I've got a bunch of coverage about TiVo's givaway this morning. The lowdown is that Comcast has been promising their subscribers that they're coming out with a DVR box for about a year now, but they keep delaying and frustrating their customers, so TiVo stepped in and told Bay Area Comcast subscribers to bring a copy of their Comcast bill and a toy for charity and TiVo will give them a new 40-hour Series2 TiVo (service fees are still required).

They told people the line wouldn't form until 9am, and the giveaway would last from 11am to 1pm, or when they ran out of TiVos.

This morning I went to Flickr and searched for the 'tivo' tag and found a moblogger's on-site post. Since then folks have pointed me to a TiVo Giveaway Webcam and a photo album of the event.

At 1pm they'd given away more than 800 TiVos and at 2pm the line is still hours long. Justine is still waiting patiently in line, and hopefully they'll run out of would-be TiVotees before they run out of boxes.

Having given four TiVos to people as gifts over the last few years I'm familiar with the joy they can bring. I'm glad TiVo's spreading the cheer. With luck these folks will have their boxes set up in time to record 'It's a Wonderful Life' while they're across the country visiting with family.

Update: All the TiVos are gone, and some people left unfulfilled. For those who didn't get them, or didn't make it out to Alviso, TiVo's offering the Series2 boxes for $49 ($50 instant discount, plus $100 rebate) if you order before midnight tonight. If you don't have a TiVo, today's probably the best time to get one.

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Today I took a look at the information you're required to supply before Yahoo, Hotmail, or Gmail will give you an email account:

Yahoo	Hotmail	Gmail
* First Name * Last Name * Zip code * Gender * Industry * Job Title * Specialization * Birth Date [] Send me special offers from selected Yahoo! partners (checked by default)	* First Name * Last Name * Language * Country * State * Zip Code * Time Zone * Gender * Birth Date * Occupation [] which of 40 newsletters you want to receive in your inbox [] which of 55 topics interst you, so that 'featured offers' from Hotmail partners can be delivered into your inbox	* First Name * Last Name

That's a whole lot of data the other guys want, and they use it to target information. Yahoo admits in their privacy policy that they provide it to third party partners for marketing purposes.

Google, on the other hand, explicitly states: "We will never rent, sell or share information that personally identifies you for marketing purposes without your express permission."

For the curious, I'll likely have some more Gmail information to post tomorrow, so you might want to check back, or grab my RSS feed to keep up to date.

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SFGate has a fascinating article on the Medicare press materials given to television stations by the Bush administration. The packages come readymade with cheering actors portraying reporters witnessing the signing of the bill, and scripts for 'real' reporters to use when introducing pre-prepared news segments from 'field reporters' who are actually actors using scripts provided by the government, portraying reporters while interviewing administration officials.

This comes at the same time that the Republican National Committee is sending hundreds of threatening letters to TV stations fraudulently threatening that they're violating campaign finance law if they accept money to air comemrcials from MoveOn.org.

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Though Steve Jobs was adament that PDAs weren't Apple's forte when he axed the Newton group just weeks before they spun off, there are now signs that the winds may have changed at Infinite Loop.

Following the success of the iPod, the slow PDA-ification of the product (adding contacts, memos, and calendar functions via iSync), and the potential for a rich-media player on the horizon, convergence seems to be leading Apple to a destination Steve didn't anticipate five years ago.

Consider Palm's announcement that their forthcoming Palm 6.0 OS won't come with Mac integration, and that since the PDA race narrowed to Palm and PocketPC, innovation has slowed drastically in the PDA realm, focused mostly on the wireless aspects of these devices.

As PDAs move down both wireless and rich multimedia paths, they come closer and closer to Apple's core competencies, and an 'everything handheld' with iPod, video, wireless (wi-fi and/or cell), and PIM integration could be exactly the kind of product Steve Jobs loves: a product that completely redefines an already established market.

There's been a lot of speculation in recent months about all of the above, fueled by Apple job postings for people proficient in mobile video delivery systems, as well as rumors of an 'iBox' mega-TiVo that would serve as the 'new digital hub', of which a rich-media device would be a natural spoke.

New promise comes today in the form of a survey being passed around by Stone Multimedia asking for opinions as to why the Newton failed, and gauging interest in a revised Newton. There's also a related discussion at MacRumors. This might seem like idle research, except that the company responsible for Newton's branding and marketing a decade ago was also called "Stone." Sadly I can't find that company's full name, so I can't verify that they're the same, but it's intriguing nonetheless.

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Wired has an interesting article on lack of attribution in weblogs, and how many large blogs 'steal' ideas from smaller blogs without giving them attribution.

This certainly happens, and with the rising popularity of RSS feeds, it's easier and easier to read a few hundred blogs a day and pass along the interesting content, without attribution. For many sites, like Metafilter and BoingBoing, this is exactly the point, though Cory (Boingboing) does an exemplary job at citing sources. Since I'm currently working on building out my own 'meta-site' this is a subject of particular interest to me.

The argument's failing, and I freely admit that I need to dive deeper to determine whether it's a weak point of the article or of the underlying research, is that it assumes webloggers predominantly get their content from other weblogs. While that's often true, it's certainly not always the case.

Take for example the 'furry germs' example given in the Wired article: The author claims this is an example of a blog meme with a point blog source and dozens of copycaters blogging it on their own site, without attribution to the original blogger. This is absolutely not the case.

Having blogged about the "plushie microbes" four weeks ago myself, I know exactly where it came from: A monthly advertisement sent out to Think Geek customers. The Wired article's argument is that the specific term "furry germs" is a unique identifier, proving that any two bloggers using the words have the same blog source. In fact, the term "furry germs" is a fabricated example for the article that, at the time of this writing, doesn't exist anywhere on the web except for in the Wired article and in this one (so far as Google can see). More likely the actual example is the term "plush microbes", the term that is used in the marketing email, and on ThinkGeek's site itself.

It's small wonder that bloggers would use the same term when writing about the product, and isn't any evidence of 'blogstealing'. On the contrary, this example raises awareness that we, as bloggers, use the whole world as our source, and that often the same part of the world is shown to many of us at the same time (e.g. through advertisements, the news, terrorist acts).

It's only natural that advertising would raise awareness of a new product, and the far more accurate implication that bloggers don't feel compelled to cite a source when the source is an advertisement that shows up in their inbox is much less insidious than saying we all read each other's weblogs to pilfer content and self-aggrandize.

Just for fun, it might be interesting to have 'attribution week' in the blogosphere, where we carefully document the source of every idea we blog, in as detailed a form as possible.

I propose the week of April 18th, when we're all done with taxes.

[thanks to Amit Asaravala at Wired News, a member of the Terra-Lycos Network]

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I left my cellphone (and jacket) at Em's all weekend by accident and picked it up yesterday to find someone in Sacramento had tried to call me 4 times but left no message.

Today I got their call. It was a marketeer from the drawing I entered outside Dickens Fair (the bait was a trip for two to London), calling to verify my address, marital status, and income. I knew it was going to be an "I'm-not-interested-buh-bye" call when she told me that they wanted to offer me some 'fahbooluhs prizes' for attending a 90-minute seminar. It's jus amazing how long those folks can talk without stopping for breath.

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I'm about to make Amazon a whole lot of money.

As much as I like movies and CDs, the single worst part of the user experience of buying a CD or DVD, or being gifted with same, is the initial user experience: the packaging. Today I'll bypass my tirade about how CD jewel cases are the worst storage device since the mousetrap, and use the copy of Pirates of the Caribbean DVD I got from my mom, as an example.

First, the good. Amazon gets it part-way right. Unlike Costco, Target, or any number of dirtworld retailers, Amazon has done the consumer a favor and nixed the exterior cardboard packaging that serves only to make a DVD case the same height as a CD jewel case trapped within its in-store protective theft-deterrent plastic prison. (must resist CD tirade...) I would credit Amazon's customer-oriented approach here, except that clearly this is a deal Amazon hammered out with the manufacturers for their own sake. When you're selling in volume, volume counts, and the dead air and dead weight of the too-tall cardboard boxes weigh heavy on razor-thin margins.

No, my beef is with the stupid sticky plastic labels designed to prevent us from opening the DVD 'keepsake case'. "SECURITY DEVICE ENCLOSED" scream labels on three sides, adhered securely along the three edges of the case to ensure that we not only know that there is, indeed, a security device enclosed, but that we'll have to sit down and have a tete-a-tete with a tooth or nail before we can break in to the case and see it. In truth, RF-tag or no, the labels themselves are security devices because they inhibit would-be five-fingered fraudsters from easily opening cases in the store and making with the discs, sans-case.

Of course, Amazon's DVDs and CDs never see the inside of a store and now, well into paragraph five, we get to the point: Inventory control (err, shoplifting-prevention) is an important part of the K-mart experience, but Amazon? What kind of security are we talking about? Is there a swordbreaker or small shield in the box, to help keep me safe from the movie? What kind of security device does Amazon need to cozy in next to my DVD, so volitile that it has to be sealed inside this sanctum by a snap-case with three security labels (one with a hologram) and a skein of plastic-wrap to ensure the pristine state?

"SECURITY DEVICE ENCLOSED" rings about as false on an e-commerce customer's ears as does 'Provided by the Management for Your Protection' does on a toilet-seat cover dispener. "What Management? Protection from what? Umm. thank you?" I can almost picture a senior VP coming in to the bathroom stall after working hours to replenish the supply, smug in the knowledge of a rectally-protected workforce.

This kind of anal-retentive mindset can be recycled when trying to contemplate exactly how forcing you to remove stickers from a plastic case is actually the consumer doing their part in preventing crime as if to say, "if this sticker is missing, then the terrorists have already won."

Is there a posterior ulterior motive at work? Within the "flagship sticker"'s hologram, is there a microscopic EULA binding my soul to the merchandising and marketing goals of the movie therein and all possible forthcoming sequels?

Jeff, as your company inches toward its first profitable quarter while struggling to differentiate itself from bricks and mortar book warehouses, how 'bout if you wield your mighty influence to change the small things that everyone will thank you for. Get rid of the 'peel here to reveal next protective device' stickers.

Picture next year's gift-giving season when Timmy unwraps the DVD Star Wars 6-pack and in place of eighteen prophylactic devices standing between him and his entertainment, he sees a small sticker that says, 'No security device needed. Thanks for buying from Amazon!'

You're trying to lead the world in a marketplace of fungible products. Grab on to any differentiator you can, especially the ones that make your customers' lives easier.

Oh, and while you're at it, see what you can do about those big red FBI warnings. Really, in today's world aren't there more important ways for the FBI to instill fear in the people?

Thanks,

Kevin Fox
fury.com

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Yesterday Steve Jobs gave a presentation to 150 representatives from independent music labels, offering distribution through the Apple Music Store. CD Baby! has posted their notes from the event.

It sounds very cool, and very well thought out. It even opens the door for small indie labels to become clearinghouses for 'ultra-indie' musicians, lowering the barrier to entry even further than it is now.

The thing I was most impressed by is Apple's claim that they will always refuse money for preferential placement. Those big banners touting the 'band of the moment' are created by Apple, solely by what the Apple music specialists think is good and worthy, not by big promotions contracts. One of the label reps was dubious, asking how they can be sure it will always be that way, and an Apple exec responded that Apple's been in the OS business for 20 years, and they've never sold an icon on the desktop like other companies have. (Is this actually true? Did no money change hands for System 7 or 8, when IE was on the desktop, or when the 'Connect to the Internet' icon drove you to an Earthlink sign-up page?)

Since the 'bestselling songs' are calculated on a rolling 24-hour basis, even a small relatively unknown band can get on the chart by organizing its fans to get friends to buy music on the same day, pumping it up in to the list, where it will either fall the next day, or stay high by virtue of the music.

Indie stuff should start appearing on the site within 90 to 120 days. I can't wait.

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I'm sure this one will spark a lively debate: Is pushing abstinence the wrong way to handle teen sex?

Mark Morford makes an interesting point about how the vast majority of the media pushes sex (TV, movies, advertisements, music), so how is pushing abstinence to teens anything more than another instrument in the cacophony?

A friend in high school's mom had a policy where she'd let her kids party and drink alcohol, on the condition that it happened at home, and under her supervision. The rationale was that if she didn't, they'd do it anyway, behind her back, and the main reasons why teens drinking alcohol is a bad thing are usually related to their lack of supervision, or efforts to hide their activity (drunk driving, fights, indiscriminate sex). Keeping it at home but keeping it accepted empowered the kids while keeping them safe.

Maybe if sex weren't vilified in the years when our biology is telling us to try it, we'd have less social problems as a whole later on.

Okay guys, have at it!

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Businesses go through all kinds of trouble to make sure their webservers aren't hacked, but they'll use marquees in front of their establishments that any dweeb with a suction cup on a stick can turn to their own (very funny) ends.

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If you're going to write what has been dubbed by some as the worst book ever published in the English language, it's nice that you can at least be good-natured about it.

Seriously, this makes me feel better about the idea of writing my own book. I know I can do better thanthis guy. And if not, well, maybe two-million people will read about the book anyhow.

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"We are small enough to listen to you!"

--MacGPS Pro web site

What a great way to accentuate the positive.

Incidentally, this is probably my biggest concern with the Google/Blogger buyout. Right now Pyra is small enough that if I have a really good idea, I can email Ev and talk about it, and maybe even get things done. As I understand it, that's how most of Blogger's new features and interfaces get started.

Will Bloogle still be small enough to listen to me?

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What with TiVo's added features in Series2 boxes, including scheduling from the web, and music streaming from my mac with Rendezvous, I was getting really close to buying a series 2 box, buying lifetime service, and selling my existing box with lifetime service.

Now I don't have to. Today my TiVo, ever proactive, let me know that they're doing what they said they never would: let you move lifetime service to a new box.

Of course there are conditions, and they stress that this is a one-time-only deal, but now I can buy an 80-hour Series2 TiVo before March 10th, and transfer the lifetime service (which, incidentally would otherwise cost $250 otherwise and next month will cost $300) from my 30-hour Sony TiVo to the new box.

Now the only question is what to do with my existing cherished TiVo.

Anyhow, I just wrote this up for my friends who I know have TiVo with lifetime service, and might be itching for a new box. If you have any questions, give TiVo a call at 1-877-806-0883.

I love my TiVo.

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I'm getting the strange feeling that when the PowerBar says "Fuel for Maximum Performance" they're not talking about coding performance...

Damnit.

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This is interesting... Flexplay has developed a DVD that will 'expire' 8 hours after it comes into contact with air. [sorry for the nyt link. registration required]

At first I thought this was stupid, but then at first I thought it related to music CDs. Stupid because you would have all the more reason to mp3 encode it immediately upon purchase. But for DVDs, well, when a product enters the market, the public decides whether it will succeed, and where DivX failed (buy a disc with the rights to watch for 48 hours, then buy more rights to 'license' it permanently on a single DVD player), these 'self-destruct' discs might just work.

You see, I have problems with DVDs. I'll buy ones I like, and then rarely watch them. Sometimes I'll rent DVDs at Blockbuster, but that requires me to drive to Blockbuster, rent it, after giving Blockbuster all kinds of personal data they can use to bill me or track me, watch it within a day or two, and then go back there to return it, or face messy late fees.

Netflix is a little better, but then I'm paying a flat monthly fee, when some months I'll watch 8 movies, and other months I'll watch none.

What this new tech would probably do to the market is that DVDs would just be a commodity like groceries. If these single-use DVDs were comparable in price to a Blockbuster rental, I could pick up a couple copies of Lord of the Rings for later viewing at $2 or $3 each, and then buy the full Special Edition DVD when it comes out.

More importantly, I could go shopping for DVDs at the video store once every few months, and pick up all those films I know I want to see, without having to pay hundreds of dollars for permenant versions, or keep going back every week (and hope that the movie's in stock) to rent the one I want to watch that night.

Also, if I really like a film and I want all my friends to see it, I can buy a handful of copies and give them as gifts. At a sixth the price of a DVD, it's not such a grand gesture, or dent in the wallet.

Since the discs are cheap to make, this could also be a great viral marketing mechanism. When you buy a 'full' DVD, you might also get one or two 'single use' copies in there. This way, when I buy Amelie, because I love it so, I can get a few discs that I can give to friends, making me an instant Amelie evangelist. Those friends, if they love it as I do, might turn around and buy the full DVD, or at least a couple more single-use DVDs of their own, or for friends.

DVD-of-the-month-club also becomes a much more financially reasonable proposition.

Christmas would be much more fun if I didn't have to hope that my friend would like the DVD I chose for her, or pretend to like the one I got. When you can give someone a library of single-viewing experiences, you're more likely to make them happy, and it's easier to trade an inexpensive item with your friends for one you'd rather have.

Basically, you're buying, selling, giving, and trading movie tickets that you can redeem in your own home, the instant you open the airtight seal.

Especially when you consider how many portable devices use DVDs (computers, protable players, card, etc.), the idea of being able to 'rent' a DVD that you never have to return or pay late fees on, and can wait as long as you want before using, looks like exactly what's needed.

Despite the instant reaction to any sort of digital rights management technology, I actually think this is way cool, and could completely change people's spending habits on DVDs.

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Just got an email from Jeff Bezos (err, from Amazon, anyhow) asking me to test their new clothing metastore, spanning offerings from the Gap, Old Navy, Nordstrom, Lands' End, Target, Eddie Bauer, Foot Locker, 'and many more.'

I get a $30 gift certificate if I spend $50 or more, and it's likely not so much a test as a buzz campaign. It looks like anyone gets the $30 gift certificate. You don't have to be sent the letter (though I bet millions got the letter all the same).

I'm shopping for a winter jacket anyhow, so perhaps I'll check it out. You can too.

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So I made the Amazon purchase today, and four items, including the oversized textbook, are on their way to me. I gotta say, living 50 miles from an amazon distribution point makes for some lighting-fast fulfillment. I've had an order arrive less than 14 hours after I placed it.

And I shared the love. Rather than sift through email addresses and determine who might like what (not that I could break it down by item anyhow), I just decided to send it to all my 'Amazon Friends.' Not that Karen cares about The Computer Music Tutorial, or Ernie wants MacOS X for Unix Geeks, but overall I figured a lot of people might be interested in something on the list.

I just hope that my mom doesn't decide she wants to give Tenacious D a try.

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My Wells Fargo Visa card expires this month, so it was no surprise to get a new one in the mail yesterday. What was surprising was that I'd been upgraded, and now warrant a Platinum Card.

Amusing to me is that my credit limit hasn't changed a cent, staying at a $3,000 max I haven't reached in the last two years. But now it's Platinum. It's pretty. This is now the card I'm proud to pull ot of my wallet when paying for dinner and trying to impress a date. After all, it's Platinum and it looks Platinum, and that says far more about my ability to be a family provider than if I opted for a translucent green card, which I can only guess is supposed to tacitly inform my dining partner that I'm looking to get married so that I can obtain citizenship.

Heck, my new credit card even has a Platinum Magnetic Stripe on the back, to impress others with my ability to induce ferromagnetism in otherwise nonferrous metals (not to mention making life difficult for people who can't tell where the stripe is, rendering near useless the semiotic drawing at ATMs showing which of the four orientations is the right one for swiping their card).

The funny part is that this is a credit card that was put on hold by Wells Fargo only last week because of suspicious activity. They sent me a nice letter letting me know that there was unusual activity on my card, and they did me the service of putting a hold on the card until I called them to go over the recent charges, item by item, to verify that they were all mine and authorized.

So I gave them a call and found out that the unusual activity was that, after six months of being overlooked in favor of my check card, I actually used it. I suppose to their fancy computers with their bayesian logic trees, that is unusual activity, and therefore suspicious enough to warrant shutting the card off, so that I don't do it again.

But now I have my fancy new Platinum card, lifting my spirits while padding my ass. I just hope all the honeys I try to impress with my ability to incur serious debt don't realize that every Wells Fargo customer is turning Platinum this year.

Shiny.

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TextAds: The most sincere form of flattery.

Someone paid Google good money so that people searching for 'AOLiza' would see their ad for free chat bots.

I'm waiting with baited breath for the first TextAd marriage proposal. "Honey, can you look up 'peruvian lizards' in Google for me?"

For that matter, it might be interesting to place a TextAd correlated to your own name, something like: "Yo, I'm the best Kevin Fox. Dis those wannabes. I'm the one you're looking for." that is, unless you already have first billing.

Are you the first google hit for your name? Are you feeling lucky?

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I'm so deadened to online advertising that I'd been reading articles on CNN for almost an hour before I noticed they replaced all their advertising with candles.

On the Yahoo front, they also took off advertising, turned it monochrome, and made a very nice rememberance site.

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(I only wonder what kind of googles that title will attract...)

Crystal pointed me to an interesting Amazon photo and review of Harry Potter's Nimbus 2000 broomstick. Check out the last (as of now, anyhow) review.

I'm not sure which is funnier: the visual, or the fact that the reviewer only rated it one out of five stars for educational value!

On a related note, Amazon is getting a little too touchy-feely, as their most recent 'new for you' email to me reveals.

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Okay, so since the ad had taken on a life of its own, sparking conversations all over the place, I feel the need to write just a bit more about what bothers me, and what doesn't, about Apple's recent tactics.

First and foremost, I'm not particularly bothered that Apple has decided to charge for iTools. I'm sad for the necessity, but that's the way the web is going, and though there's still the ambiguity about whether iTools was a feature of 10.1 and 9.0, or if only the hooks into it were features, that's another battle, and a point that Apple should explicitly address in one form or another, especially as they're on the cusp of releasing a new version of the OS, and many users may be asking themselves which of the 150 new features will Apple start charging for next year?

No, the problem I have with Apple is that even though Apple SVP Phil Shiller admits that the average conversion rate to paid services is 10 percent, though they hope to beat that, Apple is shutting out the 90% of Mac users and Apple loyalists who choose not to pay for the premium services.

Let me be explicit here: I'm not saying that this 90% (which, by the way, consists of 1.9 million Mac users; a fair chunk of their 5% market share, and a number significantly greater than the entire user base using OS X) deserves free iTools functionality in perpetuity. I'm not even saying, despite the fact that Yahoo and hotmail have free email offerings, that Apple should have a free, limited level of service. I am saying that there are two levels of consumer standards that Apple should meet: The first is an obligation to existing users, and the second is a more intelligent, palatable product structure.

Apple needs to make money off iTools/.mac. That's their prerogative. By offering a reasonable suite of products at what can be argued as a reasonable price for those products, Apple has created what is to many, a viable subscription package, and perhaps even a good deal. For users who wish to retain the services that they had been getting for free, along with the new services, that's great. For those who choose not to pay for the service and move on to other providers for their needs, Apple has an ethical obligation to do at least a bare minimum to help those Mac users out.

Apple has claimed that they need to make .mac profitable. Fine. They claimed that iTools was not a sustainable model. I believe that too. The problem is that Apple has made a deliberate decision to not allow forwarding addresses or change-of-address bounces on expired mac.com accounts, and that is Apple turning its back on those Mac customers who are loyal enough to use a Mac, but not loyal enough to buy all the bells and whistles Apple has to offer.

This is, quite plainly, dirty pool.

It creates pissed off users who have committed only two sins: believing that a mac.com email address offered as free from Apple would either stay free or close down gracefully, and choosing not to buy a subscription bundle that costs 10 times more than the functionality they desire.

What's the right thing to do? It's simple. Mail forwarding isn't the answer. It doesn't educate the sender about the new address, and requires Apple to expend server resources for an unspecified period of time. Unless the user proactively informs every person who sends them mail via mac.com, Apple will face the same problem months or years down the road.

When Apple shuts off the free mac.com email addresses, anyone sending to such an address will get an 'undeliverable mail' message when the email hits Apple's mail servers. This 'server tax' will happen no matter how Apple treats their expired mac.com accounts. Allowing mac.com users to specify a 'change of address,' and modifying the Apple mail servers to bounce, not an 'undeliverable mail' gobbledygook server error message, but instead a 'This user is no longer at mac.com. You can reach them at . Please update your address book.' requires only one hit to a database to lookup the new address. This flow educates the sender, doesn't require the former mac.com user to know the email address of everyone who might email them, and gives Apple users the freedom to choose the package that's right for them, instead of locking iTools users into Apple's product because of their email equity held hostage.

This is the right thing for Apple to do, and to do otherwise is to admit that Apple is in such dire financial straits that a 10% conversion to .mac is more important than the goodwill of the remaining 90% who, let's not forget, will be deciding whether they want to pay $130 for Jaguar in the next few months.

So, that's the bare minimum. Now let's look at the product offering itself:

In their own breakdown of costs, justifying their claim that $99 a year is a good deal for the bundle's contents, they say that the email access alone is worth '$40+ per year,' citing Yahoo and Hotmail as similarly-prices services.

First off, Yahoo and Hotmail have free email addresses. It's true that it would cost about $40 to match .mac's offering feature for feature, but if you didn't need POP access, or were happy with a 6 megabyte mailbox, you could pay half that or less.

Apple offers additional email addresses 'a la carte' for $10 a year if you're already a .mac subscriber, so clearly Apple's costs for these additional 5 meg accounts is less than $10 a year, yet this option isn't offered to the average user.

The 'value' of getting what Apple purports to be $250 worth of software and services for $100 a year is clouded by the fact that most of the items are products the average user wouldn't otherwise buy, such as virex (when was the last time you saw a virus for OS X?) or the backup tool. Moreover, several of the items listed are software products not subscriptions. Bought separately, a consumer wold only have to pay for them once, not year after year. there's absolutely no guarantee that these products will be revised every year, or even at all. If you stay a .mac subscriber for three years, suddenly the software freebies aren't so cheap.

The point is that Apple is trying to sell users things they don't need or want, simultaneously holding hostage the very few services that users do require, and using the filler services as a justification for the high annual rate. This is the worst kid of manipulation.

Apple has some of the best interaction designers and product marketers in the business, so one has to ask: how did this happen? Well, I'll tell you...

Exactly one month before Apple's most recent quarterly earnings announcement, they lowered their forecast on that quarter's earnings. This is something that companies do when they see that industry analysts are predicting earnings higher than what the company sees as likely internally. It's designed to prevent a huge selloff of stock after a negative surprise earnings release. Apple wasn't going to make the numbers they predicted last quarter, and they wanted to give investors a heads up.

Fast-forward to the eve of the Keynote speech: Apple released their earnings numbers after the bell on Tuesday evening, roughly matching their lowered expectations. The next morning Apple's CEO would be giving a pivotal keynote speech in front of 50,000 people in the financial capital of the world, withing earshot and webcast of the very analysts and investors who, after reading Apple's financial, are waiting to hear what he has to say before making the decision to upgrade or downgrade Apple's stock.

Clearly, the New York keynote was being delivered to the financial community. What better way to cater to that community than to announce new sustainable revenue streams? Recent moves in the subscription realm by competitors such as Microsoft, Yahoo, and Real, justified subscriptions for services as a viable tactic, and one that is recognized by Wall Street.

Speaking to a packed auditorium gone suddenly terse and quiet, Jobs was trying to save his company's market capitalization. It must have killed him to have to make that speech to that audience. Still, the groundwork for this decision was laid down weeks if not months earlier.

I've heard from inside Apple that this was a 'Steve-down' decision. having participated in literally a dozen meetings at Yahoo, discussing the premium services offerings, prices, add-ons, etc., for Geocities and Mail packages, I can tell you that (at least at Yahoo) those decisions weren't made lightly, and the balance between profit and customer satisfaction was a delicate one, honed during meeting after meeting, assisted by surveys and market research.

My assumption is that this same kind of thoughtful research went on at Apple too, with carefully planned tiers of service for .mac (which, I'm guessing, was still going to be called 'iTools' before the change). Then one day the need for new apparent revenue streams is realized by Apple's top executives. Despite the fact that by Schiller's own estimates, .mac will generate only $22-44 million a year, equating to 0.4-0.8% of Apple's annual revenues, iTools was targeted as a financial golden goose to be sacrificed on Wall Street's already bloodied altar.

The rest is history.

So, how did the big master plan work out? Conversion to .mac accounts is too slow to gauge, largely in part to Apple's decision to start the annual clock on the day the user pays, incenting users to wait until September 30th before buying in to .mac. As for the stock price: It lost 18% of its value the day after Apple lowered its quarterly forecast. The following morning Merrill Lynch and AG Edwards downgraded Apple stock to Neutral and Hold levels. These downgrades were the likely catalysts for the .mac pricing plan. Apple stock lost another 17% in the two days following the earnings announcement and the keynote speech. On the morning of the 17th, Salomon Smith Barney downgraded Apple stock from Buy to Neutral.

All told, in the last two months, Apple stock has dropped 46%, from its 52-week high to its 52-week low. Since the keynote, Apple stock has dropped 18%.

Clearly .mac wasn't the only Wall Street appetizer at the keynote. The decision to release a Windows iPod was one held in reserve for a case of dire need, and the pricing structure for Jaguar was similarly changed in recent months. If Jaguar had always been intended to be a full-priced upgrade, it would have been labeled 10.5, not 10.2. In fact, the decision to keep the Jaguar codename is built on the necessity of differentiating 10.2 from 10.1. The 'leopard print' X logo followed from the same rationale.

Now, as so many of the 'anti-whiners' have whined, Apple has a mission to make money, and of course that's true. As Apple devotees we all have some bitter pills to swallow in the coming quarters until the economy the tech sector turn around. Nevertheless, if the past couple of week have shown us (and hopefully Apple) anything, it's that Apple needs to create the illusion, if not the reality, that we the loyal Apple customers are in this with Apple together. Heavy-handed pricing and upgrade policies (I won't even get in to the QT 5 Pro -> QT 6 Pro debacle), aren't the way to retain the market share that Apple still has.

The lure of a better product is what made most of us buy our first mac. The allure of a better company is what causes us to evangelize, put Apple logos on our cars, even brand ourselves with mac.com email addresses.

In short: We are the cult of Apple. Please don't make us drink the kool-aid.

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I've been wrestling with a moral dilemma for the last several days, tying me up in little knots, getting to the core of who I am both personally and professionally.

At last week's Macworld Expo, Steve Jobs announce the .mac ('dot-mac') initiative, essentially taking the functionality of iTools, adding a few other features, and packaging it as a $100/yr subscription package.

There's some nice functionality in it, but at the same time they're also discontinuing iTools itself. Hundreds of thousands of Apple users who have been using the service, and using their mac.com email addresses will now lose those addresses unless they agree to pay $100 a year. There is no free version, and there is no announced forwarding policy.

As a user experience designer, this irritates me to no end. An Apple executive has been quoted in a News.com article as saying they anticipate that only 10% of the users will actually migrate to the paid service, meaning that 90% will lose their email addresses. Permanently.

Having worked at Yahoo for the last year, I'm no stranger to the push for subscription-based premium services, but Yahoo and most companies that are still in business have done it right: Charge for enhanced services and new services. when you can't do that, charge for those services which were free but are still ancillary, like POP mail access, but don't take a free service and tell your users 'tough. Fish or cut bait.'

So what did I do? I made a commercial. In the 'switch' style, but using no Apple logos or implied consent, I voiced my own opinion on Apple's new policy, and frankly I'm pretty proud of the result.

And herein lies the problem: Once I finish my HCI masters at Carnegie Mellon next year, Apple is very high on the list of companies where I would like to work. Knowing that a video/protest like this could come back to haunt me, I decided to make a pixelated version, hoping to obscure my identity. Still, I couldn't post it here, as people who know me personally would still recognize me and the cat would be out of the bag.

I showed the video to a lot of friends, and received positive feedback, but still I was torn:

When user experience design is my vocation, not just my job, what do I do when doing the right thing from a user experience perspective (on behalf of Mac users everywhere, my constituency in this case) can endanger my chances of getting a job as an experience and interface designer at the very company whose policies I'm calling into question?

Very frustrating indeed, but after a few days I have finally decided that if Apple wouldn't hire me because I stood up for the users in opposition to an Apple policy while I wasn't in their employ, then it's not a place I would want to work in the first place. As I mentioned to one of my former Yahoo coworkers: Yahoo would have hired me even if I was a vocal opponent of a Yahoo business practice before starting there, and I wouldn't want to work someplace less cool than yahoo. Let's hope that the people within Apple are more circumspect than Apple-the-company's recent business decisions.

So, without further ado, I give you:

Bait and Switch

I never noticed until today that 'New and Improved' is an oxymoron...

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Apple has a new advertising campaign focused on converting folks from Windows to Mac.

My favorite of the TV spots is definitely Aaron Adams. All the stories are true, from real people, and this guy's last comment is a real zinger.

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In an effort to increase customer awareness and popularity, five of Macromedia's "community managers" have started their own weblogs, to discuss Macromedia technologies and interact with consumers.

"Giving the community managers a platform on which they can use their own voice, that was our idea," Hale said. "Our format (on Macromedia.com) just wouldn't be as quick as a blog is. We do have a community section in there, but a blog is five sentences and 10 links. And that gets to the heart of why people trust blogs -- they like the format."

Hale added: "Would it have been a true blog if we put it on Macromedia.com? Not really."

Indeed, it was important to Macromedia that its blogs seemed true, that readers perceived them as the thoughts of very helpful community managers instead of corporate shills. If the effort felt disingenuous, like the company was merely jumping on the blogwagon, it could have backfired.

"I'd hate for you to think this is some kind of marketing agenda," Hale said. "If there is an agenda, our agenda is related to getting good information in people's hands."

The problem is that taking it off of Macromedia.com just blurs the line between it being a corporate comunications outlet and a true personal expressive publication. Are these people running the blogs as part of their jobs? Does Macromedia pay for their hosting? Are they anywhere near as likely to get fired for things they might say on their blog?

It's an interesting line to draw, or in this case, to blur. I'd wished for a Yahoo-oriented blog, but the torrents of customer-care type mail I'd get would be overwhelming, and I don't think Yahoo would go for an unofficial blog like that.

Still, I hope for the best for Macromedia and these blogs, and I hope they keep it honest. While Adobe might be pissed at Macromedia for infringing on their patent, I'm pissed at Macromedia for their push for a flash-based web. Here are leaders in the web technology field, pushing a position I can't believe that they truly believe in, because its success would mean profit for the company, at the expense of established online staandards and creating more consistancy usability problems than you can shake a fist at...

I find it ironic that blogging is one of the areas that Flash itself is particularly ill-suited for, and though Macromedia owns ColdFusion, they're using Blogger and Userland for the weblogs. Nevertheless, this might end up being a good thing. Back in the Newton days, the Newton developer community was helped immesurably by Apple's Newton Developer Technical Support staffers spending most of their day on the Newton Development newsgroup. They gave an amazing look behind the scenes, and more importantly, you could tell that the communication was two way. Several ideas that first came to light in the newsgroup's threads resurfaced again in subsequent versions of the OS.

What I'm trying to say is that not everyone can have the organically grown relationship that TiVo does with their customers, and we'll just have to see how mature Macromedia and their blogging cadre are about honesy vs marketing on the weblogs, basically, whether they use their blogs for good or evil.

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So Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference got underway this morning, and Steve outlined the forthcoming OS 10.2 called 'Jaguar.' This pisses me off incredibly, and makes me euphoric with joy.

First, the shit (the bad kind): Apple's including iChat, an Instant Message client that will work with AOL Instant Messenger's network. This pisses me off because as the interaction designer for Yahoo's Messenger for Mac, I think that picking one chat network and 'blessing' it with an Apple client is as bad a move as binding Internet Explorer into the Windows OS. I'm also pissed off because they didn't choose Yahoo to do it with. Fuck'em. We'll show them.

Second, the shit (the good kind): One technology being introduced in Jaguar is Inkwell, OS X's implementation of handwriting recognition. They've taken the Rosetta handwriting engine from Newton 2.0 and ported it to OS X, likely improving it along the way.

They mention that you'll need a digitizing tablet to use Inkwell, and there is flat out no way that they went through the engineering effort of porting Rosetta just to support text entry for people with Wacom tablets.

As far as I'm concerned (and I'm not usually so vehement about rumored products) I am absolutely certain that this means the iPad (all) is on its way, possibly in October, but more probably in January.

By releasing Inkwell into the OS months earlier, Apple is softening the ground and testing the waters for user acceptance of this handwriting recognition engine, and handwriting recognition in general. Once Inkwell has positive (or at least non-negative) buzz, the time is right to launch iPad, the killer hardware.

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Where can I set my CNN Email Alerts notices such that it understands that I don't consider famous person X or Y getting accused of crime Z to be 'breaking news' of the same ilk as terrorist attacks or acts of war?

Nowhere, that's where.

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Warning: This post is rambling and with very little point, but then so is mLife.

Thanks in part to a 6 year old article on the defunct Suck.com, I finally figured out what, beyond the obvious, bugs me about AT&T's mLife campaign.

mLife, for all its teaser-ness, is nothing more than a mashed-together set of cellphone features that you probably already have, including SMS paging, voicemail, email receiving and (laboriously) composing, a fat package of nationwide minutes and "#121", a voice-driven information service so similar to TellMe that it will come as no surprise that they're one and the same.

They don't tell you this in the ads because it's almost as complicated to explain how this will help you lead a simpler life as it is to explain how to type, address, and send an email on a Nokia cellphone.

Of course, packages from Cingular, Verison, Nextel and Sprint have all these features except #121, but heck, TellMe's free and only a speeddial away.

AT&T sells mLife as a lifestyle, in the same way that Apple sells the 'digital hub' as a lifestyle. The difference is that AT&T can't tell you how that lifestyle is any different than the one you have now, because trying to send an email while driving your car isn't really simplifying your life at all.

But the mLife site is ready for that argument, stating on the home page: (spelling and grammar are verbatim from the site)

"mLife has only just begun. soon you' ll be able to use your wireless like cash, listen to live play-by-play sports, and even send color photos. who knows what else? sign up to receive information about the newest powers of mLife."

"Who knows what else" you'll be able to do with mLife? AT&T doesn't know?? Basically AT&T isn't selling a service, or even a plan, they're selling a vision of the future. Actually, it's barely even that, since visions don't usually ask the reader to figure out what they'll include. AT&T is just selling the future as a whole. "You want something cool? Think of it, and yeah, it'll be part of mLife. Sure."

So that really bugged me. I thought, "How does a company get to use money and advertising to blindside actual innovation? how can they get away with this?" Well, the Suck article reminded me of something important: This isn't the first time. This is AT&T.

Remember eight years ago, when AT&T had those ads that asked "Have you ever tucked in your children, from 3000 miles away? YOU WILL. (and-the-company-that-will-bring-it-to-you-is-AT&T.)" and "Have you ever sent a fax... from the beach? YOU WILL. (and-the-company-that-will-bring-it-to-you-is-AT&T.)" Well, they were right about all but the last part. They dumped their picturephone development and the EO 'pen computer' shortly thereafter.

It turns out that while many companies will spend hundreds of millions in developing a new technology and bring it to market, AT&T had decided that with a mere tens of millions, they can hype a product, nayatch, technology, err, lifestyle, and see if the demand is there, by asking for names, numbers, and email addresses. If there's enough interest, then they figure out how to make it, while giving the pretense that the golden unified future is just around the corner.

The sad part is that AT&T is a giant that thinks its nimble. If it does manage to stumble on the recipe for success, there are twenty smaller, more nimble companies ready to bring the product to market.

AT&T brings the market research into the wild, looking for buzz, and trying to trap it if it happens to find any. Bascially, this is the flipside of IBM's coin, where every few months you hear about how they've found a bluer lazer and can store more stuff on a CD-ROM or sugar cube, but it never reaches the marketplace.

And for the link I couldn't find a place to graft in: This one's just fun to read (especially the defunct youwill.com and still-at-stanford Yahoo weblinks).

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For all the concerns of privacy online, I have to say that I think ultra-targeted banner ads are a good thing, and not an evil.

Whenever I work from home I get at least four calls from solicitors for newspapers, credit fraud protection dealies, or roofing supplies. I also get about 80 spam messages a day, not to mention a handful of Instant Message spams (vile vile vile). I'm anxiously awaiting California's statewide 'do not call' list, to be freed from the telemarketers, as I'm hoping for an eventual solution to the spam and IM problems.

What I don't mind (comparatively, anyhow) are advertisements that pay for content I want to read/watch/listen to. Advertising that pays for the sites I read, radio stations I listen to, or TV shows I watch, while annoying, are at least fair trade. A solicitor with a junkmailer or a phone bank provides nothing of value to me in trade for the intrusion on my time and brain.

Of course, TV and banner ads aren't as effective as direct marketing because they only reach broad, marginally targeted demographics. If this science were perfected, while still maintaining my anonymity, then a banner ad with only 1000 impressions to the right people would be more effective than a 50,000 impression ad buy.

Google's AdWords goes a good way toward that, in addition to preferred search results, for all the bad ink they've been getting lately.

For businesses to survive, they have to get the word out there, and almost universally people don't want to have 'the word' pushed upon them. But really, isn't a contextually relevant ad, given in trade for content that you actually want, a fair exchange?

The Open Source movement makes a distinction in the term 'free'. They note the difference between "free as in beer" meaning not costing money, and "free as in speech" meaning unfettered communication and distribution. A similar terminology might befit the privacy world:

• "Private as in invisible" should relate to not allowing tracking or profiling of any kind, as in cookies, registrations, or server log tracking.
• "Private as in citizen" should mean the inability of marketers to contact you without your consent, or in a form other than paid advertising in content you specifically request.
• Somewhere in the middle is "Private as in anonymous" where you can be tracked, but not individually identified.

I'd love to hear thoughts you guys have on this distinction, as well as better, more catchy terms...

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MSN: Point: Global CD revenues fall another 5% in 2001 due to music piracy.

Blogaritaville: Counterpoint: Music labels have increased the average price of a CD by 16% in the last five years, despite a 60% drop in fabrication costs.

The IPFA's analysis of international 2001 music sales places blame squarely on piracy, despite a lack of a geographic correlation between sales drops and internet access (the UK's music sales increased this year, and the US's music sales fell less than the international average, despite a nationwide recession).

Also, they point out that sales of CD singles dropped by 16% while ignoring the fact that the number of CD-single titles published in 2001 dropped by a greater percentage, as record labels try to drive people to buying full albums.

Unlike entertainment industries, consumers don't have a united voice, and as a result the media reports whatever the PACs and consortiums feed them.

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Roger Ebert posted a great article on upcoming 'copy-protected' Audio CDs that, among other things, won't play on Macs or DVD players.

It got me thinking about a world where music was able to reach every corner of the world without people having to buy it, where they could experience new music they wouldn't otherwise be exposed to. Oh yeah, it's called radio, and the labels love it to death. It's how they make their stars.

Radio listening at work has been dropping in favor of internet streams and personal music collections on CD or MP3 for a decade. As digital streams and MP3-CDs continue their inroads into car stereos, I wonder when the labels will realize that radio is no longer the best way to publicize their artists, and that to push awareness of new music to those with the financial resources to buy new albums, they'll have to turn to the net, even if they can't instantly monetize it.

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Tonight is the East Bay BayCHI chapter's monthly meeting, featuring Derek Powazek and Matt Haughey talking about online communities. Derek wrote the book on the subject, and is the person most responsible for the Fray, among other projects, and Matt is the mind and soul behind MetaFilter, notable for being a community of over 15,000 people, yet one with virtually no social problems, despite an absence of a moderation schema.

They're speaking on the Berkeley campus tonight at 7, details in the first link. If you missed SXSW, or went and found the panels unfulfilling, this might be the event for you. (No pressure, guys!) I know I'll be there.

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It looks like Yahoo! is taking a page from Steve Jobs's book, promising something that's so big there's never been anything like it on the Internet, or anywhere else. Liftoff is 1 PM Pacific Time on Wednesday which, incidentally, is just after trading closes at NASDAQ.

And no, I actually have no secret info on what it is...

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Okay, so I'm zipping through the last 60 pages of the Fellowship of the Ring so I'll finish it before seeing the movie. I know it's playing in a few theaters at midnight tonight but I don't know if I'll actually see it. Aside from tickets being difficult to come by, it's over 3 hours long (including previews) and I have to work in the morning. Bah.

So 90% of the reviews out so far have been raving about how great it is, particularly in how closely it follows the novel. But I don't get it.

The last commercial I saw talked about 'epic love' and, reading the book, unless they're talking about the love Sam has for his 'master' Frodo, I don't have any idea what they're talking about. Love is not any part of this story. In fact, the story is all about the company of men, and not in that kind of way either.

To put it another way: Hobbits have a way of making Arthur Dent seem randy.

So are the ads just being deceptive? Are reviews being written by journalists who couldn't make it past the first admittedly slow 40 pages, and don't want to admit it? Or do the last 60 pages consist largely of orgiastic revelry to counter the previous 400 pages of not?

Time will tell (and, I suppose, sex will sell).

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Behold the power of Powerpoint as a tool for presenting bad customer service. Of course, while the story deserves spreading, it's the novelty of powerpoint that keeps this meme alive.

Complaint slips should really have a space on them for UML flow diagrams, so the customer can pinpoint exactly where the system broke down.

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So last month I jokingly commented that Amazon should let people surf by books that look like other books, but I realize now that I missed the far, far bigger picture.

I'm sure most of you are familiar with Amazon's purchase circles. Amazon takes all their information on who buys what and who likes what and creates aggregations of what items are disproportionately popular in a given geographic region, company, school, or other institution. Similarly, they use this data to tell you what you'll think of other items based on the opinions of 'people like you.'

All very well and good, as now they can tell you what your community is reading and listening to, so you have to think less, but I'm waiting for the next step. With all the data they have on people, places, purchases, and your likes and dislikes, it seems only natural that Amazon should branch out into the real estate market.

Think about it: Amazon could turn the tables 90 degrees and tell you "People who think like you do live in Anytown, USA. Click here for houses in that area."

In fact, why stop there? What about Amazon.com Dating Circles? "Here are the top ten people in your area who share your taste in Books | DVDs | Music | Toys" Amazon could give advice on roommate selection. you can run a credit check and an amazon personal compatibility profile for only $9.95 per pairing.

You could tie in your E911-equipped cellphone to amazon and it can call you when there's someone near you who's also read "To Kill a Mockingbird" in the last 6 months.

The possibilities are endless. Buy stock now...

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Sometimes I'm really glad to be working where I am:

• Report: Phony 'Grassroots' Campaign Orchestrated by Microsoft
• Report: Consumers Nix Microsoft Passport
• AOL Voted Least Trusted on Net

(and for those who keep hinting that Fury is just a front for Yahoo, consider that maybe I chose to work there because I like the company, and not vice-versa)

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Why should you read my movie reviews? Because unlike some people, I really exist! (and let me go on the record as saying that Heath Ledger, despite being popular with young girls, is not "this year's hottest new star."

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So as you know I posted yesterday about wanting to shed a few pounds and today I got two pieces of spam (I know they're spam because they were to addresses completely unrelated to this blog) on how to do just that (only not any way that's clinicly proven, or inexpensive).

It got me thinking: If everyone kept a public blog, how long would it be before companies would abandon trying to get inside our heads thrugh our clickpaths and purchase histories, and start catering to our desires as evidenced on our weblogs?

How long before the folks at Google, Inktomi, and Lycos created new search engines to harvest current blogdata and sell the info to marketers?

Heck, Blogger could start doing that today, and become the next dotcom success, until everyone abandoned their system, or paid $5 a month to have a 'harvesting-free' blog.

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And the winnder for all flash, no substance goes to: 3na.com.

To think, 18 months ago a flash intro like that would be enough to secure first-round venture capital funding...

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This billboard mistake is clearly a gimmick. Ten to one odds says it's actually a Nader billboard. It's sad that CNN actually picked up the story, playing right into advertisers hands. We'll see on Monday.

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Dial 1-800-888-3999 and listen to all menu options.

I love innovative viral marketing concepts. Face it, if not for this feature, you'd probably never heard of National Discount Brokerage, but now you're going to tell your friends.

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