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As I walked out of my last final exam ever today the Columbia campus was absolutely beautiful. This winter seemed longer than most, but we're being rewarded with a spectacular spring. It's hard to believe two years of graduate school went by so quickly, but I'm not sure I'd be eager to go back to the beginning, either. It was a good run, but it's getting time to move on.
Since I'm leaving school in a couple of weeks, it seemed like an important time to update my much-neglected address book before I lose touch with friends from school. Having seen a few friends using it, I tried out Plaxo, a plug-in to Outlook that provides a terrific service -- helping you maintain your contact list and automatically transmit updates of contact information between you and your friends.
I had my doubts, but a week later 90% of the 150 or so folks I sent Plaxo update requests to have updated their contact information in my address book, with almost no manual intervention from me at all. Better yet, Plaxo is an "old-school" dot-com trying to get to a certain network size and then profit off providing the service to corporations. So there's no advertising. (I wouldn't have used it if it had any advertising or spyware involved.) Way to take the high road, Plaxo.
It's about time that the old-fashioned address book moved into the networked age. There's no reason we should still be manually communicating our contact info to the people we want to stay in touch with.
Follow-Up: Plaxo is not without its detractors. Still, I stand by my assessment. Much like Google, they seem to have understood the idea of "don't be evil."
My family dog Pete enjoys the first warm day of spring out on the waterfront. More photos later.
The New York Times covers a new study on the impact of illegal downloading on music sales:
"Downloads have an effect on sales which is statistically indistinguishable from zero, despite rather precise estimates," write its authors, Felix Oberholzer-Gee of the Harvard Business School and Koleman S. Strumpf of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
It's a lot easier for the record companies to blame illegal file sharing for downwards spiraling sales than plain-vanilla CD piracy and a lack of interesting new music. In the 90's, they benefitted from a rising economy and folks buying CDs to replace music they already owned on tape or vinyl. I'm sure they patted themselves on the back for their genius, but now that the tide is running against them they've chosen to use file-sharing as a scapegoat rather than take a hard look at their own business.
TypeKey, from Six Apart, the makers of Moveable Type, is an idea that's long overdue. They haven't released it, but in smartly pre-announcing it they've probably kept anyone else from bringing such a concept to market.
TypeKey is a free, open system providing a central identity that anyone can use to log in and post comments on blogs and other web sites.
Comment registration on weblogs has always been a problem. Authors don't want to require in-depth registration because it dampers conversation by discouraging new voices. Users already feel like they have too many accounts to keep track of. And because you can only kick someone after the damage is done, registration rarely discourages spammers.
A centralized registration system, from a "benign" corporate entity like this one, however, solves many of those problems. Users only need to register once. Weblogs don't have to expend effort developing and maintaining a registration system and user base.
Of course, the problem is deployment. That's the reason why only the developers of the most popular "high end" weblog software (Moveable Type) could initiate this kind of effort. They'll roll support for the centralized registration system into the basic software used by hundreds of thousands of weblogs, as well as offer the API to other software maker. Suddenly, there's a gigantic base of weblogs supporting the system -- making it worthwhile for users to join. An upwards value spiral begins.
Ironically, I'm sure the folks at Microsoft who run their Passport service would drool over this kind of situation. But their karma with the kind of heavy net users (ehem, "nerds") running weblogs just isn't very good. Not to mention that making it an "open" system where anyone could add support for Passport logint to their site would give those guys the shivers. Google might have the credibility to pull it off, but they don't seem to be big on registering users -- it's just not their thing, although new "personalized" Google features might change that.
This open system, centralized identity depository might just turn out to be one of Six Apart's most valuable projects, despite its relative simplicity from an engineering perspective. I can't say I'm not a little jealous that I don't work there -- the whole company reminds me of the heady days of the late nineties, when so many ideas held so much promise.
This morning, I bought a tiny (credit-card sized) digital camera for less than $300 from that American institution, Walmart. I then went to class and listened to a two-hour discussion over the war between Kodak and Polaroid over the instant camera market during the late 70's. At the time, Wall Street, and those companies, saw instant photography as the wave of the future. The business lessons may still apply, but the value of that prize seems to decrease every day.
Last year, digital cameras outsold film for the first time in the United States. They're now dominant at every level of consumer photography except disposable cameras (and they're in that market, too).
Amazingly enough, Polaroid's home page would make you think there's no such thing. I guess they've decided that there is going to continue to be a market for expensive instant film cameras, even when for a cheaper per-print price consumers can buy a digital camera and 4x6" photo printer with greater versatility and function.
Kodak, conversely, having lost the war to Polaroid, at least readily acknowledges on their web site that film is on the way out as a consumer product.
It's obvious to me that the film manufacturers have been left ending the short end of the stick in terms of the consumer imaging market. I'm not sure the camera manufacturers are much better off, considering that they now have to compete with an array of consumer electronics players. As early as 1993 it was obvious to anyone using digital cameras (and there were very good ones available then, albeit expensive) that the industry was about to change. What could they have done?
(A secondary question: Will our kids have any idea what "shake it like a polaroid picture" means?")