There is no implementation of 4g mobile networks right now, and won’t be for a while to come. While T-Mobile is using Evo “4g” ads on television to bash AT&T and the iPhone, it’s amusing to note that, according to the body that creates such standards, no such standard is currently implemented in the United States, nor anywhere worth mentioning.
Not surprising. Here are the facts.
You’re seeing an increasingly resentful attitude towards Apple on a lot of blogs and newspaper outlets these days: Small but increasingly frequent editorial hints that Apple is no longer the darling underdog, but the resented 1000-pound gorilla that nobody can compete with. I’ll give you a few examples:
On the day Apple became the #1 vendor of cell phones in the U.S. with 26%, All Things Digital put out the headline: “Android Surges… Apple Flat”. Now when you’ve just eaten up a quarter of the market, it’s very hard to call you flat, but I’ll digress. They are looking at OS shipments rather than product shipments. From Apple’s point of view, the two are the same, and since Android isn’t a first-party OS, Apple gets the last laugh as the market leader. Still, it’s funny that the editor can call Apple “flat” on such a monumental day, especially when Android marketers are a half-dozen deep and Apple is just one company, with just one (or two) handset. One thing ATD did get right is the fact that Blackberry is dying on the vine.
Another example is in the marching orders of the press corps towards treatment of the Android “family” of products (from a half-dozen different vendors) being treated as a single, monolithic anti-iphone. This depsite the fact that there are OEM features and major platform functionality differences on every handset. Just compare an HTC to any phone with MotoBlur. They really feel like entirely different products, but none in such a way that you can say yep this one is the “iPhone of Android devices”.
So I wonder if these journalistic tendencies are driven out of the desire to see Apple take a few bruisings now that they aren’t clawing at Microsoft from the bottom of the 32-bit barrel.
The assertion that Facebook can protect its market leading position by entering into the smaller-is-bigger philosophy or going async (a la Twitter) is nifty, but not the answer to “what’s wrong on the Internet”.
After reading Dave McClure’s post, subtitled “How to Take Down Facebook”, I think that, between all the f-bombs and Generation Z three-letter acronyms, Dave makes a few good points. For example, Twitter is better for following famous people (to which I would counter, Facebook is better for enabling fame).
Dave wants to see Facebook become an enabler of more private communities. To his burrito point, we could say that Facebook alerady does this through threaded, instant mail messaging. We could also respond to his friend overload point that perhaps Dave doesn’t know how to manage his profile privacy settings, or that perhaps Dave should start a Fan Page and whittle down his friend relationships to the bare essentials.
Bottom line is, true intimacy in relationships cannot be fostered by an inorganic structure like Facebook, in my opinion. Intimacy is about mutual experiences, not a mutual sounding board. We all have telephones–does this make us more intimate in our relationships than when we’re together, shoulder-to-shoulder, or working on the same outcome as a team? Hardly. Facebook is merely a platform for communication, and while it plays a role in enabling quality relationships, it is certainly a subserviant role.
My advice to Dave McClure is, you probably don’t have 2000 actual friends, so fix it. Delete. Delete. Delete.
But to give up those synchronous connections on Facebook is to give up the influence that comes with having a large audience. And herein lies the real challenge, if I can rephrase what Dave is saying here into something a little more succinct: Facebook is mediocre at protecting the privacy of celebrities, while Twitter is very good.
The effect of this can be seen in Facebook’s inability to provide more intimate connections, and in Twitter’s ability to prevent celebrities from having to spill anything more than they’d like to on their profile.
Coming from a small business owner in humble Cleveland, Ohio, the strategic guidance I might give Steve Jobs on his (sad) attempt at building a walled garden social network would be this: sometime it’s better to join than fight. If Apple can’t get its mits on Facebook, it should seriously consider taking over MySpace from News Corp. In fact, News Corp. has already outed the price tag at $300,000,000, though I think that by the time any potential deal might be struck, that price may come down. The Facebook train just shifted into fifth gear, after all.
Once upon a time, iTunes had the opportunity to become “indyTunes“, and totally missed the boat. Right now, MySpace is the MP3.com of the 2.0 era, offering indies more than Apple does in terms of self-service distribution and exposure. With this rebooted MySpace, a very immersive, very commercialized, very polished experience is in order. Same idea as iTunes, except that iTunes isn’t nearly as immersive as it could be. Problem one is DRM, which has stimied iTunes’ ability to become totally web-based. Problem two is Steve, who wants so much control over the ecosystem that he’s not likely, in my opinion, to expand Ping to the wild wild web.
That said, I still think MySpace’s new look rock concert skin is just the veil for the real goods: an audience for Ping. If Apple wants in on that action, they’re going to have to pick sides, and if Facebook is as snot-nosed as I’ve read regarding Steve, then MySpace might be ripe for the picking.
A shout out to Tsahi Levent-Levi at the VoIP Survivor blog for putting me in his Top 50 list. Thanks! If you haven’t read Levent-Levi’s blog, do so–it’s an excellent insider perspective.
It’s interesting that we’re only now having the debate over whether or not FM radio in cell phones is a good idea, at least on a widespread forum, considering Nokia and others have equipped this feature for 5-6 years now. The fact is, it’s not a good idea—it’s a GREAT idea. Here’s why:
1 – The ratings for terrestrial FM radio still dwarf that of satellite stations, when you look at the local cumes, so while a Sat channel may have 650k listeners at a time, they may only have 15k in a particular local market. Good for national advertisers; bad for community ones. For this singular reason, FM isn’t going anywhere.
2 – It’s free to the listener, can be accomplished anonymously, and requires no subscription or membership.
3 – The digital terrestrial stream (ie. HD radio) is of excellent fidelity and provides a transport for digital (and even interactive) programming beyond what FM broadcasters are currently using, so there’s headroom below terrestrial’s technology ceiling.
4 – Terrestrial radio is more or less weatherproof. Sat radio isn’t.
Now, as to whether or not it should be mandatory–well that just sounds like a war between the recording lobby and the cell phone carriers. I’m of the opinion that the FM broadcasters are generally in favor of it but hamstrung by the recording industry.
Old friend Andy Abramson’s post about Yahoo Messenger’s expansion to iPhone and iPod devices contains a nugget:
”…with the iPhone I now have Yahoo video to anyone running Windows XP versions or later of Yahoo Messenger (sorry, no Mac version yet) as Yahoo is taking advantage of the phone number…”
The nugget is in the parentheses. I wouldn’t be surprised if the feature never translates to OS X because Yahoo has never really cared much about feature parity in Messenger on OS X. My guess is that they just view the market as being too small, too much of a subset of user requirements, that it isn’t worth their development dollars. But the mobile device market–especially iOS–is a whole different story. Lots more potential customers there.
Apple’s introduction of an app store for the Mac is not only the right thing to do, it’s also long overdue. I’ve been predicting it since August of 2008. The last time I wrote about it, I suggested that opening an app store for Mac (and even Windows) would remove barriers to bigtime software distribution while driving down prices. Both ultimately good things. I’m glad to see that ol’ Steve finally saw the light. Wouldn’t have been something if Apple would’ve created the first app store for Windows, too?
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