Greasemonkey Archives » David Louis Edelman

Fortune Magazine’s David Kirkpatrick recently took a gander at the iPhone hype and concluded that the Apple model of music distribution is a thing of the past. “I doubt most people will want to buy or ‘own’ music at all,” writes Kirkpatrick in his article Looking Beyond the iPhone. “It will be far more useful to pick from a giant online library and listen to whatever we want wherever we are.”

The author then goes on to hold up as a model for the future RealNetworks’ Rhapsody service, which RealNetworks CEO Rob Glaser calls “the jukebox in the sky.” It sounds like a great deal: $10 a month for all the streaming music you can listen to. The catch is that you don’t get to own any of it; everything resides on the Rhapsody servers, you’re just checking it out for a few minutes.

Jukebox with wings Let’s put aside the fact that RealNetworks’ products turned into clunky, adware-laden pieces of crap several years ago with the release of their RealOne player. Let’s also put aside the fact that the company has lost so much ground in recent years to Apple’s iTunes and Microsoft’s Windows Media that they hardly have the clout to revolutionize the music business anymore.

The real (Real) question is this: Do people want a jukebox in the sky?

Kirkpatrick points to the coming ubiquity of wireless broadband networking. Within the next ten years or so, we’ll all be using 3G or WiMax or some as-yet-unchristened technology to access information anytime, anywhere. You won’t need to bring your music with you on little metallic discs — or little plastic iPods — because it will all be available for the taking on the big jukebox in the sky. Why pay to “own” music at all when downloading it is effortless? Just download what you want, when you want.

But here’s the problem with that scenario. Broadband access isn’t the only technology that’s growing by leaps and bounds. Disk storage is exploding too, and getting cheaper by the day.

As I write this, I’m looking at a last-generation iPod sitting on my desk with 30 GB of storage. Not quite enough to store my whole music collection yet — I rip my MP3’s at a full 320 Kbps, as God intended them to be ripped — but the newer 80 GB iPods might do the trick. Within a few years, we’ll be carrying 500 GB iPods. Seagate and Hitachi have 1 terabyte hard drives coming out this year. Flash memory is getting so cheap that you can find piles of thumb drives sitting next to the check-out counter at computer stores.

Guess how much data the entire printed Library of Congress contains? 10 terabytes. Yes, that’s it, 10 terabytes. Assuming we continue along this exponential trend of increased storage, you’ll be blowing your nose with 10-terabyte Kleenex soon enough. What does that mean? That means you’ll be able to carry your entire music, video, and book collection around in your pocket in 20 years. Let’s take it even further: in 40 or 50 years, you’ll be able to carry around every book ever written and every piece of music ever recorded around with you. Give it another 10 years for video.

So would you rather carry your digital media with you in your pocket, or would you rather carry your radio receiver with you and access your media on the great jukebox in the sky?

In an effort to spread the word about my book Infoquake, I’ve been experimenting with several social networking services. I now have a LiveJournal that cross-posts what I post here, I’ve got a space at MySpace, I’m linked in to LinkedIn.

MySpace is far and away the most popular of these types of services. According to Alexa, MySpace ranks only below Yahoo and Google in terms of popularity on the web. If you’re curious, you can view my page at http://www.myspace.com/davidlouisedelman.

Here’s the problem: MySpace is an abomination. Nothing works. The things that do work are poorly designed and shoddily implemented. Here’s just a small sampling of problems I’ve been having:

Member search doesn’t work. Try searching for members using multiple criteria, and watch the search go splat. (Then again, Yahoo’s member search has been broken for years and nobody seems eager to fix it.)
Importing contacts doesn’t work. I tried importing my online address books from Yahoo, GMail, and AIM. MySpace said it sent out a dozen or so invites. It didn’t, and I had to redo the whole thing by hand.
Instant messaging doesn’t didn’t work. I tried sending a friend a message just to see what it would do, only to receive a very unprofessional-looking error message stating that the instant messaging was out of commission.
Cross-posting from WordPress doesn’t work. I have managed to get this working with LiveJournal (http://david-l-edelman.livejournal.com if you’re curious) using a nice little plugin I found on the web. There used to be one of these for MySpace, but the plugin developer gave up because MySpace kept mucking with the API.
Reporting spam doesn’t work. This morning I received friend requests from kinkymonica, flirtymonica, and luvymonica. How do you report these friend requests as the porn spam they so obviously are? You can’t.
Approving your friends doesn’t work. I’m currently staring at my “approve/deny your friends” queue, which states that I’m looking at “Listing 1-6 of 6.” Only about an inch away, however, there’s another column that says “1 of 1.” And below, there’s nothing listed. Do I have five phantom friends? (Actually, that would explain a lot of things…)

To add to the functional problems, the site is full of the worst kind of design heresy. Boxes float around the page with seemingly no rhyme or reason. The default icons look like rejects from your old Windows 3.1 installation. Navigation seems to float around the screen in illogical places, to the point where the only button I can rely on is the browser’s Back button. Things get even worse when users start mucking with their MySpace designs and adding polls and plug-ins and garish animated GIFs. You get stuck with endless pages that take forever to load and are impossible to read.