(A Winer-esque post, but I really like this quote so whatever.)
Fred Wilson: "Shut the Hall of Fame. Because YouTube is my Hall of Fame. Rock on." The game has changed. There's too much stuff out there for us to only care about "the best". Especially when we all have different ideas of what "the best" is.
Technorati Tags: Fred Wilson, VC, YouTube, Hall of Fame, music, quotes, long tail
I'm pretty close to unsubscribing from the Apple Slashdot RSS feed. In the age of Digg, del.icio.us, Newsvine, etc, having a service model where an editor picks what to post just seems so antiquated. This is a perfect example of the pre-filtering vs post-filtering that Chris Anderson talks about in The Long Tail. For what it's worth, the Apple Slashdot site has had only 8 posts in the past seven days and pretty much all of them brought news that I saw hours or even days before they showed up in my Slashdot feed.
The most recent example is Phill Ryu's fake Leopard screenshot contest results, which were announced Wednesday 7/26 at 1:44PM. While I did see it straight from his blog no more than 30 minutes after it was posted, had I not been subscribed to his feed, Digg picked it up less than 90 minutes after so I would have seen it then. If I happened to miss either of those two sources (highly doubtful, considering one is the primary source) a link to the blog post appeared on many, many other Apple-related blogs. When did it show up on Slashdot? Tonight, Thursday 7/27 at 10:54 PM. It's "only" a day in real world time, but in blogosphere time that's an eternity!
And what about the tens or even hundreds (on a good week) of Apple stories that showed up in the past week? There's no mention of them anywhere on Slashdot. They bill themselves as "News for nerds. Stuff that matters." but there's a lot more that matters in a week than 8 stories. But I suppose that tag line became as irrelevant as Slashdot itself did a long time ago.
Technorati Tags: Slashdot, Digg, blogs, news, editors, Long Tail, del.icio.us, speed, relevance, editors, social media, traditional media, Web 2.0, community
One of the few perks of having to be at work at 8 every morning is that fact that I get to read my RSS feeds at 7:15. As such, I was able to catch Chris Anderson's post from two nights ago in time to be one of the 100 bloggers to receive a free copy of his new book, "The Long Tail". I was pretty sure I had made it in on time, but I wanted to wait until the confirmation email came in to be sure. The book should be here sometime next week. Hopefully I can read it in a few days, so expect the review to be up the week of the 9th.
Technorati Tags: long tail, Chris Anderson, book, review, free, bloggers
Let the lock-in begin!
News came today that Skype will begin to offer some features, such as 10-way conference calls, to users of Intel's latest dual-core processors.
I have to say that I'm a bit disappointed with this news. There's really no good reason for these features to not work on AMD's dual-core chips and I think Skype is being a bit short-sighted in their partnership with Intel. The primary reason for AMD's market share gain over Intel is due to enthusiasts who have overcome the MHz myth and prefer AMD's slower-clocked, cooler-running, but faster chips. I'd also venture to say that a majority of Skype's users are also enthusiasts. While the app is simple to use, the real barrier is that it just hasn't really had the exposure yet to be taken up by the mainstream. The end result is that the large subset of Skype users who run AMD chips will continue to do so.
Simply put, Skype doesn't have that killer-app status that would make many people switch to Intel chips if they don't have to, especially die-hard AMD fanboys. So what do Skype and Intel gain from this partnership? Not much. Joe Keyboard may not necessarily be more likely to use Skype even though his Dell has dual Intel cores. If Skype really wanted to reach the average consumer, they would be better off partnering directly with Dell and have Skype be one of the many icons plaguing a default Dell installation. Intel, on the other hand, believes that it could get a lock on die-hard Skype users who are willing to switch to their chips.
Though there is something to be said about network effects, if an AMD user absolutely needed an Intel-only feature, they would look for an alternate piece of software to serve their needs instead of upgrading their entire machine. Given that these Intel-only features are targeting the long tail of Skype users (how many actually need 10-way calling?) and that you need to have Intel chips on all ends for the feature to work, its very easy for a small group to switch to a different application if they absolutely need a feature and so network effects, if any, are diminished by how much easier it is to switch software over hardware.
Technorati Tags: Skype, Intel, AMD, dual core, Core Duo, Pentium, VoIP, IM, networks, web 2.0, telephony
Seth Godin links to a NYTimes story about how much space people actually use on their iPods. Well, of all the people surveyed by the Solutions Research Group in Toronto, half of them had less than 100 songs stored on their MP3 players and the average among those with iPods was 505 songs.
Now, this news comes a few days after I lost my 30GB iPod and started considering my replacement options. My iTunes library clocks in at 19.68GB but a Smart Playlist I made revealed that I only listened to over 4.27GB in the past 19 weeks. The new iPod nano is only 4GB and absolutely perfect. The problem is those few times when I would want to listen to one of the songs I don't have on the iPod. It's not so much the inconvenience of not having the song, its the disutility I get from the fear of not having a particular song.
Despite all this, I decided to go with a 1GB shuffle as a temporary solution. My rationale behind this is that Mac Expo is a week away and with the rumors that there's a video iPod coming out (or even larger capacity 4G iPods), I want to have the smallest investment in hardware as possible at this time. Even when I get a larger iPod, the shuffle still has its uses as a much smaller solid-state player and USB drive.
Getting back to Seth Godin's piece, he argues that a larger capacity iPod is more of a status symbol than a necessity:
We don't buy a bigger iPod because we need a bigger iPod. We buy one because we identify ourselves as the kind of person that doesn't squabble over a few bucks when it comes to buying the best.
…
Nobody buys "best" in everything in their life. But in every category that's not a commodity, somebody is buying "best" because they want to, not because they need to.
While I agree to some extent, I think his theory doesn't take into account that Apple positions the feature sets of their iPods to upsell people to the larger iPods they don't necessarily need. Look at the difference between the iPod nano and the iPod lines: anyone with >4GB of music has to get the 20GB iPod whether they have 4.5GB or 19GB of music, and for only $50, you bet that guy with 4.5GB is going to get the 20GB player. The same enormous storage gap (and small price gap) exists between the 20GB and 60GB iPods. With that type of upsell strategy and the fact that Apple doesn't offer iPods in, say, 2GB increments, of course there's going to be a trend to move up along the iPod lines.
I also think the Long Tail (as a proper noun) has a large part to do with Apple's offering of large iPods. The average iPod user might not need more than an iPod nano in terms of storage, but what about those on the Long Tail that do? I know several college students with fat internet connections who have over 50GB of music in their iTunes library (legality notwithstanding) who are more very happy Apple offers 60GB iPods. For all intents and purposes, the R&D cost of the 60GB iPod (or a hypothetical 80GB iPod) is zero and the cost of going from a 20GB to a 60GB drive is minimal. Being in relatively small packaging and easy to manufacture (and switch back to the 20GB "mainstream" iPods), a Long Tail does exist for the iPod and so it is viable to offer these huge iPods despite the statistics showing that "average" users don't need nearly as much storage as Apple offers.
Technorati Tags: Apple, iPod, iPod nano, nano, Long Tail, marketing, Mac Expo
