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

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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).

And I thought last week's allergies were bad...

This weekend I went with my dad to try flying model airplanes. Out to Antioch we went, and we were there for no more than 30 minutes before I had the worst allergic response of my life.

Hours later, in the Alameda County Hospital emergency room, he snapped this picture of my swollen eye, and the other one's just as bad. (Only click if the words 'this picture of my swollen eye' don't deter you.)

Needless to say, contact lenses or any kind of reading for more than a few minutes is pretty much not going to happen for a little while (1-3 days, according to the doc), though the nice doctor gave Kevin some drugs to try (Zyrtec) so hopefully this won't happen again.

I really hate pollen.

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...

The more I use OS X as my regular operating system, the more Win2K starts to feel like KDE and Gnome when I turn to it...

A small but important note on the competition between SonicBlue's ReplayTV and TiVo's, err, TiVo: This summer SonicBlue will stop including lifetime service with ReplayTV purchases, and will move to the monthly subscription model.

This is an important factor, considering the lack of service fees was one of the (few) reasons somepeople prefer ReplayTV to TiVo. This is a sort of vindication for TiVo, and also helps the consumer, since it will help to continue lowering the entry costs for digital video recorders.

Meanwhile, Newsforge has a good first look at the TiVo 2 players, and an interview with TiVo's chief evangelist. This article gives a good peek at where TiVo is headed for the rest of the year.

I got four odd emails today, from different, fake-looking addresses (one was a spoofed email bounce from my own domain). Each of the emails had an executable file (don't touch it! It's evil! (I assume. I, being safe, use a mac for reading email, so I'm immune to the torrents of email virii that go around)) and a small image.

These were the two images included in the emails. No words, just these:

Have you seen us?

I haven't heard anything about the virus, and I have no idea what it does or how widespread it is. I'm curious if any of you have seen either of these images in recent emails though...

My odd point at work today is when I was discussing an interaction flow with a coworker, and I said to her in all seriousness, "Well, this is how a porn site would do it..."

CNN's running a story on the Segway, now that Atlanta has received its first Segway shipment. In the article, they link to a Time.com flash animation detailing the anatomy of a Segway.

The diagram shows where the batteries, gyroscopes, daughterboards, and so forth ar all stored away, and also shows us where they hide the user interface:

Rollover text: "The User Interface tells you the machine is on, what mode it's in, and how much battery life is left."

Who would have thought the whole user interface fit into a readout on the handlebars? Looks like someone at Time needs to learn the difference between a status readout and a user interface...

(yes, I'm feeling snarky today. I just want to drive one...)

Thanks for all the kudos on the skydiving report. I had almost as fun making the 'webumentary' as I did with the actual dive!

Tonight brings baseball, with the A's going up against the Yankees, with expat Giambi leading the Yankee charge. I wonder if people will boo...

Anyhow, off to that work thing.

Oh, and to keep you enticed, I have big news on the horizon. No, really! It'll be about a week and a half in coming, but I'll try to keep you distracted 'till then.

I'm alive and all... Just editing some quicktime and finishing some commentary. I'll have a meaty post up later today. :-)