Ed Gutman

For many of you Europeans out there, you may be familiar with the service @Spotify. It’s a no-nonsense online music streaming service. What sets this service apart from services like Last.fm and Pandora, is first, the catalog, and second, and most importantly, it’s a true on-demand music service.

Spotify is available in the UK, Finland, Sweden, Norway, Spain and France. It currently comes in three flavors: Free, Day Pass, and Premium. The paid services play music without ad interruptions (although I have yet to hear or see one; I assume they play in-between tracks). Their catalog is quite impressive, which seems on par with iTunes in size and scope. For you Lindy DJs out there, the entire Complete Jazz Series is available for streaming.

Unfortunately, if you’re in the States, you can’t technically sign up for the service, but there is a workaround for that until it’s official:

1. Visit http://www.azproxies.com/proxy-lists/ and find a proxy site at any of the aforementioned countries (I personally chose a French one, since I have a thing for French pop).

2. Once you’ve found an appropriate web-based proxy, enter in the site field: https://www.spotify.com/en/get-started/. It will ask you some basic sign-up questions; note that you need to pick a zipcode from the country of your proxy (Google search for one).

3. Download the application for your OS, install, run and you’re all set!

Oddly enough, It didn’t occur to me to post a link to my new website-slash-journal, //REMarkify, here.

The logo that isn't technically on the website.

In case you’re wondering where I got the name from:

• “//” – The single line JavaScript comment tag.
• “REM” – The BASIC comment tag.
• “arkify” – Because it’s catchy and… after spending hours trying to find domain names that weren’t taken, this was as good as it gets.
• Add the above together and bingo.

Ever wondered why that website you visit has a weird name that ends in ‘r’ or ‘oo’ (Tumblr, Squidoo, come to mind)? Are they being intrinsically creative and edgy with their name choices? Well, yes and no.

You see, when the world wide web picked up in traction around the early 90s, less than 12% of the US had access to the web with that a small fraction of today’s websites were in existence. A few people saw the growth potential in the web and started buying domains left and right by picking: words out of the dictionary, prominent company names, famous names, etc. Since relatively no one was paying attention it was easy to claim them.

Fast forward several years and now there are over a billion people on the net. Domain names are at a premium, and now those cheap purchases in the 90s have turned into a million dollar industry. For example, business.com sold for some 7.5 million USD.

Somewhere around the beginning of the so-called “web2.0″ revolution, instead of capitulating to domain squatters, most web properties went with a more creative approach: create words (or alter them) to a point that no one has heard of it before. Hence, we now have Flickr, digg, and Twitter.

Necessity, is indeed, the mother of invention.

My relationship with Yahoo has been a rocky one. I want it to succeed. I really do. But time and time again the company has managed to shoot itself in the foot. And given the bloated bureaucracy, I’m amazed Yahoo can even see it’s feet.

It’s simple really, Yahoo forgot what’s important: the user. While I worked there, I was constantly disappointed with the rhetoric at All Hands meetings: advertisers were seemingly top of the chain, followed by publishers, the lastly, the user. The guise was to bring them all together on an equal playing field. But they really aren’t, as the user gets the short end of the stick. Paid Inclusion (paying to bump a page’s relevance) is proof of that.

Oh sure, every month they release some fancy new “web 2.0″ interface tweak that maybe a handful of users care about, but it does not change the underlying issue of search. In ignoring the user, they also forgot they have two very powerful game changers that are wasting away to irrelevance: Flickr and, most importantly, del.icio.us. Before twitter, and most social bookmarking services, there was del.icio.us, and if it was correctly applied, could be reliable human powered search. In my own experiences, I search delicious before Google if I’m browsing general topics, since I know the most reputable sites will be represented (by frequency of bookmarks).

So I’ll end with my simple proposal: Drop Paid Inclusion. Integrate delicious results to Yahoo Search.

Say what you will about Google, there’s one thing they put first above anything else, and it’s their users (and their data, but that’s another story).

The business of being an online aggregator of information is a competitive one; sites such as FriendFeed, Facebook, and Mint are all vying for your attention making it hard to choose one. Usually one site will have one service, but not another. Maybe it’ll have a good mobile app but few partner services. Or, maybe it’s just something no one ever uses.

Pageonce blows all of them away. I was just shocked at the sheer amount of online accounts that I was able to include in their service, all in one, so let me just list what I added:

• Financial Institutions (BofA, [my student loan holder], Fidelity Investments, [my credit union])
• Utilities (AT&T, AT&T Wireless, Liberty Mutual, PG&E Skype)
• Shopping (Amazon, ebay, Netflix)
• Travel (Virgin America, United, Avis, Alaska Air, Marriott, Amtrak)
• Email (Google, Google Apps, Yahoo, Hotmail)
• Social (Twitter, Facebook, Plaxo, Last.fm, digg, del.icio.us, evite, Flickr, LinkedIn, Meetup, Yelp, Youtube)

As the service grows, I imagine it will include just about everything under the sun. Personally, they hit about 90% of the services I use, and 100% of the ones I use frequently (I was pleasantly surprised to find my credit union and student loan holder).

For the most part it’s purely informational; you can’t do much to interact with said feeds, but that’s the major appeal of this as well. If you wanted to interact, you would do so on desired site (which is more secure, anyway).

The real clincher for me was having all this account information not just in one website on my desktop, but on my iPhone. Pageonce launched version 3.0 of their premium application (there’s a free one as well) which brings all of this information to the palm of your hand. There is a Blackberry app available as well.

Granted it’s a little on the slow side; it is after all, pinging all of your online accounts at once. And, as this may be a deal breaker for many, but trusting all of your online account information to one site can be a leap of faith. As it is, the site is well secured, well encrypted, and is covered by all the large online security companies. They do mention in their privacy agreement that they won’t use your data for marketing purposes and that you own it entirely, something Facebook has struggled agreeing to.

Definitely a service to keep an eye out for.

Here are 10 of my favorite iPhone apps that make certain parts of my life a little easier. I often wonder what I’d do without some of them, but then again I seem to remember this business of using a pencil and paper in a previous life. Ah well.

I’m excluding the built-in apps here, since any of you that have an iPhone would have those too.

	Tweetie: Hands down the best Twitter client available on the iPhone. It’s simple and fast, has a slick UI, and all the functionality of the web app and then some. Since I’m quite the twit, this is where I do most of my tweeting.
	Facebook: For those of you with an active account, it’s a no-brainer. As an added bonus for those of you who don’t like the new Facebook, this is reminiscent of the old one.
	Air Mouse: Powerful mouse alternative. A portable touchpad with full keyboard functionality. If I’m in the kitchen and need to open a program on my laptop, this program helps me do it.
	Jaadu VNC: For something a bit fancier than Air Mouse, this lets you remotely connect to your computer, with full functionality. Think of it as adding a screen to Air Mouse. Expanding on the previous, if I’m in somebody else’s kitchen and need to open a program, this helps me do it.
	OmniFocus: For the uber-organized, this is the ultimate task manager/planner. It uses the “Getting Things Done” system of task management and works better than any planner I’ve had in the past. Requires sync with the OmniFocus desktop client.
	Yelp: Helps me find decent restaurants (or whatever else you need) within the area, thanks to the GPS locator. Now all I need it to do is get me a reservation a la OpenTable’s app and I’m set.
	Shazam: Extremely powerful song recognition app. I can’t get over how great this is for finding song titles I thought I never figure out outside of a lyric search. This plus Youtube makes for an excellent way to find the tunes on that commercial you’ve been wondering about.
	BeeJive IM: So far the only decent all-in-one chat client on the iPhone which can sync all major chat protocols. Still, it’s a bit pricey and needs background operation capabilities. Once push is available with 3.0, this will be an even better app (at least until Adium comes out with their own).
	1password: This program comes close to replacing my wallet. Syncs with the desktop client to store every password/info you could ever use online. Just make sure it doesn’t fall into the wrong hands.
	Edge: The best game you can buy for the iPhone, in my opinion. I’ve gone through quite a few, but this one is the only one I keep playing over and over. Great graphics, great music, great control, and a great idea!

Lastly, here are five I’m supposed to be able to live without. There’s no straightforward way to put these on your iPhone, so I’ll leave it to you to find out how.

• Netatalk + OpenSSH: Allows your iPhone to talk with other computers making the following apps possible:
• MobileFinder + MobileTerminal: Thanks to the above, you can command line or use the finder on your iPhone.
• SBSettings: Makes actions such as turning on/off wi-fi and airplane mode happen literally at the swipe of a screen.
• Cycorder: Recording video on the iPhone for the win.
• PDANet: Allows you to tether your internet connection to another computer (the 3.0 update will cut into this a bit).

I’ve been getting some flak lately for my seemingly excessive usage of Facebook, and it’s getting a little old. You know how much time I spend on Facebook per day?

About 10 minutes. Tops.

That’s spread out over the day, including my iPhone app. It really doesn’t take long to glance at what people are up to. I’ve found that my community of friends (especially those in tech) are a lot quicker at finding relevant news than the mainstream media is. Plus, I like keeping up with friends I don’t normally see a lot of; in the Lindy community where many of us are spread out across the world, it’s a great communication tool.

A lot of what I do content-wise is done through third party apps posting to my Facebook profile, much like FriendFeed does. I write a blog post, it’s on Facebook. It’s pretty easy to ignore things on a feed; you can click on any item’s option and choose “Less about [username]“. Or you can delete me altogether. Pretty simple, and I won’t be heartbroken.

I’m a social networking power user. I’m fascinated by them and how they are moving toward uber-inter-connectivity. Most successful web applications today have the option to, among other things, post or receive a feed from some other app such as Facebook. I’ve done that on this blog to an extent with Google Connect and Disqus.

Many of the things we do in everyday life may end up connected in some way; this guy hooked up his laundry machine to send Twitter updates. I know many people are uncomfortable with this level of intimacy into our personal lives, but our shift to a more voyeuristic society seems to be becoming a more common phenomena. Our children won’t care as much as we do today.

I must admit, I do spend a lot more time reading my Twitter feed than I’d like, but that’s a different story.

This month marks four-year anniversary of the launch of Youtube. In that four years, it has managed to hold down the crown of online video traffic. With sites like Vimeo and Hulu slowly growing, those days may be numbered.

If you’ve used Youtube long enough, you’re very familiar with the interface (which has been oft copied by sites like Break and Dailymotion), but lately it’s been showing it’s age. In an industry where looks are everything, it’s not exactly pretty. Check out this video on both Youtube and Vimeo:

Where the Hell is Matt? (Youtube)
Where the Hell is Matt? (Vimeo)

Off the bat, Vimeo has a more pleasing user interface. Plus, there’s even an official full HD download link (which the uploader can turn on and off). Note that the Youtube version just added HD options while Vimeo had it when the video was originally posted 8 months ago. Lastly, the Vimeo ads aren’t embedded in the video content, instead opting for a slot on the side. In general, I’ve found the ads to be just as relevant on Vimeo as they are on Youtube, albeit slightly more compelling and far less obtrusive. Based on all of that, which site would you rather watch this video on?

You may have also recently seen the new feature of annotations on Youtube videos. If you’ve ever wondered how they were going to spam video, here it is. I can’t count how many times I’ve cringed when one of those text blocks came up telling to visit x website. It’s distracting and cheesy looking, and while it’s a novel idea in theory, it has to go (I believe they’re may be an option to turn it off, although I haven’t figured it out yet).

Sure, Youtube has started adding HD content in the last month. Unfortunately, they’re also planning on making it impossible for anyone to download content off the site (all those third party download sites will be rendered useless). This may be a move appease major studios. But, it really makes no difference when you’ve automatically capped the video length to ten minutes. Who knows how much potential content they missed out on by placing this restriction?

Outside of the personal video market, Hulu has nailed downed the commercial content segment. With a slicker, faster interface, more quality content and a delivery system that can bring it to your television via Xbox Live or Roku, it’s light year’s ahead of anything Youtube’s got. To make matters worse, they seem to have figured out how to monetize their content with ads, without compromising quality.

While neither Vimeo or Hulu is close to the 70 million viewers on Youtube has, it really won’t matter unless the folks at Google can figure out a better long term plan. The migration from television to online video is accelerating, and with that more options are becoming available. As long as it has the content it has now, Youtube will continue to be relevant. But with that, the end of it’s reign as the go to video portal of choice is may be coming. And I couldn’t be happier.

I get this question a lot.

I usually give a pretty simple answer: “It’s a very easy to use micro blogging service.” Most of the time people will respond by pointing out that Facebook does the same thing with status updates, albeit in a larger, stalk-ier, complex package (I would like to point out that it seems quite a few people who use Twitter are not avid Facebook users).

It’s nearly inevitable that Twitter’s the next big thing: check out this graph on Quantcast. They average almost 4.1 million people users per month in the US alone. It’s a meme in pop culture. Heck, I’ve seen it mentioned on the news twice in the last week. Twitter has tipped. And most of you too, will use it eventually if you’re not already.

Much of it’s main appeal is in its sheer simplicity and structure. In a way, it’s like reading a newspaper for the headlines, only in this case it’s your friend’s headlines. And with the endless stream of Twitter apps (I use Tweetie and TwitterBar) in all flavors of OS plus an open API, it’s integration into everyday life has become more prevalent.

Now if they could only figure out how to keep the thing running more consistently (it’s down as I type this) and figure out how to make some money, they’d be set.