Matter/Anti-Matter

iTunes 8, announced Tuesday, introduces a couple of things that point toward a future in which Apple branches out beyond its pay-as-you-go buying model for media. Are these a harbinger of new buying options that will appear in iTunes 9?

Genius List
iTunes has had a "Party Shuffle" function for quite a while, with which it dynamically builds a playlist from your music on your hard drive. It was not (so far as I could tell) particularly intelligent about how it picked out what to play, however--Chemical Brothers could be immediately followed by Dave Brubek. It was essentially a glorified shuffle mode.

With iTunes 8, Apple has introduced the Genius List, which communicates with a cloud server about the contents of your music collection, then does fancy some background intelligence so that when you give iTunes a seed song, it is able to build out an automatically running playlist in which the songs have more of a similar character. And what's great is that you can do this on the iPod, independent of iTunes.

While a seemingly small thing, this actually fixes one of my peeves about iTunes--when you want something more tailored than a full shuffle but you don't want to switch to radio, how do you do it? iTunes has always had a fairly black-and-white approach--it's random, or it's exactly what you asked for. There was no in-between. Genius List fills this middle ground without the hassle of creating mood-specific playlists.

This is clearly treading into the same territory on which Pandora has built its reputation, though for the time being, Apple is mum on how the algorithms are doing their magic. Apple is currently restricting the Genius List to the contents of your current library, while Pandora is, of course, a streamed service that introduces you to new music and artists.

This brings us to...

The Genius Sidebar
The Genius Sidebar goes outside your library to introduce you to algorithmically generated recommendations from the iTunes Store. Again, Apple isn't saying much about how this is done, other than explaining that it bases recommendations on looking at your collection, as well as others' (so the more people that take part, the smarter it gets).

At the moment, these recommendations are available only with the usual 30-second preview, but it seems like just a short hop to get to a full streaming, subscription-based approach, living in parallel with the pay-per-song approach Apple has successfully used so far. Rumors have been around for ages that Apple will introduce a subscription service, and the Genius Sidebar seems like a simple way to step into that approach.

Most of the subscription services tried so far have done rather poorly to terribly for various reasons: price point, confusing DRM, confusing interface, lack of content, or just not having a critical mass of users to sustain them. If anyone can make it work, Apple can, and my guess is that iTunes is its step toward a full-blown subscription service in 6 to 12 months.

Over at Micropersuasion, Steve Rubel is making a bold prediction: The portals will be big winners in the social-networking wars.

"Social networking is certainly rising and there seems to be no end in sight to the phenomenon. However, what I do know is that people will jump around from one Myfaceborkutspace to another and not all of them will win," Rubel wrote.

He is referring to Long Tail author Chris Anderson, who points out that all good web sites should have elements of social networking and therefore suggests that social networking is a "feature, not a destination." Rubel believes that the portals' key advantage is that they "own the glue that keeps many of usconnected to our structured social networks (e.g. Myfaceborkutspace) and the looser ones--e.g. a personal network of contacts. And that glue is a trusted communication system that works with every person and social net."

That's true. You could also say that our buddy list is our social network, and we appreciate just plugging it into the most convenient and trusted network of our choice. Call it the "floating network." I therefore also agree with Rubel when he says, "No matter which social network(s) you participate in, even if you float, you're going to turn to your trusted communication system to manage it all. This will include any or all of the following: a) Web-based e-mail, b) instant messaging (which is nowadays integrated), c) RSS and d) telephony tools like Grand Central."

There are good reasons why there is a lot at stake for the traditional portals, and there are good reasons (Rubel names them) to predict they will not just sit back and watch the young social-networking sites own the game, especially now that business has begun facing up to social networks. And yet, I am hesitant to follow Rubel's prediction that the portals will have the upper hand in this conflict. In fact, I think he gets the conflict wrong.

I don't think this is as strict an antagonism as Rubel describes it, and I would even question the "war parties" as he identifies them: On the one side, the emerging social networks that are relentlessly trying to enhance the one main feature they're built upon ("making connections") into a platform. On the other side, the big portals, the AOLs, MSNs, Yahoos, that are seeking to operate more like social networks. This is an over-simplified showdown, for Rubel stages a competition where, in fact, we witness a co-evolution. The portals will adapt the best social-networking features, for example by activating the "dormant social networks" they own (see Yahoo Mash), and the social networks will adapt some of the portals' features; just yesterday AllFacebook and Paid Content speculated that Facebook is preparing to launch a music platform, either as a potential iTunes killer (according to AllFacebook) or a MySpace competitor (according to Paid Content).

However--and herein lies the major difference to Rubel's assumption--both social networks and portals are striving to eventually become something entirely different: the new operating system. Facebook is not shy about its intentions, and you could argue that it has already transformed the site into something much bigger than a social network.

It is a not a social-networking war; it is a race to become the de facto operating system for the social networker. And that is, of course, why Google, which is neither a social network nor a portal, is in the game too. The company is said to be feverishly working on "out-facebooking" Facebook by introducing a meta-platform that integrates not only a suite of Google services (like iGoogle, Gmail, Google Talk, Orkut, etc.) but is also 100 percent open to third-party developers--and other social networks. Google's recent acquisition of mobile social-network Zingku indicates that this uber-platform may have a strong mobile component and the long-rumored free, ad-based phone service. In other words, while social networks and portals are fighting the "social networking wars," Google may be winning the actual competition at hand: to become the dominant operating system for all of our communications. You can also call it the World Wide Web.

(Credit: Amazon)

It's been a busy week in digital music, to say the least. Today Zune 2 was announced, and Amazon finally launched its MP3 download service, though it's currently still in Beta.

I gave it a short try and found that overall it is a competent start. It's not a significant step beyond iTunes in terms of functionality or usability (more on that in a moment), though it's price/quality ratio is very good: 89-99 cents for 256kbps bit rate, DRM-free MP3s. Albums vary a lot in price, from a bit over $4 to $8.99 so far as I can tell. This is a good deal if, like me, you prefer a higher bitrate than iTunes has historically offered and you don't use an iPod as your main device. (I use a SonyEricsson W810 Walkman phone as my main device. I've had three hard-drive based iPods go south on me so I'm reluctant to get another, and I just like carrying one less device around. Plus it has a radio and I'm an NPR junkie.)

So what does the Amazon MP3 store do well and not so well?

Pro's:

• It automatically puts stuff into iTunes for you if you use the Amazon downloader application. Tracks seem to be kept outside of the iTunes folder hierarchy. I actually like this as it means it's easy to find the unprotected tracks to put onto my Walkman phone.

  Track previews are of standard 30sec length with good fidelity, and fade in and out. Nice that you can preview a whole album at once (it moves automatically from on track to the next). Very responsive action of the previews.
  

• The recommendations seem good and on-target so far from my limited experience. As it should it taps into CDs that I've bought in the past so it's not just relying on my short mp3 buying history.
  
• The functionality and interface are much simpler than the iTunes Music Store, which in my mind is a plus. The iTMS has become very cluttered as more media types have got loaded on.
  
• Album art is downloaded too, and shows up correctly in iTunes.

Cons:

• I got separate emails for each track or album purchase--why can't I get a summarized report of a session like iTunes gives me?
  
• The process for buying individual tracks is cumbersome. 1. Hit buy button. 2. Get taken to a confirmation page. 3. Hit "Back" button on browser to go back to the previous page and pick another track. They need some AJAX goodness to make this more efficient, and need to allow non-contiguous selection of multiple tracks to buy them all in one go.
  
• To make the process most efficient you have to first install the small Amazon Downloader. This worked OK in Safari, however in Camino the tracks didn't automatically start downloading for me, I had to double-click the icon in the Camino download window to kickstart the Amazon Downloader. Once going the UI was decent enough and integration with iTunes was flawless.
  
• The look of the store is Amazon standard, which IMHO is utilitarian but not very attractive. Music is treated like everything else on Amazon, whether you're spending a lot or a little.
  
• When I do a search and get dozens of results back, I can't sort by album, song title, artist, etc. This can make it pretty hard to find a specific song.
  
• Strangely they are not pulling in user reviews from the CDs of the same albums. Hopefully this will change as it makes no sense to have a separate stock of reviews for MP3s.
  
• Music selection is pretty slim right now. Even though 2 million songs sounds like a lot, you quickly realize it isn't. Do a search on U2, for example, and you get a bunch of covers, but nothing original. Amazon has both EMI and Universal and it claims thousands of other labels, but there are obvious large gaps. Presumably this will fill in over time. But for comparison, remember that the iTunes Music store launched with only 200,000 songs and itt took quite a long time to feel like it wasn't plagued with gaps, and given the current state of maturity of the market Amazon should be able to fill it much faster.

The two biggest question marks in my mind about whether Amazon will be successful with this venture are:

1. Will they actually continue to put effort behind it? Lately Amazon has been in serious fast-follower mode, and throwing in every gee-gaw and feature that seems to be popular elsewhere. You like wiki's? We got 'em! Carousel navigation for no obvious reason? Check! You can almost imagine Amazon as an extension of Jeff Bezos' short attention span. To be successful in this area they are going to have to stick with it, which is going to require effort and deal-making that Amazon doesn't typically do.

2. Can they pull together the strengths of their customer network and massive mine of data, and then layer game-changing functionality on top of it? A me-too entry is not going to be enough to make a major dent in Apple's dominance. Leveraging their strengths is a good start for Amazon, but I'm more sanguine about whether they can get beyond their current fast-follower approach to really do something fresh and attention-grabbing.

(Cnet blogger Michael Horowitz also has a review of the service. Unlike him I had to confirm my login info before being able to make a song purchase.)