Free lunches still elusive on MySpace

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Nice comment by Don Dodge…

MySpace has blocked Photobucket content again. Robert Scoble reminds us when you host your content on free services nasty crap can happen. TechMeme is flooded with blogs angrily protesting MySpace’s actions. The lesson is this; Free services always come with strings attached, limitations, service outages, advertising, and rules that can change at any time without notice.

Consumers sometimes forget the bargain they made in exchange for the free services. Sometimes it means your personal information can be sold or marketed. Other times it means your content is not really yours anymore. Sometimes it means you get to pay for additional services once you are hooked. Or maybe that the rules change over time and the service is unreliable. Most times things work out OK and consumers don’t complain too much.

Consumers will put up with hassles and uncertainty in exchange for a “free” service. Businesses will not. Business customers require solid, reliable systems and they are willing to pay for them.

Both markets, consumer and business, are important and potentially profitable. However, the economics and expectations are different for consumers. As an example, Microsoft has 260 million Hotmail consumer users and over 500 million Outlook business users. The terms of service and feature sets are different and so are the business models.

MySpace, YouTube, FaceBook, and other Web 2.0 free services get lots of attention. They are held up as examples of innovation and the new way of doing things. I agree they are fun services but innovative? Depends on your perspective…

Nick Carr gleefully pitches in:

It’s worth remembering that the business model of Web 2.0 social networks is the sharecropping model. After the Civil War, when the original sharecropping system took hold in the American south, the plantation owners made money in two ways. They leased land to the sharecroppers, and they also leased them their tools. It’s no different this time. The payments for land (Web pages) and tools (video widgets et al.) don’t come directly, through exchanges of cash, but rather indirectly, through the sale of advertisements. But the idea is the same. If there’s a widget that can accommodate advertising, that tool will be supplied by the plantation owner, not by some interloping varmint. Whine all you want, but that’s the way it’s going to be.

The Reith ‘lectures’

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[Warning: retired colonel rant upcoming. Sensitive souls look away now.]

I’ve just listened to the first of this year’s Reith Lectures, delivered by Jeffrey Sachs, billed as “one of the world’s foremost economists and advisor to several governments around the world”. It was held in the Royal Society before an invited audience. And it was ‘introduced’ by the fragrant Sue Lawley, a broadcasting celeb, the high point of whose career to date has been hosting Desert Island Discs. The event consisted of a short sermonette by Sachs, followed by an inane Q&A session moderated — if that is the right word — by Lawley.

This has been the pattern for the Reith ‘lectures’ for the last few years. The old idea of a lecture as an hour-length talk, preferably covering terrain that is intellectually demanding, has been abandoned. And not by some brain-dead commercial broadcaster, but by the BBC. Investing the Sachs/Lawley travesty with a Reithian aura warrants prosecution under the Trades Description Act. One of the glories of the ‘real’ Reith Lectures was that they made no concessions to intellectual feebleness or short attention spans (just look at the list of past lecturers and subjects). I still remember wonderful Reith series given by, for example, Edmund Leach, Donald Schon, Richard Hoggart and Daniel Boorstin.

Bah!

Update…A friend tells me that one of the luminaries who asked a ‘question’ was a former Spice Girl. Only David Beckham was missing from the stellar line-up.

Double think

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There’s a very interesting item on Andrew Sullivan’s blog. It’s about the British service personnel who were held by the Iranians and the prevailing double-think about confessions obtained under duress.

Here’s the problem: the Royal Navy folks were captured and subjected to some forms of duress, as a result of which they said all kinds of foolish things on Iranian TV — such as the admission that they had trespassed on Iran’s sovereign territory. Nobody believes this: the Brits knew exactly where they were. They’ve been using TomToms (as it were) for aeons. So when they arrive home, all kinds of accommodating noises are made; the poor kids had to say these idiotic things simply to get their tormentors off their backs, etc. etc. But it didn’t mean anything really.

One of Sullivan’s readers made an astute comment about this:

Meanwhile, the U.S. position is that torture (or torture-like) techniques garner valuable information as opposed to false statements engineered to end discomfort. Anybody else see a disconnect here?

Sullivan responds:

Count me in – but the public doesn’t seem to grasp this. It’s especially telling since we dismiss the statements of the captive British soldiers as the fruit of coercion even though their treatment was like a bed and breakfast compared to what has taken place at Abu Graib, Camp Cropper, Bagram or Gitmo. Why are we unable to make the same assumptions about other coerced testimony?

One possible answer is simply that as long as the victims of torture are not white or Western, they are not seen as fully human victims of torture – and therefore none of the rules we apply to full human beings count. Since any information from sub-humans is sketchy anyway, why not torture it out of them? It’s as legit as anything we’re likely to get out of them by conventional techniques. “Treat them like dogs” was General Miller’s express instructions at Abu Ghraib. And he saw the prisoners as dogs. In fact, if animal shelter workers in the West treated its dogs as some US forces have treated some detainees, they’d be fired for cruelty.

The scenario changes instantly when the victim of coercion is white or an allied soldier. It’s striking, isn’t it, that the only cases of torture in Gitmo and elsewhere that have had any traction in the wider culture have been people who do not fit the ethnic profile of Arabs. Jose Padilla is Latino; David Hicks is Australian. When they’re tortured, we worry about the reliability of the evidence. But when we torture “information” out of men called al-Qhatani or Khaled Sheikh Mohammed, the information we get is allegedly saving “thousands of lives.” How do we know this? Because the torturers, i.e. the Bush administration, tell us so. And so the circle of cognitive dissonance tightens until it becomes airtight.

Spot on. This is not a criticism of the Royal Naval hostages btw. They did what most of us would have done in the circs. There are strong moral arguments against torture. But there is also a very good pragmatic argument against it, namely that people will say anything — anything — to stop the torture. Ergo, you cannot believe anything they tell you under such circumstances.

The real Web 2.0

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Nick Carr has an interesting post about what’s going on under the hood, as it were. It’s started me brooding…

Web 2.0 isn’t about applications. It’s about bricks and mortar. It’s about capital assets. It’s about infrastructure.

Yesterday, Google formally announced that, in addition to building a big utility computing plant in Lenoir, it will also build one a little to the south, at a 520-acre site in Mt. Holly, South Carolina, near Charleston. The company will be reimbursed by the state for some of its building expenses, and, the governor reports, legislators have “updated the state tax code to exempt the electricity and the capital investment in equipment necessary for this kind of a facility … from sales tax,” an exemption similar to one granted manufacturers. Google expects to invest $600 million in the facility and hire a modest 200 workers to man the largely automated plant. Google may also build yet another data center in Columbia, South Carolina.

At a pork barbecue celebrating the announcement of the data center deal, Google held a question and answer session with local dignitaries, but it was characteristically closed-mouthed about the details of its operation. Asked how it uses water and electricity at its sites, Google executive Rhett Weiss said, “We’re in a highly competitive industry and, frankly, one or two little pieces of information like that in the hands of our competitors can do us considerable damage. So we can’t discuss it.”

He goes on to discuss what Microsoft is doing in the infrastructure line too.

The local paper’s account of the Google deal is hilarious. Sample:

The company hopes to open its first building by December and the second building 18 months later.

It plans to begin advertising for the leadership positions on its Web site by next week at the latest.

Chris Kerrigan, president of the Trident United Way, said Google and Alcoa donated the money from the timber sale to Links to Success, a program that tries to keep children in schools in Dorchester and Berkeley counties.

Berkeley County Supervisor Dan Davis also praised the company for writing the county a check for $4.34 million for the right to tap into the water system.

Davis said the company could have spread the payment out over 30 years if it had wanted to.

John Scarborough, the county’s director of economic development, said the company’s annual payroll in Berkeley County will be about $12 million to $15 million, much of which will be spent in the area.

He said luring Google will be a major status symbol for Berkeley County.

“It shows companies that in Berkeley County we can handle the big projects, we can handle them professionally and confidentially, and we can solve problems that need to be solved,” he said.

Blog spam

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According to this,

A recent study by WebmasterWorld found that an estimated 77% of all blogs on Google’s Blogspot service were spam. Similarly, AOL Hometown, had well over 80% of its results turn out to be spam. Even MSN Spaces, which as not mentioned in the report, is claimed to host an estimated ten percent of spammer Web site.

It seems as if nearly every major free blog hosting service has been either overrun or nearly overrun with spam. However, one services stands alone, a relative oasis of spam cleanliness, Automattic’s WordPress.com. Despite being just as free as its competitors and placing few restrictions on registration, WordPress.com has not endured the spam avalanche that other services have.

Though there have been spam attacks in the past, the spammers have been easily shut down and, overall, the service remains relatively free of the splogs that seem to choke up its competitors. Though paid services such as Typepad also enjoy a relatively spam-free existance, what WordPress.com does is very rare for a free service…

Those numbers are very interesting. Wonder how they affect the Technorati figures about 71 million blogs (as of now) and two new ones being created every second. Also: what is Google doing about the Blogspot problem?

Footnote: Memex runs on WordPress.

Yo Blair!

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Hmmm… New Labour has decided that it must “use” the “YouTube channel”. Somehow, I don’t think it’ll catch on. Especially when it’s up against stuff like this.

iPod sales top 100 million

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Wow! Interesting post by Blackfriars Marketing, a marketing consultancy run by Joe Butt and Carl Howe.

Today’s New York times ran [an] Apple ad … celebrating 100 million iPods sold. With that milestone achieved, I thought it might be interesting to analyze the last five years of iPod and iTunes growth.

In case anyone believes that selling 100 million iPods in five years is no big deal, here’s a bit of history. In 1945, there were 7,000 televisions in the US. By 1949, that number had grown to 1 million, and it hit 10 million just two years later in 1952. But it took more than 30 years for the number of televisions sold to exceed 100 million. Apple achieved that same 100 million mark with iPods in just five years.

Now those 100 million iPods are a big deal for Apple’s bottom line, but iTunes music has actually outstripped iPod growth. Blackfriars got involved in a little disagreement last year with an old Forrester colleague about iTunes sales. Based upon some of the data he had, he claimed that it appeared iTunes sales were slowing. I used the data I had to prove that he’d picked a particularly unfortunate sample to examine, namely the period between January and September, when fewer songs are purchased than in the big holiday season. But still, there was a lot of Web ink spilled discussing the point.

I think we can now lay that argument to rest once and for all. The folks over at Macsimum News picked up a little-noted quote from Steve Jobs saying that iTunes just passed the 2.5 billion song mark. Now for those of you keeping score at home, that means that iTunes is now selling a billion songs about every six months. But wait, there’s more! According to our figures, iPod sales passed the 100 million iPod mark in March, and TV shows passed the 50 million shows sold mark as well. Add onto that the 1.3 million feature length movies that have been sold to date, and well, I’d say you have quite a fast-growing business…

The author has made a logarithmic graph of various aspects of Apple media-related sales. (Remember that exponential growth shows up as a straight line on a log graph.)

The Blackfriars commentary continues:

Now if you ask me, the really interesting part about this graph is the fact that iPod sales appear to be continuing their exponential climb into the stratosphere. That’s important because it drives Apple’s earnings report, which we’ll hear more about later this month. But don’t ignore those TV shows or movies at the bottom. They’re on a very steep growth curve themselves — and there are a lot of new Apple TVs that are going to need feeding with content this year.

So what does the future hold for iPods and iTunes? While music is what made the iPod and will continue to be the major driving force behind Apple’s iPod thrust, Apple is trailblazing growth in digital movies and TV shows in a way similar to what it did in music in 2002. Remember Apple’s announcement that in the first week or so of movie sales, it sold 125,000 movies? Well, today’s Boston Globe reported the first month’s sales from Wal-mart’s online movie store were a whopping 3,000 movies. If we were to graph that on the log scale graph above, we’d need to add another decade of graph below where Apple numbers are just to see the Wal-mart sales. By all public measures available so far, iTunes is well on the way to repeating its domination of digital music in digital TV and movies. After all, once you’ve bested the largest American retailer, the sky is the limit.

Lighting by numbers

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Any parent who ferries teenagers* around at night knows the problem: most suburban house numbers are unreadable in the dark — it’s why I carry a LED torch in the car. Which is what makes this solar-powered solution so neat. Thanks to Michael and Laura for the idea (and for a lovely supper). $19.99 per number. From ThinkGeek, naturally. Can’t find a UK supplier, yet.

* “Dad’s Taxi Service”, as James Miller calls it.

It isn’t working

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From today’s New York Times

BAGHDAD, April 8 — Nearly two months into the new security push in Baghdad, there has been some success in reducing the number of death squad victims found crumpled in the streets each day.

And while the overall death rates for all of Iraq have not dropped significantly, largely because of devastating suicide bombings, a few parts of the capital have become calmer as some death squads have decided to lie low.

But there is little sign that the Baghdad push is accomplishing its main purpose: to create an island of stability in which Sunni Arabs, Shiite Arabs and Kurds can try to figure out how to run the country together. There has been no visible move toward compromise on the main dividing issues, like regional autonomy and more power sharing between Shiites and Sunnis.

For American troops, Baghdad has become a deadlier battleground as they have poured into the capital to confront Sunni and Shiite militias on their home streets. The rate of American deaths in the city over the first seven weeks of the security plan has nearly doubled from the previous period, though it has stayed roughly the same over all, decreasing in other parts of the country as troops have focused on the capital.

American commanders say it will be months before they can draw conclusions about the campaign to secure Baghdad, and just more than half of the so-called surge of nearly 30,000 additional troops into the country have arrived. But at the same time, political pressure in the United States for quick results and a firm troop pullout date has become more intense than ever.