@lindsay.at

DeWitt Clinton's screed on URL shorteners, especially directed at Twitter's usage thereof, is interesting, not only for the actual content (which is broadly true, and fairly sensible), but for the meta-message: Google is increasingly threatened by Twitter as the prime mover in the "Real-time web."

To me, this feels a bit like fear, uncertainty, and doubt spread about a competitor, attacking the competitor's actions while distracting us about Google's own actions. Most telling was this sequence about precedent:

As a thought experiment, imagine that your email provider suddenly started rewriting all of the URLs in your outgoing emails so they could track every link the recipients click on.

…

But since Twitter is the most popular, and arguably the most influential, of the new wave of micro-blogging systems, I sincerely worry that this is going to establish a precedent that everyone else will feel compelled to follow, since it is clearly an advantage to the network if they can get away with capturing this data. I ask, why wouldn't WordPress or Facebook or Tumblr do the same if they could?

We're supposed to be outraged by the privacy implications here, but the real outrage to Google is that it makes their job harder. Look at Gmail's privacy statement on what they do about you clicking links on email you receive:

When you use Gmail, Google's servers automatically record certain information about your use of Gmail. Similar to other web services, Google records information such as account activity (including storage usage, number of log-ins), data displayed or clicked on (including UI elements, ads, links); and other log information (including browser type, IP-address, date and time of access, cookie ID, and referrer URL).

Yes, Google's asserted rights are over your own use and not with others' use of the links you send. Ask an average user on the distinction, and I think they'd say it's different but not categorically so.

The other part that interested me is the "Safety and Transparency" part for Twitter's links. A major part of Twitter's justification for wrapping every URL (which I'm still personally dubious about) is to protect people from malicious links. Well, that sounds suspiciously like the role Google's stopbadware.org interstitial warning page plays, especially when Twitter doesn't have direct control of how the status message is displayed (it may be via a third-party application or SMS). Is this an argument against URL rewriting, or an argument against anyone else acting as a trustworthy intermediary?

I think Twitter's revelations on its monetisation and platform strategy earlier this year have Google genuinely worried that Twitter is turning into a trusted gateway into the web, and so it gives rise to pieces like DeWitt's, where Twitter is attacked for minimal differences in approach to taking on a threatening gatekeeper role. Google's problem, and DeWitt's myopia in offering solutions ("consider using an html payload"), is that Google is fundamentally of the web, and deals with web pages viewed through browsers. Twitter reaches beyond the web, being deeply embedded into mobile devices, and deals with much smaller units of interest than a web page.

I had never noticed differential pricing within a normal sitcom series before. In the UK, £1.89 (~3.70USD) is the nominal price for a TV Programme. With certain "catalogue" titles, they have been recently experimenting with £1.19 (~2.33USD) per episode. This is the first place I've seen both next to one another.

It might make sense for Apple and partners to experiment with increased differential pricing abroad, first, before launching it in the US. The partners are happy because either price is still a premium compared with US prices.

On the other hand, it could be a mistake, in view of there being two episode number sixes.

phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewTVSeason?i...

Véro Pepperrell posted at her blog on the new iPhone announcement:

However, the biggest change isn’t in the physical device. It’s all in the perception. Last time around, Apple was looking for early adopters, geeks and IWOOTs* to test-run their product in a giant, live usability testing session. Now that they’ve been able to watch us use the device, it’s time to reach out to the normobs with lower upfront costs.

[* Def. IWOOT: “I want one of those”, otherwise known as saddos like me who can’t resist the latest gadget, even at exorbitant prices.]

Back in the day of frequent IM conversation with Fraser Speirs, we jointly coined a term regarding price points, OGOT. It stands for the rather British, "Oh, Go On, Then," and here signifying a price point that is perceived as being low enough for an impulse purchase. It's low enough to break through any price-based purchase resistance. It varies per product or per person, but you know it when you see it.

That's been the major focus of Apple's revamped iPhone, to address the reasons for purchase resistance head-on. The biggest reason that affects the most people has been price. In the UK, £99 sounds absolutely reasonable for a full-featured mobile on a £30-35/month plan. Oh, go on, then.

The iPhone steps out of the realm of the élite device into the mass market. Fantastic!

Looks like HBO has put series like Deadwood, the Sopranos, and Sex in the City on the iTunes store. Good for them, and good for Apple. What I don't understand is how all the commentary points to how this "new" variable pricing for television episodes suddenly augurs a change in the dynamics between NBC and Apple.

I've watched these negotiations for a while, now. And it annoys me that it's widely reported that it's a cracking of the flat-rate pricing stance. TV shows have been priced at more than $1.99 for a while now. Look at PBS, look at Lifetime. It's premium content, and it still presents a compelling savings over the DVD pricing.

Now that I look at it, it seems like bub.bilicio.us and Doug Amoth of PC World got it right. I'm glad someone has.

I've had a lot more thoughts on Apple's recent moves since last posting. None is quite enough to post individually, but they seem to make for a decent set of thoughts.

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There has been a wide range of prices thrown around as possibilities for a new pricing structure for television shows on iTunes. Prices from $0.99 to $4.99 have been quoted. I have only seen the prices reported at their face value and only compared to $1.99 for the existing standard definition purchases. Has no one else considered that $0.99 might be for a rental, and higher prices might be for High Definition?

Incidentally, people should not forget that HD television purchases have had an established price for nearly ten months: Xbox Live has offered 720p download purchases for $3.00 since last November.

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Mike Lee's rant on the entitlement people felt on hearing about Apple's iPhone price drop was amazing, and expanded on my initial reaction perfectly. That said, Apple's premeditated response was perfect. I also see it as being a

1. one-time benefit to early adopters of any of Apple's products ("This is life in the technology lane." In other words, "I hope you've learned your lesson."), and
2. the product of a wide-ranged sociological experiment. (Would users take this sort of price drop? No? Okay, we've learned a lesson.)

Perhaps it was enabled by – or even the reason behind – Apple selecting a subscription financial model for the iPhone.

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I am a bit stymied by the specificity of the naming of the "iTunes Wi-Fi music store." At first, I got it: Apple's not going to deal with delivery over the mobile telecom networks, and they're not dealing with video. Fine. It's verbose, but clear.

On second blush, however, I wasn't so sure. Why couldn't this be used for purchases over the AppleTV? The same underlying model (and controller) surely would serve the AppleTV's interface equally well. In fact, the seven major store headings ("New Releases," "What's Hot," "Genres," "Featured," "Top Tens," "Search," and "Downloads") line up fairly well with the YouTube interface headings ("Featured," "Most Viewed," "Most Recent," "Top Rated," "History," "Search," and "Log In").

I would have thought the ITunes Wi-Fi music store was a sure sign that similar functionality was coming to the living room. Perhaps it is, but under a different name: "iTunes AppleTV store." That gets around the music-or-video question as well.

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Last week, I had thought the iPhone's closed API was because of the the mobile carriers. Apple didn't want to come up with a guaranteed API until it had all of its carrier agreements down, and there was no chance of the carriers pushing to have their own applications on the Springboard. Independent reverse-engineering and programming has been allowed because there's little chance of it appealing to institutions. Thanks to Ben Metcalfe, I now think that the iPhone interface may never be "open" in an official way:

Dave Winer has a good observation:

“Scoble wants an SDK so developers can create cool iPhone apps. Of course I do too. But I doubt it’s going to happen anytime soon. Look at all the deals they can do if they don’t. Starbucks wouldn’t need them if there was an SDK. And Tulley’s could do their own, as could Peet’s, and Whole Foods, etc etc. Apple wants all that business, I’m sure. And they want to be able to sell Starbucks an exclusive. They couldn’t if there was an SDK.”

When he announced the iPhone, Steve Jobs said there would be no SDK because you could do everything you needed to in a web-browser/web-development environment. Clearly that’s not the case - the Starbucks’ widget is not something that the rest of us can implement.

It’s bad enough that users will be forced to have Starbucks marketing on their iPhone/iPod Touch screen. It’s a kick in the face to have built that with hidden functionality that goes against the previous ideals that were made about openness of the platform.

Apple may well be trying to be the new "orifice" here, via its Applications and unique partnerships, to displace the mobile carriers' own entrenched positions.

Well, I'm glad I still own some Apple stock.

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I also noticed the iPod TV-out picture suddenly got more complicated. The new iPod nano and the iPod classic will not output video to the television without a (new) cable or accessory including an Apple authentication chip.

Could this be the start of Apple's (public) implementation of a "secure signal path" for the purposes of complying with Digital Rights Management requirements of High-Definition video content providers?

Also recently: iPod classic vs. Flash, Where's the HD?, iPhone vs. iPod touch, and Technical feasibility on HD delivery.

I'm trying to figure out what Apple wants to accomplish with the iPod classic with a hard drive (the "lazy" iPod) versus the flash-based iPods (the "active" iPod). I'll make no bones about it: I have been waiting for a hybrid device with the capacity of an iPod classic and the wide screen of an iPod touch for over two years. I am frustrated that I have to choose between capacity and screen size. That said, I am (mostly) reconciled with the situation as it is today. I understand that the twin concerns of battery life and form factor make such a hybrid undesirable by Apple.

But why the move to flash? Doesn't it do Apple a disservice, where it gets people derailed from the track of massive capacity iPods? For people with large media collections, having a "lazy" iPod means that device management is largely deferred to the time you want to play your media. But once you decide you want the features from a flash-based device, you only need to intensively organize your playlists, smart playlists, and iTunes habits once, and (theoretically) you never have to deal with a high-capacity iPod again.

Maybe it's purely financial. The data density per (hard drive) spindle seems to be leveling out with the class of 1.8-inch drives. Maybe Apple saw this (pretty clearly, due to their massive investments in this area) and sees much more long-term growth and returns on moving people to flash memory. The iPods have progressed from 1GB to 16GB of flash much more quickly than from 10GB to 160GB of hard drive capacity.

The possibility that intrigues me most was first brought up by my officemate: what if Apple doesn't want lazy iPods (and lazy iPod users) out there? What if Apple wants to encourage people to dock their iPod more often? It could be very beneficial to re-engineer user behavior from synching only before major travel to synching regularly. Introducing podcasts may well have been an early form of this. Television season passes may also be seen as another way of accomplishing this.

Why would Apple push this behavior? Because each time a user syncs, the user interacts with iTunes, and each time that happens, there's a chance that the user interacts with the iTunes music store. It may well be that Apple's desire to get "active" iPod users has increased due to new services and/or security models. (e.g., DRM appropriate to movie rentals, perhaps?)

In the twitter commentary that followed Apple's iPod announcement, while I was getting caught up with the news, I realised that Mail was missing from the new iPod touch. I got to thinking that was an interesting omission, and reflected that the widgets, the stock, weather, and Google maps features, in particular, were particularly telling (rather than "curious"). It points to the fundamental (and very deep) way in which the iPod touch and the iPhone differ.

The iPhone is an always-on, lightly tethered communications device. It presumes that at least a minimal network connection is always available. Weather and stock information is conceivably continuously updated. Mail can be checked regularly or pushed to the device.

The iPod is about entertainment, as it always has been. It is the mobile "lean back" to the iPhone's "sit forward." The 'curious' thing about these two devices is driven by how the world is today: in 2007, an Entertainment device and a Communications device look remarkably similar. (And, as an interesting corollary, it exemplifies how Apple generally sees the web as it is today.)

And it's in that striking similarity and feature near-parity that the iPod touch necessitated a price drop from the iPhone, to something more in line with its feature differential. Really, you're paying subscription fees to AT&T wireless for having the communications device cum phone.

It sounds like a reasonable choice for people to make during the upcoming holiday season.

I took delivery of my project's RAID server yesterday. It's a heady bit of hardware, and I'm sure I'll blog about that part soon (once I know what does and doesn't work). The idea was to do some serious RAID (16 spindles), but using the end-to-end software approach from ZFS.

I was debating whether or not I would try to tackle the somewhat baroque instructions for the much more experimental ZFS boot support. I was pretty put off by the instructions, however, so I set them aside. Instead, I jumped in and decided to install using the more familiar UFS/slice method.

So I just got back from setting up one of what I'm sure will be the first of many attempts to get the server configuration just right. And the experience of setting up the fdisk and pdisk slices, with their permanent choice of size, and with the involved UFS mirroring procedure still ahead of me… Well, I think I will give ZFS boot installation a try.

(next in series)

Yes, it's The Register, and yes, other rumour sites are throwing doubt on the idea, but El Reg asks, are the 'Alu-mac' iMacs due next month?:

We've got around a month to wait before Apple unveils the anticipated next-gen iMac design, it has been claimed. Expect to see the 20in and 24in machines on shop shelves between the middle of July and mid-August, moles maintain.

Earlier this month, it was claimed the new models, which are said to sport a stylish, Mac Pro-like aluminium all-in-one enclosure, might see the light of day by now. No mention of the machines was made at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference last week, though last-minute schedule shifts were likely, the sources claimed.

Could this be the definitive shift in the product line whereby brushed metal is the new white as I predicted? The twist here would be to push aluminum down to the bottom-end products, making the high-end products less attractive with the design ubiquity, and forcing the fashion-conscious to upgrade with the next high-end fashion. We'll see.

(Via The Register - Personal: Mac Channel.)

[Note: The events and deals described in the post are currently in flux. I advise not acting upon the information contained within, for the moment.]

It looks like it's happening again, in another venue.

One of my first posts here was on why apple-watchers/users have an overgrown sense of entitlement. TextDrive has much of that excited buzz about it, albeit on a smaller scale. The forums, featuring the founders' regular commentary, attract a rabidly loyal following. Over time, people like Jason Hoffman have tuned back their announcements of what's to come from explicit promises to somewhat cryptic allusion.

Earlier promises of what would come to customers (in the forums dominated by the hosting-for-life customers) often ran into implementation delays, and so there have been multiple instances of managing expectations with the delays. These have always been handled by Joyent/TextDrive with graciousness, generosity, and aplomb, but the journey to customer satisfaction has not always been pretty, mostly thanks to the enviable customer buzz and loyalty cultivated by TextDrive. Even announcements on when news will be made available have been greeted by customers with the solemnity of a contract.

So, while there have been no explicit announcements laid out on what the precise future of shared hosting is at TextDrive, there have been enough hints to set people abuzz with excitement and speculation. One current meme/worry now (most likely prompted by my "harmless" observation on the forums) is that the people who paid an extra $199 to upgrade their TextDrive lifetime accounts to go onto the MixedGrill plan will have nothing to distinguish themselves from the VCers who did not upgrade. Someguy embodies this fear in this Joyent forum thread:

It looks like the VC accounts at TxD have been bumped to 10GB quota which matches with the mid-level TxD shared hosting plan. Once the Joyent Core gets rolled out it would appear that the VCers will end up with the 25GB/25 user mid-tier Joyent and SS accounts.

Will the MGs also be in the mid-tier but get access to the soon-coming additional apps, or something else?

In other words, if I'm "special," and pay TextDrive earlier/more, shouldn't I always get the special goodies? While a part of me marvels at TxD's loyalty to customers who no longer provide active income, and live off the increasing returns while the hosting company repeatedly pumps millions into its network, storage, application, and processing infrastructure, another part thinks, "yeah, we paid more, shouldn't we get more?"

Here comes the irresponsible speculation, deliberately kept off the forums: I think MixedGrill customers will stay special, and receive Strongspace and Joyent Connector apps at the "Plus" level of service (25 GiB, 25 Users). I think VCs will join those users at the "Shared 2" level of TextDrive hosting, but will not receive the full "Plus" plans of the others. The Joyent Core upgrade will introduce Strongspace and Joyent Connector to the VCs at a lower level. "Startup" (or 5 users, 5GiB storage) seems too low, but if you double it to 10/10, it sounds just right, and still far enough from the MixedGrill users to show a respectable differentiation.

Here's my prediction, though: no matter what is announced, someone is going to think it's unfair, and complain loudly on the forums. Most people will see this as being craven entitlement, and will shout the person down. Life will be a little more exciting for some people for a while, then settle down afterwards. :-) (I reckon that's a safer prediction than past ones on the blog...)