Mixtape Two - Nice Background Music

Pippa makes these great mixes for her dad under the heading of 'Nice Background Music'. The last one she made was the first one to have singing on it. Although they're for her dad, the joy of iTunes is that we have them too, and this regularly makes the grade for our weeknight listening.

Enjoy.

The supidity - EMI sues MP3 Tunes

I use MP3tunes to store my music in an online locker. It's not a perfect service, but it does what I need. It lets me kepp a backup of all the music that I own outside my house and it lets me listen to my music anytime I am near a computer.

The key phrase throughout that first paragraph is my music. I put stuff on MP3tunes that I have paid for and own. I enjoy listening to music that I bought. It makes me want to buy more music...

So the idea of EMI suing MP3tunes fills me with anger. These guys are dinosaurs. They have no idea.

Anyway, here's the text of the letter in full. Please support MP3tunes.

Dear MP3tunes Customer,

Let me start by saying that as the CEO of MP3tunes I appreciate your support over the last few years. Your suggestions and patience have helped us build the Locker system we have today. We just launched AutoSync that makes managing your music collection easier than ever.

As you may be aware, the major record label EMI has sued MP3tunes, claiming our service is illegal. You can read about the case here. Much is at stake -- if you don't have the right to store your own music online then you won't have the right to store ebooks, videos and other digital products as well. The notion of ownership in the 21st century will evaporate. The idea of ownership is important to me and I want to make sure I have that right and my kids do too.

I would like to ask for your assistance in our battle for personal music ownership. We need your help because we are a small, 15-person company battling an international giant. They would like to make us spend all of our money paying legal bills. Here's what you can do to help:

1) Please upgrade to a Premium account. This week MP3tunes is launching 3 service levels. I hope you will consider signing up for one of the paid levels. This will not only help us pay for the costs of our service (machines, storage and bandwidth) but a portion will go to cover our legal costs in our case with EMI.

2) If you have a chance to talk publicly about our cause on your blog, with friends, reporters or even EMI personnel please do so. MP3tunes is working hard to design a secure personal music service. We don't promote sharing of music in any manner. We want people to legally acquire their music. But once they do, we think it's important that you be able to use it how you want for your personal use. The AmazonMP3 store says: "You may copy, store, transfer and burn the Digital Content only for your personal, non-commercial, entertainment use." and this is what MP3tunes allows you to do.

You have my commitment that I'll continually battle for your right to store your music online and listen to it anywhere on any device. I hope you'll consider helping MP3tunes in our battle. Thanks.

-- Michael Robertson
CEO
MP3tunes.com

Firefox should be the desktop client for webapps

Recently there seems to have been a rash of 'desktop client' solutions for popular webapps.

There's Twhirl and Twitteriffic for Twitter, Alert Thingy for friendfeed and a whole slew of others. A lot of this development has been stirred up by the launch of Adobe Air (a platform that lets developers port flash-style apps from the web to their very own desktop clients).

So far, I've resisted downloading and using any of these desktop hybrids. I like my webapps in a browser and I already have an offline client for Twitter - my phone. That said, judging by the sheer volume of 'via Alert Thingy' signatures on friendfeed these days the desktop apps do seem to have been quite popular.

What do you get from a desktop version of your favorite app? As far as I can see there are 3 big advantages:

1. A flashy, reactive interface
2. A neat, standalone instance of the app
2. Offline access to your data with syncing of your offline actions
3. Notifications that unobtrusively (sometimes) alert you of other activity on the app

Well, here's my take. I don't see why Firefox (or any other browser for that matter) can't do all of this, with no need for additional downloads. Let's take things one at a time:

1. As is evidenced by the web apps themselves, the combination of CSS, DOM and Javascript make for incredibly responsive, highly styled interfaces. If Google can use these tools to turn my lowly browser into a spreadsheet, then I am pretty confident we can do anything.
2. On my mac I have a little app called Fluid. It creates standalone, single window instances of Safari that open a specific URL (gmail or Google Reader for instance). Those apps are walled off from your other browser windows so a pesky crash caused by some random Facebook app doesn't hurt your unfinished draft in gmail. One addition I'd make here is an API in the browser that lets the app take greater control over the appearance of the window (e.g remove all of the chrome or color it black etc) that is controllable from Javascript.
3. Google Gears - improve the stability and speed and then package it with the browser. Package it with all browsers (or something else similar that uses the same API)
4. Here's where we need something genuinely new. But it's not rocket science. Browsers should have a little API that let's web apps create notifications from the OS (in the same way and IM client does). Just like Gears the web app should have to get explicit permission from the user to access this API (to avoid the obvious abuse you'd get from advertisers).

My point is, we already have almost everything we need for the browser to be the desktop client for all of our web apps and with a little effort there would be limited additional effort required by an app developer to create an app that just doesn't care about the connection state of your PC.

The key of course (as I'm learning with my efforts to build an app myself) is to get this stuff standardised across browsers. The APIs need to work the same in Firefox, IE and Safari. But if we can get that right, I'm not sure all this hype about Adobe Air is justified...

Mix tape - Bubblegum Pop

I got introduced to this awesome service called Mixwit recently. I'm going to try and do at least one ten track mixtape per week on the blog.

The first one is inspired by my recent discovery of Jens Leckman and is all about bublegum pop. Enjoy.

On platforms and apps

I was reading Fred Wilson's blog yesterday and saw that 4 more startups recently launched services on top of Twitter. It caught my interest, so I shot a tweet across to Fred asking why Twitter themselves weren't building more apps. (Fred's VC firm are investors in Twitter)

Fred's response was simple and I wholeheatedly agree with it: "should they be? Or should they be focused on making the platform better?" Twitter is a platform, first and foremost, and they need to keep improving its reliability, speed and APIs. However, Fred's reply also got me thinking. If I agree with his response but I still have my nagging question from the start of this post, what's up?

A bit of pondering and an always helpful discussion with Pippa later, I had my finger on it. For me, the question is not whether Twitter should focus on platform or apps, but where you should draw the boundary between the two. What does this mean?

Well, let me take the example of Google Maps. That's a platform - you only have to count the number of times you encouter in your daily forays across the web (or visit this page at Programmable Web) to see that. As a platform Google Maps could just provide draggable maps and a geo-coder (the tech that let's you turn a postal code into a map coordinate). Google could have left the local business search, driving directions, UGC mapping etc to 3rd parties. These services might be called apps. Sat on top of Google's platform.

But google didn't keep it's platform to a minimum. It built functionality into the core offering. That meant that some of these core services can work together a bit better and faster (driving duevyions to home via the supermarket). And that created value for users, for Google and for developers who could focus on writing really groundbreaking services on top of an already highly functional platform.

So where does this lead us with Twitter? Well I think just maybe they need to expand what they think of as their platform. Not too much but maybe a bit. One way to do that would be to see what little bits of code are being constantly reinventing for the service? Those are candidates for platformhood. 

A good example here is the functionality required to run Fred's lyric of the day club. That's a pretty simple idea and requires some pretty simple code. Why can't you just do that on Twitter? I'm sure there are a bunch of other little bits of code that fit this bill. And the right implementation has two benefits: first your developer community can get on with writing great apps (instead of simple little hacks) and second you can expand your 'developer' base to include highly non-technical people (imagine how many lotd-style clubs there would be if you didn't need to write a Twitter bot and own a database to build it.)

I'm sure there are a bunch of other things that Twitter should do 'out of the box'. What do you think?

PS - I'm really enjoying Twitter, so I hope this is seen as constructive feedback rather than a rant :-)