Media Utopia

(Warning, semi-rambling post ahead...)

Lately I’ve been thinking about how we use media.  A little over a year ago, we joined the DVR revolution with DirecTv’s DVR option, and this taste of flexibility has highlighted exactly how far behind technology we’re lagging in consumer experience.  The DVR is a nice little island utopia.  As long as we’re at the TV with the DVR, the kids have their pick of their favorite shows.  My wife and I can watch a show that we missed, or that we recorded because it was too late for us to stay up.  Unfortanely as soon as you sail away from the island, all is lost.  The DVD player in the car can only serve up movies that we have physical discs for (what an archaic concept!).  My Zune only holds music, videos and pictures that I explicitly put onto is (I don’t keep a lot of media on my computer, so I have to go out of my way to sync stuff.)  My family pictures, home movies, and other digital media mostly lives on our Windows Home Server, which makes it very accessible to our home computers, but not very useful on the road.

What would utopia look like?  Media shared everywhere. If my family owns it, I want it available wherever.

In practice, it’s not this simple.  How would data get from the DVR to the server?  How do you deal with devices with limited storage (come to think of it, every device has some sort of limit)?  How does data get onto the Zune, into the car, etc.

I’m thinking that a simple provider-subscriber model could work.  Each device would advertise it’s content using a format that could describe the media in enough detail that subscribers could make sense of it, and then they could make decisions about retrieving the media (RSS with enclosures might work as-is or with minor extension).  Each device would also have a configurable subscriber profile that would define what it would actively retrieve, or what it would make available by reference.  So, for example:

• DVR Records a bunch of shows.
• DVR publishes listings with metadata via RSS.
• Windows Home Server retrieves RSS from DVR.  Based on its settings WHS will actively retrieve some shows that I’ve set to archive and save them on the server.
• These shows will be added to WHS’s published RSS, with some sort of UID included so that the DVR doesn’t think it needs to copy them back.

or:

• WHS stores some home movies.
• WHS publishes a listing of home movies via RSS.
• DVR subscribes to this listing, and makes them available via the DVR _by reference_, basically it doesn’t make a local copy, but you can view the movies on your TV by selecting them through the DVR interface after which they are streamed from the WHS.  (Wouldn’t want to waste the DVR’s limited drive space by making a local copy.)

The scenarios go from there.  You could set priorities for devices with smaller storage like my Zune30.  It could actively retrieve the most recent 2 episodes of each of my kid’s favorite shows, as well as the most recent episodes of Las Vegas (the one show I try to watch each week), and maybe also a few podcasts that WHS has downloaded for me. 

Ok, that last sentence made this a bit more interesting.  The subscriber/provider model extends. I can subscribe to internet feeds to acquire content.  If I want to, I can publish a feed of select home movies and my family members can subscribe to them.  The data flow might go:

• Digital Camcorder uploads to Client computer. 
• Client computer publishes via RSS. 
• WHS subscribes to RSS and retrieves and archives media (archive action might actually remove it from client depending on settings). 
• WHS adds home movies to its published feed.  
• After reviewing the movies on the server I tag a few as “Share_Family” and they become available on a feed that is accessible from the internet. 
• My extended family then can subscribe via their own WHS or a client application and the content will automatically be transferred to their local repository.

Feeds should be configurable, so that I can build custom feeds that filter by tag, time, format, media type, etc.  So basically each provider will have a single subscription endpoint, but the feed can be filtered, or alternately the client can retrieve the entire feed, and filter locally.  Also, authentication should be an option so that you can make a public/private distinction, or even control access in a more granular manner.

Ok, this has devolved into a bit of stream-of-consciousness rambling, but hopefully it conveys that the technology to do this is available today, but that the implementation is lagging.  DRM is a hurdle to open integration like this, but it’s not an insurmountable one.  Hopefully media companies will realize that if they make their content available and give consumers the freedom to use it in flexible ways, then the consumers will actually be more likely to consume the content.

(Disclaimer:  This post is pure speculation by me.  It does not convey any information from my current or future employers.  I do not know if anything like this is in development, I just wanted to throw out some ideas that might make the consumer experience better in the future.)

Saturday, November 03, 2007 6:06:53 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)      Comments [0]  Internet | Media

What Do You Mean My Address Book Is Full?!?

For many years, I've been a paying customer for Hotmail.  Now this isn't as big a benefit as it used to be, but still, I like the service I get, and usually don't have any issues.  Tonight, after sending an email, I tried to use the "Add Contact" feature, and was denied.  Instead of the expected result, I got the following:

This prompted me to check how many contacts I've got squirreled away.  Evidently, I've accumulated 999 contacts.  While I admit that it's a lot, every one of those contacts was added for a reason, and now Windows Live Hotmail is telling me that I have to purge something if I want to continue adding contacts.

Now I'm in total agreement that my Address Book could use some serious spring cleaning, but I don't like being forced into it.  Besides that, my current "Mailbox Usage" is resting at 6% of 4GB used.  This is not a space issue.  This is an arbitrary limit that was placed on Hotmail.  My question is: What is the functional or business requirement that caused them to set this limit at 999?  Basically, this tells power users and communicators that if they have more than 999 legitimate contacts, then Hotmail isn't good enough for them.

Tuesday, June 05, 2007 9:18:10 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)      Comments [0]  Internet | Microsoft

Twitter - Universal Content Origination System

Chris Webb writes that he thinks Twitter is going to earn a place as a universal content delivery system.  My thoughts on this are a little different.  Reading his post it seems like he thinks it may become the default info aggregator for a bunch of folks.  It may in fact do that, but I think the more interesting thing is that it can be a unified point for individuals to generate and publish info.  Now I haven't played with Twitter yet, but from what I've read, I could see it evolving into a mechanism for people to put as much of their lives online as possible.  The text-twittering that seems to be the bulk of the traffic now is really only for hard-core communicators who's thumbs are glued to their BlackBerry or Smartphone (If you're at your computer, what are you going to Twitter, "I'm sitting at my computer twittering"?)

Anyways, with the API, I could see lots of interesting things happening.  Verizon could offer to automatically twitter my location from the aGPS on my phone (hopefully with a convenient on/off feature).  I could have Flickr auto-twitter my photos.  After Microsoft hashes out their Tellme acquisition they could offer to autotwitter from a microphone (or my phone again) so that my voice comes through as text (and audio?).

Now this is an emergent area, and what it grows into is going to be very uncertain and organic for many years.  I'm hoping that some competing services pop up, and I'm also hoping that they choose to interoperate with Twitter.  All us old guys who remember the Mosaic browser (or gopher clients!) thought email was "the" new way to communicate.  IM was next, and I think Blogs and social networking sites like MySpace are just a pitstop on the way to whatever it is Twitter is going to grow into.  Like email though, their success is going to hinge on playing nice with others.

Friday, March 16, 2007 3:01:56 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)      Comments [0]  Internet

Windows Live MSN .Net Messenger Identiy Crisis

I was just having some trouble signing in to Live Messenger and decided to use that little "Server Status" link.  I was a little surprised to be hit with 3 different brandings for the same service in the span of a few seconds.

 

I know there has been some brand confusion in the land of MSN, but I'd hope that they could at least pick one and try to make things consistant.

Friday, March 16, 2007 2:10:45 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)      Comments [0]  Internet | Microsoft | MSN | Search

Jason Kolb is trying to reinvent the Internet.

Alex Barnett linked to Jason Kolb's recent blog miniseries about online presence and identity.  

Here's links to all of Jason's posts (descriptions from Jason's "Featured Posts" listing)

Reinventing the Internet, part one - How the evolution of social networks is going to fundamentally change the Internet and the way we use it to communicate.
Reinventing the Internet, part two - A domain name in every pot - Why and how our online identities will eventually revolve around our own personal domain names. 
Reinventing the Internet, part three - Unlocking the potential of the URI - this is really WHY everyone needs to have their own domain name.
Reinventing the Internet, part four - Connecting the dots - A look at the open peer-to-peer social network at various levels, and an overview of how it's all hooked together.
Reinventing the Internet, part five - Decentralized network, centralized identity - Why and how our online identities should be nodes in a decentralized social network.

If you think you might someday want to have a part in the evolution of the internet, Jason's posts are a great read.  He has some very interesting ideas that relate to how our personal data is stored and located on the internet.

After reading through these posts, I have a few thoughts to contribute.

1. DNS is not a solved problem.  Jason seems to think that since DNS has served him reliable for over a decade, it is sufficient.  There are many problems with DNS, and they mainly come down to trust.  The distributed nature of DNS makes it powerful and reliable, but it also makes it susceptible to many different attacks, including spoofing & cache poisoning.  Now this doesn't really matter much for a lot of information, but what if we were relying on the security of DNS to verify the authenticity of stock tips coming from Warren Buffet?  As the payoff for fraud gets higher, we need to increase the security of the underlying systems.  The good news is that this problem has mostly been solved from a technology standpoint, check out http://www.dnssec.org/ for links to lots of resources, and this PDF specifically for a great overview on threats and mitigation details.  An alternative to this is requiring the personal server to have an authentication certificate from a reputable authority, and then relying on that to bootstrap any authentication.
2. Jason seems to focus on individuals, but this model could be applied to business entities as well.  Businesses have for the most part missed the social networking boat.  Yeah there are some entities that have set up shop on MySpace, or who publish company-focused blogs, but the value proposition hasn't really taken off.  Jason's model for publishing and consumption of information should apply to businesses as well, and it might be easier for early versions of it to gain traction in this space.
3. Something that will probably be critical in both the personal and business space is the idea of Views, or adapters that will convert the format and protocol of the data.  This way, I post some new family photos to my private data store, they get emailed to my email savvy relatives, they show up in a rss feed for those using newsreaders, they get published to a picture site for those who only want to occasionally browse my pics,  and possibly get sent off to kodak.com for printing and delivery to the grandparents. That way adoption isn't held up because the folks on the receiving end aren't living in the land of XMPP yet.  Of course with this last bit this beast would start overlapping with products like BizTalk.
4. Many of these issues have been solved in very complicated ways in the past by CORBA, and more recently HLA implementations.  These are both distributed models that allow publishing and subscribing of information, based on some predetermined schema, although HLA calls the schema the Object Model Template, and CORBA uses its Interface Definition Language.  What Jason is proposing seems much simpler at first, but the lessons learned from HLA and CORBA, especially in terms of schema development probably apply.
5. Many folks see this idea as being at odds with the MySpace crowd, but really it just requires that the main players allow you to use your own domain name on their servers.  In reality, not too many people want to run a server in their basement (Unless it's dirt-simple and provides real perceived value).  It'd be great if this framework was open enough that I could own my personal domain name and get access to all of the tools of Myspace, Youtube, Flickr, etc.  Ideally, they would just be service providers (format conversion, friendly interface, etc.) and the the data would be pushed back and stored on my personal server (which is hosted by yet another company).  Microsoft and Google are already getting into this space with Live Domains, Office Live, and Google Apps.
6. Social networking sites provide a hub for communities to form around.  The "social momentum" that these sites have is going to make implementing the distributed model more difficult.  Right now soandso.myspace.com equates to "cool" and soandso.com means you are a geek.  Unless the "cool factor" of the distributed model can be raised above MySpace, then there's no chance it'll get any traction.  All of us geeks see this personal server idea and think it's a utopia because it plays to things we think are important, data ownership & verifiable authentication without sharing personal information.  Will it really matter to the teens who sign up on MySpace because it's "cool"?

That's it for now.  Cool ideas Jason, it'll be interesting to see where it goes from here.

Friday, September 08, 2006 6:49:29 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)      Comments [1]  Blogging | Internet | Quattro

The Real Problem With The Network Neutrality Debate

I've been reading lots of well written arguments in the Network Neutrality debate, but unfortunately most of them are missing the point.  Not to say that they aren't factually correct (although some are a little shady), but they aren't positioned properly to win the arguement.
 
For the record, I'm pro-neutrality.  I believe that the greater good of our economy and society is served by a neutral net.  Some more thoughts in that vein can be read here.
 
But for the sake of the debate, most of the pro-neutrality folks are attacking this from the wrong angle.  Most people, even politicians, don't understand the economic and technological forces that keep the internet running, yet we keep offering more complex explanations supporting neutrality.  "Lets see, you didn't understand my last complicated explanation, so let me offer an even more complicated explanation."  It's just not going to work that way.
 
Everyone likes to poke fun at Senator Stevens' "Series of Tubes" analogy, but there's a real lesson to be learned from the popularity of that gaff.  Simple analogies have traction.
 
If the pro-neutrality folks want to win this debate, they have to come up with simple analogies that will allow non-technical folks to grasp the reality of what neutrality means to the economy and society as a whole.  The telcos are doing a very good job of framing this argument in a way to make it seem that certain companies are exploiting neutrality at the expense of everyone.  They are doing this by putting up a smokescreen of complex explanations, and then offering simple but disingenuous analogies that support their position.  When faced with either struggling to understand the complex reality, or accepting the simple analogy, most non-geeks will accept the simple analogy.
 
The pro-neutrality camp needs to focus on developing simple, believable, and truthful analogies.
 
Want to get involved?  (I am not affiliated with this site, just found it while googling.)

Wednesday, September 06, 2006 3:52:29 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)      Comments [0]  Consumer | Internet

Newsgator support rocks, and thoughts on data retention

After posting my troubles on the Newsgator Support Forum, it was determined that theres was a bug in the "Delete all posts on this page" function.  In less than three days, they fixed the bug, got the code into production, and they were able to restore all my lost clips.  My 300 lost clips were joined by about 400 other clippings that I had saved and subsequently deleted over the past year.  While I'm very happy to have my clippings back, it got me thinking about how Web 2.0 companies retain data.

Now Newsgator has mostly my attention data.  I consider this data to be fairly public, but some folks might disagree.  The fact that they were able to restore my data means that they are retaining it for some period of time.  Every company that stores user data on the web faces a choice.  What do they do with data that is "deleted" by users?  There's an obvious value in keeping it, both for the customers, and for the business.  The customer might want the data restored.  The business might want it for historical analysis.

Now, I haven't researched any of these companies, so I don't know what the answers are.  Just food for thought.  If you remove a photo from Flickr, is it really gone?  What about the email you delete from Hotmail or Gmail?  The draft blog post on Blogger that you decided not to publish?

We're used to data retention questions coming up in a work context, but more and more of our personal data is living in data farms operated by companies like Yahoo!, Google, and Microsoft.  I'm sure if you dig, you can find most of the data retention policies.  Probably in the long legalese usage agreements that normal users click past without reading.  This probably won't come to the public's attention until some high profile criminal prosecution pulls out all the stops and subpoenas all this retained data. 

Tuesday, August 22, 2006 8:50:52 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)      Comments [0]  Internet

Newsgator ate my clippings...

Update 8/21/2006, 8:19PM: Newsgator is on top of this.  They have escalated the bug, and will post updated info here: http://www.newsgator.com/forum/FindPost20446.aspx

---

Newsgator just ate approximately 300 entries that I had saved in the "My Clippings" folder.  I use Newsgator Online as my primary aggregator, and a technical glitch just made me really want to switch.

I had a pretty extensive collection of clippings.  A "Blog This" folder with about 10 entries.  A "Read in Detail" folder with many entries that I wanted to read when I had time to concentrate & absorb the information.  A couple of reference folders with info on different topics that I might want to look back on.  The list goes on and on, and now they're all gone.

I was going through my clippings, and I was viewing a folder that had 4 entries in it.  I decided that I no longer needed any of the four entries, so I clicked the "Delete All Posts On This Page" button.  Well, instead of deleting all the posts on that page, it wiped out all 300 clippings I had made.  All gone.

I was able to repeat this by saving some current articles into different clipping folders, and trying the "Delete All Posts On This Page" button again.  Without fail, using this function wipes out ALL saved clips, not just the ones in the displayed page, not just the ones in the selected folder.  All of them.

 

 

Saturday, August 19, 2006 8:25:54 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)      Comments [0]  Blogging | Internet

FUSF is gone, Verizon takes opportunity to gouge customers.

Update: Lots more at Mercury News and Technorati

---

I received this email today.  I'm including it in it's entirety, highligts are mine.

Dear Valued Verizon Online Customer,
Effective August 14, 2006, Verizon Online will stop charging the FUSF (Federal Universal Service Fund) recovery fee. We will stop being assessed the fee by our DSL network suppliers. Therefore, we will no longer be recovering this fee from our customers. The impact of the FUSF fee is as follows: for customers of Verizon Online with service up to 768Kbps, the fee eliminated is $1.25 a month; for customers of Verizon Online with service up to 1.5 Mbps or 3Mbps, the fee eliminated is $2.83 a month (based on current FUSF surcharge amounts). On your bill that includes charges for August 14, 2006 you will see either a partial FUSF Recovery Fee or no FUSF line item at all, depending on your bill cycle.
Starting August 26, 2006, Verizon Online will begin charging a Supplier Surcharge for all new DSL customers, existing customers with a DSL monthly or bundle package, and existing DSL annual plan customers at the time their current annual plan expires. This surcharge is not a government imposed fee or a tax; however, it is intended to help offset costs we incur from our network supplier in providing Verizon Online DSL service. The Supplier Surcharge will initially be set at $1.20 a month for Verizon Online DSL customers with service up to 768Kbps and $2.70 per month for customers with DSL service at higher speeds.
On balance your total bill will remain about the same as it has been or slightly lower.
For more information, see the Announcement in the Help section of Verizon Central, located at http://central.verizon.net
We regret the need to add this Supplier Surcharge, but we thank you for choosing high speed Verizon Online DSL. We appreciate and value your business.
Sincerely,
Verizon Online
Broadband Customer Care Team

So, if I'm reading this correctly, Verizon's costs are going down, but instead of passing that along to consumers, they are taking the opportunity to raise their fees by an amount that is almost equal to the FUSF.  I guess Verizon figure that consumers won't really notice, and they get to pad their profits.

I'd love to see some regulation on how service providers advertise pricing.  Taxes and such should not be allowed to be "passed through", they should just be part of the providers costs of providing the service.  I don't know many other industries that are allowed to pass through costs this way.  I just want the bottom line.  If your costs go up (new taxes) then you raise your prices, and consumers can see the truth about what they are paying for your services.

The irony?  If Verizon didn't practice this tax pass through, then they could've kept the difference from the elimination of the FUSF and I wouldn't be complaining.

---

Update:  After Getting Called Out, Verizon Rescinds Non-USF-Replacement-Fee Fee  -- Basically it looks like Verizon tried to pull a fast one, and when they realized the world was watching, they took their hand out of the cookie jar.

Saturday, August 19, 2006 9:19:51 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)      Comments [1]  Internet

Uninstalling Windows Live Mail Desktop for the second time.

The first time I installed Windows Live Mail Desktop, I had some problems with it freezing up, so I ended up abandoning it.  After the recent refresh, I decided to give it another try.  This time it turned out to be a much more stable platform.  In fact, it's a very good mail client.  My only gripe has been that I haven't been able to get one of my domains.live.com accounts to work with it (And yes, I signed the account up for the beta on ideas.live.com).

So why am I uninstalling a good product?  Well, I gave it 4 days, and it didn't make my life any better.  While Microsoft has put together a great product with WLMD, I don't really see any value above and beyond what I get from the online Windows Live Mail.  In fact, the online interface seems cleaner and more intuitive.

For now I'm sticking to the online Live Mail.  I might give the desktop version another try later, but really I wish it would look and function just like the online version, but with support for multiple accounts and a locally cached copy of my mail.

(Posted with Windows Live Writer Beta, giving another desktop app a chance...) 

Wednesday, August 16, 2006 5:28:03 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)      Comments [0]  Internet | Microsoft

The Future of Your Career is Online...

This post on Library crunch made it into my "Blog this" folder back in February, and I'm finally doing some spring cleaning.

Michael Casey links to some ideas from Richard Macmanus and a whitepaper by Rod Boothby.  The basic premise is that the next round of MBA graduates (I'll be able to count myself in that group in August '06) know how to work differently.  From my perspective, he's right.  My coursework has been completed exclusively through the University of Maryland University College's online classroom.  Almost half of my assignments are collaborative, and another quarter require online conference interaction.  We email, we teleconference, we chat.  We know how to self organize, chose task leaders, and get things done.  And I've never met any of my teammates in person.  Sometimes we have to work around time zone differences to accommodate teammates who are living or traveling across the world.  And all this is just the mechanics.  Thomas Friedman's The World is Flat was required reading this semester.  We're coming out reading to fight in a global marketplace, connecting by a myriad of communications links forming a web around us...

But even with all that, we're behind the curve.  As the next decade passes, we have the email generation, the IM generation, the livejournal, generation, the myspace generation, and the second life generation, all entering the workforce.  Then a subset of them will get MBA's, or mature into management roles.  These folks are going to fundamentally change the dynamics of business.  Robert Scoble touches on this in his recent Moonshot post.  The handshake is out, the business trip, phone calls and voicemail are going to fade away.  Coming out of high school, many students will have more collaborative skills then most businessmen of decades past. 

Thursday, April 27, 2006 11:03:56 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)      Comments [0]  Business | Internet | Technology

The Nuclear Option for Network Neutrality: Eminent Domain

I’m reading stories all over the blogosphere and technology news about how the big network players are trying to leverage their control of the internet and do away with network neutrality.  Daniel Berninger asserts that this development will destroy the internet as we know it.  Many others are chiming in.

While I’m sure many are sensationalizing this, I’d like to put forward an option.

Throughout the history of this country, the government has had no qualms about using its power of eminent domain to build infrastructure that will serve the common good.  That’s why we are able to have highways, decent roads, schools, public buildings, and many other institutions fairly well spread out through the country.

The argument goes like this:  The internet is infrastructure that serves the public good.  It enables commerce, communication, government operations, pretty much anything that requires communication can leverage the internet to make services more accessible and interoperable.  If the actions of the owners of the network are beginning to threaten the public good, then the government has a responsibility to step in.  This is even more relevant because the government has subsidized many major improvements to the buildout of the internet.

Now I’m not sure that I’d want the government taking over the internet.  I could see it falling in the lap of the FCC, and I just can’t imagine that would serve the common good (No offense intended to the fine folks at the FCC).  But the recent Supreme Court decision on eminent domain makes that a mute point.  We just need a couple of private development corporations to propose to some local or state governments that they could better serve the public good than the current owners of those assets.  The government, even at the local or state level could step in and condemn and transfer the assets to a new, more responsible steward.

Now, like other nuclear options, this one might server better as a threat than through actual implementation.  If a few heavyweight locals (NYC, LA, etc.) let the networks know this option was on the table, I’d be willing to bet that it would never have to be implemented.  The downside to this option being on the table is that it might discourage investment in new infrastructure, but I think that it would be better than letting the network degrade into a disjointed, fractured, and much less useful internet.

Update 6/19/2006: Mike at TechDirt links to a Weekly Standard article by Andy Kessler exploring this same idea.  Interesting additions to the discussion at both sites.

Tuesday, February 07, 2006 7:53:01 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)      Comments [0]  Consumer | Internet | Random

Search Champs v4, I'll be there!

Sweet!

I'll be participating in Search Champs v4 later this month.  It looks like I'll be working with the local.live.com team, so if you have any feedback, use the contact link (->) and drop me an email.  I'll do my best to take as much constructive feedback to the team as I can!

 

 

Wednesday, January 11, 2006 8:17:07 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)      Comments [1]  Internet | Mapping | Microsoft | MSN | Search

Live.com Classifieds

Dare Obasanjo has two great posts with some background and details on Microsoft's entry into the classified ad service space.  Microsoft's Fremont (formerly know as Casbah, later to be known as Classifieds.Live.com?) is an atypical classified ad website that allows you to limit viewing to trusted persons in your social network.

Of all of the recent entries into the social networking space, this is one that I think I might actually use, and encourage my friends to use.  I really like the idea of being able to limit my posts, and reading, of ads to trusted or semi-trusted people.

Dare's post talks about social circles, and tribes based on email and buddy lists.  I think an important part of the success of Fremont is going to be the ability of users to build, manage and share circles that are based on more than just email addresses.  Let me build a circle that includes all of my college classmates that currently live in the Washington D.C. area, or a different circle may include any friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend.  After I build cool, useful circles, I want to share them with my friends.  That way I could build a circle for a model airplane club, or a Scout troop, and then share it with the members who could then use it to post relevent information or items for sale to the entire circle.  Hrm, seems to have come full-circle to MSN Groups eh?  Merge Groups with Fremont, and now you have a ton of "Special Interest" tribes, ready built, and ready to make use of the new service. Cool...

The major drawback to this social model is that one of the biggest features is based on limiting visibilty of ads.  The only way that Fremont will come out ahead is if Microsoft can build users' trust high enough that they are willing to post more ads, enough more ads to make up for the limited visibility.  Building more interesting circles will also require that users are willing to include personal details in their profiles. Again, this will come down to trust.

This is going to be interesting.  Microsoft's ability to integrate this accross Messenger, email, groups, and maybe Spaces is going to make it unique in the field.  Yahoo! can play this game, AOL can play too.  Google is still playing catch-up with their application base, but they're closing fast.  Whoever makes it easy & seamless wins.

Thursday, December 01, 2005 10:16:40 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)      Comments [0]  Internet | Microsoft | MSN

Transient (Throwaway) Email Addresses

I wonder if it's time for email providers like gMail and Hotmail to take a lesson from the banking industry.  Some banks now offer consumers the option to generate temporary credit card numbers to use for online shopping.  These temporary numbers generally have a spending limit associated with them, and a shorter expiration period than a typical credit card number. 

How would this work for email?  The main difficulty would be in the creation and input of the temporary addresses into online forms. The nature of the temporary addresses would likely make them hard to remember.  This is where Microsoft could play on a bit of Hotmail/MSN Toolbar synergy.  Basically, you create a plugin to the form-fill wizard that will detect when the user has entered their primary email address into an online form, and then you could gently suggest that they use a temporary address instead.  You can include options for how long the address should be valid for (3 months, 1 year, indefinite), and possibly let the user select a default automatic replace option.

On the Mail UI side, you could provide a way for consumers to find out what site gave out their address to spammers.  I'm thinking that the user would just hover their mouse over the "to" address and it would display some basic info such as "This email was sent to a transient email address.  This address was generated on 03/03/2005 for the site http://blobservations.net".  You could also let users expire indefinite addresses, or other addresses that have been overrun with spam.

The benefits?  This lowers the value of all of those "verified email address" lists that are bartered on the gray market.  Even more importantly, it provides a chain of culpability when your email address is shared without your permission.

The difficulties?  User experience.  Getting this right so that everyday email users understand it will be tough, but doable.  The infrastructure to generate addresses and route/deny email is going to be complex (but if it lowers the overall spam load, you should free up some of the required resources).   Security?  Essential.  Branding?  What do you call this functionality so that consumers "get it"?  Cross Platform?  Please, leave the API open so that everyone can play.

Other random ideas:  Let users create vanity (self-selected) temporary addresses.  Maybe provide 3 free with any mail account, and let users purchase extra vanity "slots".  This way consumers would have a way of throwing away overrun email addresses without losing all of their mail.  Whenever a user throws away an old address, let them create a new one for free. 

Many computer savvy users have been generating and abandoning temporary addresses for years.  Make this easy, and give the power to everyday email users, and the value of spam goes down. This isn't the end-all-spam solution, but it makes it harder to abuse the email system, and hands some control back to the consumer.

Tuesday, October 18, 2005 5:04:59 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)      Comments [2]  Consumer | Internet