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March 26, 2004
iTunes Music Store RSS Feeds
Via Brian Sweeting (who was in attendence at this morning's CTO Breakfast) I learned that iTMS is now offering RSS feeds. Like Brian, I wish you could fine tune the feed a little more, but then, that raises its own set of problems.
Here's the problem I'm thinking of. Imagine a world where there's RSS everywhere and there's a lot of knobs on each feed that you can twiddle to fine tune what you see. Now imagine that you've spent a lot of time on the iTMS RSS Generator and got an RSS feed for iTMS that suits you, but one day you want to change it. Do you go through all that fine tuning all over again as you would on today's non-persistent RSS generator applications? Would you even remember what you'd done last time so that you could fine tune it? Multiply that by hundreds of specialized feeds you, or your computer, might subscribe to and you've got an adminitrative nightmare.
I think there are several partial solutions to this problem with pros and cons
- iTMS could offer a persistent application that you log into and can adjust your RSS feed and then get a new URL.
- You could sign up for fairly generic feeds that contain more data than you really want and then fine tune it in the aggregator.
- You could feed the RSS URL, if properly designed, back into the generator where it would be decoded and present you with the last set of options you used.
The first option is too 90's. RSS is supposed to free us, at least a little, from lots of persistent Web site hassles. The second option is very flexible, but wasteful of bandwidth. The third option makes URL design more important and breaks what some people consider good URL design principals. I favor a combination of option 2 and 3. I think that RSS tools that offer the user more control over the feed are important, but that can't substitute for having the originating site provide the best information it can.
12:37 PM | Recommend This | Print This
Apple's DRM Dilemma
Anyone contemplating a business that depends on using DRM to control their customers ought to read Cory Doctorow's story at BoingBoing. Cory says:
So, the "FairPlay" system [Apple's DRM system] was punishing me for:Apple tells us that its DRM "keeps honest users honest." I'm a pretty honest user. Apple's DRM hasn't kept me honest, though: it's kept me angry with Apple. It's kept me feeling like a sucker for giving them my money. It's kept me in chains.
- Buying so much iTMS music that burning it to CD and ripping it back as MP3 (and re-entering all the metadata) was too big a chore to contemplate
- Buying a new Powerbook at full retail every 10 months
- Buying new Powerbooks as soon as they are announced, before all the manufacturing bugs have been shaken out
From Boing Boing: VLC will play iTunes Music Store tracks
Referenced Fri Mar 26 2004 11:05:59 GMT-0700
This frames Apple's dilemma perfectly: can it afford to punish the buyers of $3000 computers to protect $50 worth of content? It doesn't take an MBA to see the problem with this strategy. Business Week has a different tack for Apple: license Fairplay to other music vendors and get out of the music store business. That might keep people who buy Apple's gear from being mad at Apple, but it still doesn't solve the real problem for online music: DRM alienates the people who pay your salary: your customers.
11:12 AM | Recommend This | Print This
CTO Breakfast
We had another CTO Breakfast this morning. There were about a dozen people there and we had some good discussions about broadband, cluster computer, project portfolios and when to sell your company. If you're interested in attending, follow the link above for future dates or to sign up for the mailing list and then I'll just send you a note to remind you.