Salon.com on social networking online

Andrew Leonard of Salon.com delivers a social networking primer and profiles the different approaches of big name social networking sites such as Friendster, Tribe.net, and Orkut. Marc Canter is mentioned as social networking taken to the extreme but there is no mention of FOAF or how to move common data between social networking providers. The article does a good job examining the privacy trade-offs when a user provides a profile to an online site. “Promise someone a date, or a chance at a job, and they’ll happily expose their most intimate secrets.”

Walt Mossberg interviews Steve Jobs

Today’s Wall Street Journal has excerpts from last week’s Walt Mossberg interview of Steve Jobs onstage at D: All Things Digital. The article is available to subscribers only, so I will quote at length.

[W]e’ve gone from pretty much zero a year ago to about 2% of the legally sold music in the U.S. That’s not a giant number, but if you look at it and say it’s been accomplished in a year and you look at the trajectory, it’s not inconceivable to see it breaking through 5% in the next 24 months as an example, maybe sooner.

We got enormous pressure to do a PDA and we looked at it and we said, “Wait a minute, 90% of the people that use these things just want to get information out of them, they don’t necessarily want to put information into them on a regular basis and cellphones are going to do that.” So getting into the PDA market means getting into the cellphone market. And you know, we’re not so good at selling to the enterprise where you’ve got, in the Fortune 500, five hundred orifices called CIOs. In the cellphone market you’ve got five. And so we figured we’re not going to be very good at that.

The interesting thing about movies though is that movies are in a very different place than music was. When we introduced the iTunes Music Store there were only two ways to listen to music: One was the radio station and the other was you go out and buy the CD.

Let’s look at how many ways are there to watch movies. I can go to the theater and pay my 10 bucks. I can buy my DVD for 20 bucks. I can get Netflix to rent my DVD to me for a buck or two and deliver it to my doorstep. I can go to Blockbuster and rent my DVD. I can watch my DVD on pay-per-view. I can wait a little longer and watch it on cable. I can wait a little longer and watch it on free TV. I can maybe watch it on an airplane. There are a lot of ways to watch movies, some for as cheap as a buck or two.

And I don’t want to watch my favorite movie a thousand times in my life; I want to watch it five times in my life. But I do want to listen to my favorite song a thousand times in my life.

New York Times on fair use in the digital age

Tom Zeller Jr. of The New York Times writes about copyrights and multimedia in academic institutions. “Many scholars, librarians and legal experts see rich promise for the use of multimedia materials in research and education. But the possibility of litigation over file-sharing and confusion over digital copyright protections have scholars feeling threatened about venturing beyond the more familiar world of printed texts.”

Cal Athletics LookSmart search partnership

LookSmart will develop a branded search property for Cal Athletics available at CalBears.com, CalBearsSearch.com and via a toolbar application. “Each time users click on a paid listing, a portion of the revenue will go to support Cal Athletics.” It would be nice if they had a Grub promotion to help utilize all those idle computers and open bandwidth. If all search engines provide a similar impression of a result to their users, the move towards cobrand benefits could be big. Think of iWon.com of years ago.

Bridging the Internet and the TV

Today’s announcement from TiVo regarding downloaded Internet content available on a personal video recorder got me thinking about how independent content authors now have the same path to the end consumer as Viacom, Disney, and General Electric. As I read the New York Times article profiling the new TiVo service, RSS enclosures came to mind. Microsoft might still use IPTV, but other software manufacturers can build support for RSS enclosures into their software with little overhead. What does this mean to the average user? Average users are able to push content to targeted subscribers. It could be the latest video feed of a rock band’s concert, or a child’s birthday party video sent to family around the globe, but it will be waiting for the viewer on a variety of devices. Only bandwidth stands in the way.