allow a single level of replies. The notion of “a comment which is a reply to another comment” is built into the system—but you cannot reply to a reply. This cripples conversation, for no good reason, and it’s clearly a deliberate design decision: an ugly, clumsy, and completely inexplicable misstep. It’s like Facebook developers are literally incapable of thinking outside of the box that is their feed. And the worst thing of all? Next time I build a site that requires some kind of commenting system, I might wind up using Facebook Comments. Yes, despite my hate and loathing. Because as frustratingly mediocre as it is, it is easy to plug in, and it does solve the troll problem, and everyone’s already on Facebook, and it helps to spread links. It’s a piece of crap, but it’s just barely good enough and easy enough that it’s not worth wrestling with alternatives. Facebook Comments is basically Facebook writ small: while it’s maddeningly mediocre lowest-common-denominator crap, it’s not quite bad enough not to use. But just take a moment, please, if you’d be so kind, to scroll down to the bottom of this page, consider the comments section, and reflect on the fact that what you are looking at is the very best product that a $75 billion software company, one famous for allegedly only hiring A-list talent , was able to build. If that doesn’t make you weep for the future just a little bit, then I don’t know what will. Image credit : Zitona, | |
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