Music Stores

Brian Briggs reviews the various Online Music Stores that are around. IT still seems to be shooting at a moving target. It seems there is no best yet. Major concerns are choice and price. Interesting reading.

[by way of Marc Canter]

Del.icio.us

This Service Provider combines various services into an intermediairy service. It services publishers and viewers.

The basic services is an Enabling one: it allows users to publish their bookmarks on the Internet. A bookmark consists of a title, a url, a description and a set of tags. The bookmarks are published to the entire internet under a license set by the publisher. A viewer can thus see what an individual publisher publishes.

The service aggregates the bookmarks that it is publishing and offers various services to view the bookmarks of the entire community. A free and guided search function are offered. The free search function allows to search through the tag-field of a bookmark. A user can also define a subscription on one or more tags. The predefined search function includes: the latest published bookmarks, the most active tags, todays most popular bookmarks, todays most popular tags, related tags, bookmarks per author. One can subscribe to feeds of all these predefined queries.

Web 2.0 analysis:

• Structured MicroContent - YES, bookmarks. A permalink is however lacking;
• Data Outside - NO, there is no service to either import or subscribe to bookmark feeds. This would be useful;
• Licenses - YES, the user can set under which Creative Commons License his bookmarks are published;
• Feeds Galore - YES, there are a lot of feed possibilities;
• Web API’s - YES, there are several interfaces availablef;
• Desktop Integration - YES, for MacOS-X there is a client that uses the Web API’s;
• Single Identity - NO;
• MicroWeb - NO, the service does not integrate with other services;
• Wild MicroContent - NO;

tags: microcontent; type; bookmark; tele-service; enabling; publishing;

Call Control

Gerrit @ Smart Mobs mentions the Only One service of an Ohio-based services provider.

In the Telecom-world many types of enhanced services have been developed, but the problem is the interface with the customer: too difficult. With the advance of Internet as a possible interface there were hopes that things would change. It has not really happened. It is all just to much hassle for the user. And when you really need it you probably have a secretary. It is a pity, but there just does seem to be a need out there.

Ditch the landline-service?

An interesting report in Extremetech of an experience with going all mobile: it did not work out. I assume this is mainly a US-story. I have seen reports the KPN Telecom in the Netherlands is losing a lot of customers per year to people who go all mobile. So mobile can really be a substitution service.

Dropload

Lessig mentions on his blog the service offered by DropLoad. The service allows the users to exchange large files and thus circumvent possible limitations in an email service. The sender can drop a file through a web-interface (HTTP-Post) and the receiver can get it in a similar way. The email-addresses are used for notification. The files are kept for 48 hours at Dropload.

I wonder whether there do exits many users for this kind of service. Are many email-services to limited? Anyway the service is nothing new. I have have seen similar services many years ago (lost their name). It is very similar as any web-based email services, which allows the exchange of attachments. In fact I used Yahoo mail for this purpose.

Ambient Voice Calls

Joi Ito mentions on his Blog an interesting usage of VoIP: permanent calls. Whether working together or just begin apart for some reason, just keep the voice channel open and you will hear the life of the other person as she/he goes about her/his business. Maybe the separation is then not so bad. They also call it ambient virtual co-presence.

A permanent call on PSTN is certainly not done, due to the costs. And also the PSTN-infrastructure is not designed for that. I guess the number of voice channels can be increased to get a 5.1 surround presence and you will have an even more immersive presences (immersive ambient virtual co-presence?).

Mobitus

This service provider sells a VoIP-PSTN gateway service. It allows users with their software and a headphone to make voice calls between Mobitus users or between a Mobitus and PSTN user worldwide. You must buy a subscription with them and you will get call charges for making calls through the gateway.

It is unclear why this is a paid service as also many free services are available. I wonder whether anyone is working on the inter-working between all these VoIP-clients and -services.

[inspiration Techdirt and WiFi Planet]

Book search @ Google

Google is adding the ability to search inside books. So Google is slowly expanding its search domain, which is good I guess. I wonder whether they will be able to take away functionality from Amazon. Or maybe they just will help Amazon selling books. They could become an affiliate. At last they have a business model

[inspiration Techdirt and Search Engine Watch]

Prepaid Internet

KPN Telecom, in the Netherlands, introduces a prepaid Internet service. You can buy prepaid-cards for 5 or 10 Euro.  This allows for 500 or 1000 minutes of surfing per 4 months (it is their 2-monthly billing cycle)! You must use their special ISP: Direct Internet. You can order the card (only?) online and you are up and running within three days. You will also receive a confirmation letter.

They seem to have created a lot of procedures around this product, which I think invalidates the idea of prepaid. For it would be useful if I arrive in a country and am able to go online within minutes, not three days! It does not seem to be geared to this user group. It is more a way to sell a fixed amount of internet minutes and hope that people won’t use it and cash in the left overs. The offer seems to be coupled to your fixed number, so it is not suitable for people on the road. But this is a bit unclear on their website. All in all it is a bit confusing, but is seems to be only a new pricing model for their restricted subscription-less ISP.

Come to think of it. It is not without a subscription as you must have a fixed line and thus already have a subscription with KPN through PSTN.

[inspiration: Webwereld]

Google Everywhere

Techdirt comments on the vision that Google wants to be the command line operating system of the Internet. For any search you have in your mind, you could go te Google. He only comments that not everybody wants to use a command line, but I guess Google will be quite able to create an user interface.

By the way, this is a interesting vision for Google. Would make life much easier.