06 December 2007
Written by
Richard Leggett (
)
Published on December 6th, 2007 @ 04:24:00 pm, using 435 words, 1264 views
For the “cyber nomad” (cyber-cafe frequenter), Jooce is a new web-based venture which aims to give:
- Multi-network-chat - instant message your friends from your jooce desktop, no matter which IM client they use
- Instant file share - share files instantly with your friends just by dragging and dropping
- YouTube upload - upload your favourite YouTube videos to your jooce desktop and share them instantly with friends
- Public desktop - express yourself with your fully customizable public face on the internet
- Media Player - play music, watch videos, create playlists;
- File Storage - secure online storage of all your files - accessible from any internet connection anywhere in the world.
This reminds me somewhat of Wallop, a kind of MySpace evolved. It’s probably important to remember that you or I might not be the target audience for this sort of thing. Generation Y (and later) eats up the sorts of features on offer by the bucket-load, and the not-so-tech-savvy of all ages could perhaps enjoy the way it brings together a lot of functionality into one manageable entity. Geeks like myself might prefer to use other disperate services that are potentially harder to use but offer extra functionality or features, and this can make it easy to pick holes in these sorts of things, but in reality I think there’s a lot to be said for this sort of thing. For one, having your music collection online (ignoring the issue of DRM for a second) would mean that you can hotdesk or visit a friend and not worry about where it lives. It’s one for the “coffee shop generation” perhaps.
An interesting feature of Jooce is the split between public and private “desktops", where you can organise your content and publish it or keep it secret by dragging it between the two. The duality of public/private personas when online is something I spoke about in my recent presentation “Touching the Future”. I think it’s something that people growing up with the internet now will have to learn early on in their development, so Jooce’s implementation helps to make this easy, making it very clear what you are publishing about yourself.
It will be interesting to see how successful Jooce is, one thing is for sure, giving people methods for hacking in extra functionality (Facebook), and building in transparency (linking/searching), is something that bolsters any social network. It’s something that is traditionally harder to achieve in all-Flash affairs, but with good APIs it is definitely achieveable. Let’s hope these concepts are core to Jooce.
I have 8 Jooce invites to give away, first come first served…
04 December 2007
Written by
Richard Leggett (
)
Published on December 4th, 2007 @ 11:39:53 pm, using 601 words, 864 views
That means iTunes’ current model will be due for some drastic changes, no more downloading things “to keep". Someone asked me the other day whether I really thought all our media consumption (music, video, insert-other-media-here) would be entirely subscription based in the near future. I gave a definite YES in response.
This is something I’ve had on my mind a few years, and personally I’m of the opinion the only viable solution to the increasingly complex problem of content management and ownership -whilst maintaining the rights of artists and authors- is to consume all of our content as the result of a subscription to a media conglomerate or third party broker.
The stepping stones to this are coming, one at a time. Nokia today announced the “Comes With Music” service, which allows customers purchasing a new device, unlimited free downloads of a million songs from (initially) Universal’s music library. On top of that the downloads will remain accessible and playable after that year is up.
That’s a good first step, and it’s not as if Nokia is the only one providing subscription based music services. But what I’m talking about here is entirely subscription based models, where you don’t ever have a file to “keep", you just obtain the media when you wish to listen/watch/interact with it. This means that to the company facilitating the transfer, you cease to be a user that has paid for X, Y and Z. Instead you gain a “role", your role specifying what sort of access to the content library you have, and in what circumstances you can consume that media.
Added to this I very much think that we will completely give up ownership of our content. Not only will we not be able to say “yeah, I own a copy of XYZ", to me it seems sensible that we will also not be storing our content anywhere near our physical locality.
When speaking about this topic there are always throes of despair from people that are used to owning physical copies of original content, and that’s understandable, many people have grown up collecting music or films on physical media. I imagine you’d get a very different opinion from the current generation of children with regards to the importance of owning content. The BitTorrent/YouTube generation has very little interest in collecting media when its all there, all the time anyway.
The subscription/no-ownership model is a big shift in how you see media. It also requires a great deal of trust in the stability of the companies offering the content, as well as the speed and reliability of your internet connection with regards to whichever device you are using to consume the content. But all in all I think it’s a sensible proposition, and nothing new, but thankfully companies like Nokia are not afraid to dip their toe in the water and examine new ways to deal with media to make the necessary baby-steps toward this goal.
But will the subscription model be successful? I think so, and in other markets it already is. It certainly checks all of the right boxes… To me one of the keys to the success of a new technology or any mechanism that uses technology is that it must make things easier than before (or at the very least bring with it new abilities that far outweigh any new inconveniences.) Related to this the subscription model deals with the problem of piracy in the only way possible, by making it *easier* to consume your content by paying for a subscription, than going through alternative channels.
03 December 2007
Written by
Richard Leggett (
)
Published on December 3rd, 2007 @ 02:12:58 pm, using 174 words, 684 views
Tink has just uploaded a video of my Touching the Future presentation. A big thankyou to Tink as always for the vast amount of effort it takes to organise LFPUG every month. The video itself is very small but most of the presentation is verbal anyway and the sound is not too bad at all. However you can still download the slides if you wish.
See the video here.
Download the slides to follow along with here.
Also I mentioned a PDF on the night created by Tom Klinkowstein, Irene Pereyra et al(with no less than Bruce Sterling acting as an advistor to the project). It is in the form of a diagram illustrating “A DAY IN THE LIFE OF A NETWORKED DESIGNER’S SMART THINGS OR A DAY IN A DESIGNER’S NETWORKED SMART THINGS, 2030″ (apologies for the caps). I thoroughly recommend taking a look if you get a chance, there’s a wealth of interesting information in there, the blog entry related to it gives some background. You can view it here.
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