I sort of hate going out this way – it really looks like I pulled out after getting my dubious 15 minutes of web fame by baiting Robert Young (not intentional but I should’ve known better, though I still stand by what I wrote). I have cool things I want to say piling up in my little “to blog about this” file, but they will likely find different outlets. If you enjoyed reading this, I’d love to hear from you – feel free to comment – and maybe whenever a reincarnation of something like this ends up happening, you’ll hear about it as well.

– Mike.

Now real quick, here’s a summary of those three and why I think they’re silly:

Google and the Movie Studio

Google buying a movie studio – this is admittedly written before the YouTube purchase, but I still find the argument a little bit contrived: Apple is looking for exclusive online distribution rights for movies, so instead they should (a) buy a studio, (b) make movies available online through Google Video for a modest fee (hey, it works for Apple…), severely undercutting Apple and everyone else, and without any DRM (or with less DRM from anyone else). Then, Google should hunker down, eat all the lawsuits, wait for DVD sales and theaters to die, fundamentally change Hollywood and come out on top.
First of all, the reason that the online distribution of movies model works for Apple is that (a) they already have a huge user-base of iTMS users (b) they market a set of overpriced accessories (e.g. remote, RCA cables) that make it pretty easy to take your movies out of your uselessly small iPod screen and onto your TV.
Second:

Consumers should be given the choice to either pay to download & own, or to stream it free with ads. And the pay option should be priced substantially below existing home video/DVD alternatives (e.g. $3.00 for sell-through/ownership), to reflect the lower cost basis of digital distribution. Moreover, if the consumer buys the title, they should be able to do whatever they want with it for personal use… burn it to DVD, copy it to an unlimited number of machines, etc.

I see all the idealistic “DRM is bad” and “movies for the masses” and Google should do this “with the direct intention of disrupting the Hollywood business model at every level” because Hollywood is evil, but I’m really failing to see any useful reasoning for the fact. If Apple can make very good business selling DRM-protected movies for $10-15, why should Google sell DRM-free movies for a fraction of the cost? I’m sure it’d make Young happy, and it’d make me happy, but where’s the business model?

Apple Buying Youtube

I’ve blooged about this already – Apple Buying YouTube? Why Bother?. Apple has a great distribution system, and has absolutely no need for YouTube. My own prediction was Microsoft buying YouTube (if anyone was going to), and I was wrong, but I still think it makes more sense than Steve Jobs.

facebook and SixApart

The basic argument – facebook and SixApart are very similar, are competing for similar audiences, and should “immediately run a strategic/financial analysis to look at the costs and benefits of a merger.” Young loosely bases his essay on the new Vox service from SixApart, which is near and dear to my heart. He does mention that SixApart also owns TypePad, Moveable Type, and LiveJournal, but I don’t see how those blogging services are in any way like facebook (and neither, I think, does Young) so I’m going to go ahead and focus on Vox and facebook as potentially competing services.
I’ve been using facebook since it was only a handful of schools, and Vox since the beta, so hopefully I’m at least a little bit qualified to evaluate what they’re about.
Vox is, first and foremost, a blogging service. It is innovative in that it has cool integration with photos, video-posting and so on as well as intuitive social elements, but that alone does not a social network make. In trying to be a media-rich and socially-connected blog, Vox is in some sense taking what LiveJournal is one step farther.
facebook does have a new notes module, which one could argue is sort of like a blog (and in fact, one of my friends cross-posts entries from her blog to facebook notes). Still, among my hundred-odd facebook friends, there are under a dozen notes users, most of whom use it for silly things or for the ubiquitous “MEMORIES” entries (e.g. “please comment with a memory of me”).
You could say that facebook has users with profiles and a place for longer bits of writing, and that Vox has places for longer bits of writing attached to profiles, but if you try to get more specific, the comparison loses strength quickly. It’s not just a question of specific features within those profiles and bits of writing, but a question of focus: Vox is a blog, facebook is not a blog. You don’t sign up on facebook to blog on it. You don’t sign up on Vox unless you’re going to blog on it.
Young views both SixApart and facebook as “ultimately aimed at becoming personalized portal platforms” but I really don’t see that as true. facebook is doing it, sure – and bringing the kitchen sink with it, might I add. SixApart does one thing – blogging – and does it well. These are two different company philosophies, and I really don’t see how Young lumps them together.

Now, onto some useful stuff. First of all, I’ve decided that I’m going to stick with WordPress. The speed increase over Blogger isn’t a huge deal because I do most of my post writing offline (using MarsEdit or, more recently, Ecto), but even with that aside, I like the WordPress themes better, and I decided I don’t have time to mess around with Blogger’s somewhat arcane XHTML/CSS themes (think CSSZengarden – lots of unnecessary stuff just so you can customize everything).

Also, I recently got an invite to Vox, which is a new social blogging service from SixApart that Anil Dash blogged about a while back. I’ve kept a more “personal” type of a blog on LiveJournal for a couple of years now, and I’ve always been slightly bothered by your stereotypical angsty teenage LJ user. Not that I wasn’t one at some point, and not that there more sensible people on it, but that’s the general vibe that the global LiveJournal community gives off. Vox is a little bit more early-adotper-ey, and a little more adult and modern, and oh so very 2.0. I’m going to play with it for a bit more, and post some more specific impressions. In the interest of keeping my “personal” life and my bloggy life at least a little bit separate, I’m not going to post my Vox address on here, but if you know me personally you should have more than sufficient means at your disposal to get it.

(Via Engadget.)

Seriously, can we stop giving grants to these people? Sometimes in the late ’90′s, someone decided that seeing what “lights up” in the brain when stuff happens is “hawt.” Now, I’m all for real neuroscience studies that use imaging data to infer brain function. In fact, that’s my own interest, basically. But looking at what in the brain “lights up” when nuns try to “relive a religious experience” or when “kids think of their mother” or whatever else and call it the “God spot” or the “Mom spot” is stupid. A great majority of these studies are a waste of $600 per scan or whatever it is for fMRI (more for PET and MEG).

There is something to be said for the fact that the iTMS was one of the things that added some nails in Napster’s coffin, but if you took YouTube, removed the user-sharable stuff and started charging a buck or whatever for videos, you’d be doing what Apple is doing with the iTMS already. A different company could actually try to do this – buy YouTube, get all the IP rights, cripple it so that the RIAA is happy and sue anyone who tries to start YouTubeTwo. I think that this is pretty unlikely though – Apple has certainly been known to take some decisive measures to protect its IP, but it hasn’t really used its legal department to necessarily stifle competitors like certain others tried to do.

Frankly, even if buying YouTube would boost Apple’s video iPod offerings, are they going to bother? I’m really not sure on this one. The current iPods have tiny screens, and you need to shell out $100 or so in adapters to plug one into your TV and get any use from the video features. I really don’t see any sort of YouTube-iTMS or YouTube-iPod integration being particularly exciting for Apple, given the small amount of users I suspect actually use their iPods’ video capability to anything beyond the strictly gimmicky extent. Granted, Think Secret writes that there’s a 3.5″ screen video iPod in the works for the spring but again, I don’t see how YouTube could give Apple anything (legal and) exciting that the iTMS doesn’t.

You know who I’d expect to pull off the sort of dirty trick I described earlier? Our friends over in Redmond. The folks over at Engadget indicated a little while back that the Zune will be basically Microsoft’s challenge to the iPod-iTMS system. Apple already has quite a complete framework set up for content distribution (i.e. the iTMS), but Microsoft doesn’t. Knowing that Microsoft will probably ship a few months late and with half the (working) features promised, it is possible that they will acquire YouTube rather than build their own equivalent. Even if Microsoft doesn’t end up using YouTube as part of their Zune distribution solution, I could still see them buy YouTube out and kill it to eliminate the competition from that front.

I’m curious to see how well this is going to work, and what it says for the shareware market as a whole. By definition, it’s sort of a niche market – the apps are usually simple (though sometimes surprisingly useful) one-shots that are used by a subset of the already-niche mac geek userbase. People within that group usually register your app because they often are developers themselves, they respect your work and so on.

But when you try to get out into the more mainstream market (even just to slightly less geeky mac users), you need to start guilting people into registering, because the internet often makes your serial numbers just about as as easy to distribute as your software. This is really where the problem arises, I think – people will steal your app, and they’ll do it a lot, and you either have to compensate for the people who crack your software by charging more for the people who actually register (a $20 desktop worldmap or a $25 blog updater come to mind), or you charge peanuts and hope that you’ve dropped the cost to the point where people would rather pay than waste their time looking for codes or cracks. Of course, if you choose the latter option, then some people might feel less guilty stealing it because “oh, it’s only worth 5 bucks anyway”.

Ryu and his buddies have money to burn on something like My Dream App, so there’s no question that people buy their shareware – but I’m wondering whether it’ll ever grow out of this mac-geek/blogger-developer thing and to more mainstream.