This in reference to the accusations (1, 2) that Techcrunch made towards Last.fm, which have been criticised by many, not least by Last.fm and CBS itself. For those that haven’t been following it, accusations were raised at Last.fm for sharing (private) user-data with the RIAA, the US institution best known for suing old ladies for sharing music on their PCs. Recently, CBS/Last.fm issued another statement that these accusation are completely false. More recently, today in fact, news was released that the Last.fm founders quit. Now, I, as a blogger and not a media-person (there is a difference), don’t think that this last piece of circumstantial evidence bodes well for CBS/Last.fm.

Let’s first define media and truth as I think its relevant to the discussion. By media, I mean any publication that has it in their core-statutes (or whatever they are called) to inform the public as accurately and honestly as possible. This excludes blogs, in my opinion, as most of us have made no such agreements with our readers (sorry, guys!). Instead, some of us use it as a diary, others as a commentary, and others as a pseudo reporting service (on Tech IT Easy, we try to restrict ourselves to two and three). Techcrunch, on the other hand, while having started as a blog, can now easily be called an organisation reporting the news, with all the conditions that come with it.

Truth: in the media, truths are verifiable facts. You can verify facts in two ways. One, by quoting your source, preferably primary, short and simple. Two, by being a reputable source yourself. In other words, the Financial Times can tell us that an anonymous source has told them that Martians have visited the president and that statement will hold more value than if I told you that Martians have visited the president. Why? Because the Financial Times has more to lose than me (perhaps).

While Techcrunch is obviously not the 121-year old institution that is the Financial Times, it is in many ways it’s equivalent in this time of new online-focussed media. It has a lot to lose by giving out the wrong information. Techcrunch repeated its allegations several times even, without quoting sources I should mention, which leads me to believe them.

So why not trust CBS/Last.fm over Techcrunch? One, a corporation stating that it hasn’t done harm to its customers is simple self-preservation. Two, while I have been following Last.fm even before it was Last.fm, and while I actually find its founders very sympathetic, I think that they experienced the hypocrisy that corporations sometimes live by (it may be in their statutes even), and decided to quit. If this happened to my baby, I would quit too.

I am not saying that everything Techcrunch writes should be taken at their word (nor even the Financial Times), but as recent history has shown us, there is something wrong in the world of the music- and video-industry (you know, that other media-industry), and the only protection we regular people seem to have, is the media calling them out on the sometimes very nasty things they do. And while we should keep double- and tripple-checking the facts, if only to keep the Techcrunches et al. on their toes, if the RIAA is involved and a big company like CBS, I think I’ll side with public media.

End blog post.

Vincent

P.S. the irony: I think that CBS is also a news reporting organisation. However, in the case of the Last.fm “business unit,” it is not!

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My sentiments about online media aside (I think it’s despicable the way media-companies treat consumers, particularly outside of the US), it has always bothered me to use Last.fm for a number of reasons. Here they are:

1. Last.fm, apart from being happy to pull my listening data into their site, does not integrate with my listening habits Whats.O.Ever. My method for managing music, perhaps determined by owning an iPod, is entirely dominated by iTunes and the usage of the device itself.




2. Last.fm does not play on the road (let’s ignore the iPhone radio app and that eventually all devices will be connected to the internet)




3. Last.fm does not acknowledge that I give different stars (= degrees of love) to songs (instead I have to “love” a song manually).




4. Discovering new music through Last.fm’s radio does not easily lead me to purchase the actual song




5. One cherry on top is that Last.fm now wants to charge me for using the radio, even though I add to it by playing my songs.




6. A second cherry on top is that Last.fm is now, indirectly through CBS, giving information about what we listen to and who we are, to the RIAA, a US organisation that probably also shares that information with other international organisations.




7. The only use Last.fm seems to have is vanity, in the sense that you can see what songs I loved (when I love them) and I can make pretty graphics of my listening habits (makes for an interesting poster).

So, as of this week, I am deleting my Last.fm account.

That doesn’t change that I am a fervent listener of music and it also doesn’t change that I believe deeply in the concept of sharing music. I like finding nice tracks to play at parties and equally I like finding tracks for some of my friends that I can only connect to online. There is no legal service that allows me to do this. As a matter of fact, in the Netherlands, I should even be paying a licensing fee if I play music in public or for too many people at once!!!

In comes Drop.io, a file-sharing service that recently added Facebook Connect as a way to share stuff only with your friends. Drop.io fills the void that Last.fm leaves in the following ways:

1. It has an integrated player that is very elegant and can also be accessed and added to via many different devices.




2. I can restrict access to my files to my Facebook friends only (evil internet lawyers can get lost).




3. It’s free for using 100 MB storage and charges a very fair $10 per gigabyte per year.




4. Any loss in statistical “vanity” data can be compensated by using iTunes and starring / sorting your files accordingly.

That’s it. Of course I will not be sharing songs that are copyright protected (and, of course, if we’re not Facebook connected, you will never know for sure )

Vincent

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Continuing our short(!) screenshot-series on geeky innovations… Thank you, Skitch, for making it so easy!

I was really missing a collection of my Loved Tracks in Last.fm and it looks like the new version delivered. What we need next is a way for ratings in iTunes (and more specifically my iPod) to automatically register as “loved” in Last.fm, and for that to create a TheFilter-like service of creating custom playlists that I like.

*Sigh* why does interoperability of web-to-real-world-to-web have to be so complicated?

Vincent

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Business is all about three things: generating income, generating growth, and making smart spending-decisions to generate both of them. Within that framework, it’s not surprising that business often make compromises as to the feature-set that they offer. This is especially true of web-businesses, who, while they may have built a relatively cheap business (compared to the physical alternative), also find it difficult to create sustainable business models. And, considering the barriers to entry are as low as ever, I imagine that this situation won’t change anytime soon.

My “rant” today is about relevance, which I define as targeting your app or service to work within the context of your consumer. Many internet-businesses focus on two things: building easy connections to other web-users and trying to prevent total breakdown when viral growth reaches a peak.

The fallacy in that mindset is that users are being treated like nodes, who connect back or connect to other users. A node, in a P2P network, is a static entity, one that doesn’t move. A user is, typically, a human being, one that not only moves, but exists on a different plane, the physical world. A lot of web-businesses fail to make that distinction and it has created not only the reality that we are being bombarded with connections whenever we sit at our PC, but we are expected to be connected 24/7.

I alluded to this last year, when I asked “what place does the web take?” The point of that article was really about the relevance of the web to real life. According to a theory, there are three places relevant to people: the first place, which is home-life, the second, which is work-life, and the third, which is leisure. The web, through email, blogs, work-apps, twitter, media, has become a hub in all three places, but its consequences are both information overload and obesity, both caused by passivity.

When you look up the word “break,” it’s defined as “a period of time taken out of one’s professional activity in order to do something else.” If the web is work and the web is home, then the break should not be the web.

Relevance is, once again, having services be context-driven, i.e. being relevant or shutting up at the right time and the right place and for the right person. A pretty complex task, but that is an ideal to live for.

Let me give some examples. Both TheFilter and Last.fm are services that both passively monitor media-life and actively provide services (such as radio-stations and the like). When I plug in my iPod after a run (a third place-activity), Last.fm asks me whether I want to “Scrobble” my tracks, which it in turn uses to make recommendations. TheFilter is not quite there yet, but it passively scans my iTunes-behaviour and creates custom-playlists for me if I want. You may think this is no big deal, but you’d be surprised how few services make even that tiny step from the web to the desktop.

A bigger deal, in my opinion, is NearByNow, which allows shoppers to search the shopping-malls that they visit, not by searching every store, but by entering a search-term for a product on their mobile or via the web, and having it search the retailers’ inventory. I wrote about it here before. This is just a first step, but especially in retail there’s much room still for merging the web with the shop.

Some more examples are the Nintendo Wii, which brings a physical dimension to gaming, and even the MacBook Air and the Asus EEE, both of which are clearly designed to not chain users to a location.

Relevance is something that a lot of commercial and non-commercial services are battling with nowadays. How do you sell a good online that you need to smell, taste, feel, or try on? How do you integrate virtual friendships into real life? How do you limit the amount of noise that your online customers are exposed to? How do you “synergise” the power of the web—information at a finger-tip—with a fragmented physical world? How do you create business models based on both the online and offline behaviour of consumers?

Those are the real questions to answer, not only for the web to become truly mainstream, but for it to stop treating us “users” like grey square boxes with a blue light shining out of it. We, the kids, the workers, the retired, are people dammit, with muscles (not just in the fingers), mouths, and other senses. We were not put on this planet to read 12/7 and type the other 12.

The next liberation-age is, I hope, about freeing ourselves from the machines and living life again as the hybrid entities that we are, producing both physical and mental energy.

Rant over.

Vincent

(The picture is the cover of the book “Snow Crash“—still the most relevant book about a very possible future of the information age today… if you ask me.)

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