If you’re like me, you have almost a dozen Google services — Gmail, Picasa, Voice, Reader, Checkout, Alerts, Analytics, etc. Making sure that everything is set up correctly and not inadvertently exposed to the world is an otherwise painful task that is made easy with Dashboard. By scrolling down and glancing at the summaries of your various services, you can make sure that the pictures of Grandma’s birthday party aren’t visible to the world.

So, despite some other privacy setbacks (really what were they thinking with Buzz?), I think this is a leap forward for a company to expose the data they have about you and give you choices about what they do with it. Imagine the grocery store doing this with your preferred card or your phone company with the data they collect from your wireless bill (and location data they get from your GPS). It’s great when consumers have the choice about how their information is used, and kudos to Google for getting this one right. They still have some work to do given how much info we end up giving them, but definitely a step in the right direction.

No doubt, this is great. However, with smaller city newspapers failing across the country and even the venerable Times in trouble, the long-term sustainability of content providers is a serious question. Right now, Google News and YouTube news videos are fueled largely by professional journalism companies that make their money selling advertisements in print and video media. However, as Google steps in and uses the content without providing an adequate revenue stream back to the content creators, the prospects for professional journalism look dim.

Clearly journalism as a money-making endeavor will not go away. What will happen, on the other hand, is that news outlets will find ways to capitalize on what is actually an amazing opportunity to reach a huge audience with dramatically lower costs. As an example, I’ve never paid a dime for a newspaper, yet after getting an Amazon Kindle2 about 2 months ago, I now pay for subscriptions to two newspapers. The key for me was convenience and quality — the ability to have a full news source on my Kindle every morning on the train was well worth the $10-$15/month I pay for my subscription. A content delivery device that didn’t exist 2 years ago is what it took to get a 24-year-old guy to start paying for the paper.

What about the web? How can providers continue to afford to let Google assemble their content into dynamic newspapers and give it away free? The solution is micropayments. Want to read an article on Google Reader? Why not charge a nickel (or a penny!), the bulk of which goes directly back to the content provider? Of course, a few cents doesn’t sound like much, but obviously the key is making it on millions of users. Collect a nickel, and watch what happens to the web. The best content providers — professional and amateur — will now have a way to make money off of their work directly. News outlets will still exist, but there will also be plenty of semi-professional, independent authors and creators who will churn out material that will be just as good.

Undoubtedly, there are many stumbling blocks to charging people for what they’ve become accustomed to getting for free. Dan Ariely, the MIT behavioral economist and author of Predictably Irrational has found that the difference between even 1 cent and free is enormous from a psychological perspective. Things that are free just have a certain allure that even the cheapest alternatives do not. The way to overcome this stumbling block is to disassociate people with the money they’re actually spending. We could do this by allowing (but not necessarily requiring) people to prepay their nickels every month with their internet bill — perhaps include $2 worth of content in a “bank account” with the monthly internet. Alternatively, Google could pay these nickels for you — in this case they would simply be a structural mechanism to allow payment to flow back to the originators.

The internet has irreversibly changed traditional content distribution models, but so far, revenue models have largely stayed the same for content providers. The providers that push for and embrace new models will be the ones that generate incredible profits. Micropayments are the solution that will fix the content-revenue link on the web.

The reason platforms are so important is that they allow developers to use massive technological leverage. To illustrate this point, lets use the example of Dropbox, an outstanding online backup application. Dropbox creates a folder on a user’s computer where they can drag files, and then stores those files on Amazon’s S3. S3 is a network that programmers can easily use to store files on Amazon’s servers. By simply paying a low fee per-gigabyte of disk space used, developers have access to an unlimited amount of secure, redundant disk space online on top of which they can build their own program. Dropbox is a derivative application built on top of the S3 platform, and utilizes the S3 backend to intelligently sync and back up files on individual PCs. Without S3, Dropbox and others would have to invest enormous resources into creating and maintaining a huge storage datacenter, which would almost certainly be prohibitive for the rapidly-growing startup. However, since they are able to leverage the S3 platform to handle the storage issue, the developers are able to focus on the product instead of the nitty gritty needed to get that product running.

The ability to abstract away the “nitty gritty” by using a platform is immensely powerful, because it allows entrepreneurs to build on top of existing technologies instead of reinventing the wheel for each venture. Facebook applications have been incredibly successful because they allow a developer to leverage the existing networks people have already built, rather than fighting to get people to sign up for a new website and build a new network. Before Facebook Photos, several sites attempted the tagging functionality that Facebook mastered with virtually no success because there was no way of enrolling every user that might be in someone’s photo. Since Facebook already has a huge portion of internet users, Photos (and other apps) can simply abstract away the “building a network” aspect — a huge obstacle to building a networking application — and focus on creating new and interesting functionality.

The other cool aspect that platform creators get “for free” is marketing. If a developer creates an application on Facebook, they are likely to spend time and money marketing that application. However, since that app is nothing without Facebook, any marketing that the app developer does is by default marketing for Facebook as well. While its not always this obvious, it’s always the case that the platform benefits as the child application grows — as Dropbox gains users, for example, Amazon naturally gets more business without really needing to do any extra marketing. It’s all done for them, and all owed to their killer platform.

Platforms are an amazing innovation, and we’ve seen (and will continue to see) some incredible applications arise from them. They lower the barrier to entry for entrepreneurs, so programs that used to require a team of engineers to handle “support” aspects of an application now only need one or two core developers. As a result, more products can come into the market quickly, and great ideas can rise to the top even more freely.

Five years ago, a bad experience like this would have meant that the company lost a few customers at most — maybe me and a few of my friends. But in the age of Facebook and Twitter, where people are microblogging about everything, a few bad experiences can quickly find an enormous audience. All it takes is a reader to see one or two tweets relating a hiccup with a company for that reader to avoid the company in the future. The margin of error for bad customer service is getting far smaller, since it takes far fewer missteps to destroy a reputation than it used to.

Customer service has always been important, but now days, its make-or-break for a company. When I Google for ‘flowers’, 11 sponsored links show up. The services themselves all basically do the same thing — the call one of a few local florists and have them deliver an arrangement purchased online. Since I imagine conversion for keyword clicks for ‘flowers’ on Google are pretty high, I bet that they pay $5 or more per click for traffic through search engine ads. Given that the cost of acquiring a customer is very high, a company in this type of business must do everything it can to make sure that it keeps the customers it has, since part of the rationale behind a high initial acquisition cost is that customers on average will do business repeatedly. But if a company doesn’t invest the [comparatively far smaller] money in customer service needed to keep existing customers, they will find that they can no longer afford to pay the huge acquisition costs because they simply aren’t capturing enough profit per customer over the entire lifecycle to justify the expense. Since its much easier to keep customers you already have, the competitors that can retain customers will be the ones that win out, hands down. And as the world gets more connected, these companies will have an even easier time rising to the top.

Update: I’m not all pessimism — I just had a great customer service experience with Fidelity. Read about it.

Over the last several weeks, I’ve been working hard to promote the site. I have no formal training in marketing, so my efforts have come mainly from trial and error and also from advice from marketing professionals, both through their blogs and from actually speaking with them. There are other guides on the internet about generating buzz for your website, but most of them are long on generalities (“Know your goals”) and short on details. This guide is an attempt to nail down some of the strategies that have worked for me, and help others that are getting involved in the social marketing landscape.

Disclaimer: this is a work in progress, so I have inevitable missed some key points or approached some things in an unusual way. I welcome your comments below!

Cover Your Bases With the Social News Sites

1. Reddit – catchy, thought-provoking titles are important. The main site gets a huge number of submissions, so posting to a subreddit (a sub-site devoted to a specific topic, like Business or Linux) might increase your chances of making it to the front page.
2. Digg – short titles and good descriptions are important. Be sure to choose accurate categories for your site. You’ll be best off if you’ve been using digg for a while and have built up a base of friends, since they’re more likely to see the story and vote for it.
3. StumbleUpon – tagging your site properly is key, since users see sites based on interests they select.
4. Del.icio.us – tagging is very important, since that forms the basis upon which others find your site.

Get the Word Out On Twitter

It’s important to create a solid presence for your site on Twitter, since it is becoming an increasingly important place for users to share links and thoughts about sites and services. Here are the steps:

1. Create a Twitter identity for your site. For Free Agents, users can follow @freeagentnet.
2. Send out several Tweets relevant to your message to get some good content in your feed so that users have something to see when they first start following you.
3. Advertise your Twitter name on your site — a simple “Follow @freeagentnet on Twitter” will do the trick, and allow users to stay up to date. Also, ask users to add in a hashtag in posts related to the site. For example, if a user Tweets about something unemployment related, they can add #freeagentnet. Hashtags are keywords easily indexed by outside agregators, so you can pull all posts related to your site together on a page.
4. Use Twitter search to find users that are talking about topics related to your site. Start following them. This has 2 purposes: first, it keeps you in touch with what people are saying about the area that you’re in. Secondly, when you follow people, they are likely to follow you if they see that you’ve been Tweeting about the same types of things, so you get a larger Twitterbase.
5. Tweet often about relevant content, new areas on your site, and other information related to your primary goal.

Things to Avoid on Twitter

1. Don’t send out too many tweets each day. Aim for 5 or fewer messages every day, with great, compelling content in them. Never use your “business” account to send out messages like “I’m eating breakfast”, or followers will quickly drop you.
2. Don’t try to follow anyone and everyone. Follow those that you think you’ll learn good information from, and read their tweets. If you’re a follower of the whole world, the information gets diluted
3. Keep your links informational, and not overly promotional. Link to relevant content that you post on your site, but limit the number of links to your top level site, since it only takes a few before people start thinking you’re a spammer.

Create a Facebook Group to Engage Your Friends

Marketing to your friends is a great way to get the word out, especially if its the kind of product that lends itself well to your own demographic (otherwise, why would you build it?). Creating a Facebook group dedicated to your concept and inviting your friends to join is a good way to spread the word on Facebook, since each time someone becomes a member, that information shows up in the feed and others see it.

You can only invite 100 people to a group at a time, so be sure to choose carefully who you add to the invitation. On one hand, you want to pick people close enough to you that will join because you’re their friend and they want to help you out. If you pick people that you barely know, they are less likely to pay attention to the invitation, which means the invite is “wasted” on them. On the other hand, if you choose your 100 best buddies from college, they might all join, but they probably all know each other, and the benefits from your group appearing on the feed are lessened. By choosing some people that you don’t know as well, you lessen the chance that they will join, but if they do, you will likely access a completely separate social circle and your product will hit a more diverse group of users.

Add Meaningful, Relevant Comments to Related Blogs and News Articles

If you run a site devoted to auto repair, you probably are interested in that subject and read related blogs and other sites regularly. If you don’t, you definitely need to, for several reasons. First of all, its important to keep your finger on the pulse of your topic online. If some bloggers break news about Callahan Auto’s new Brake Pad Division, its important to see what everyone is saying about it so that articles on your site can respond appropriately. Secondly, commenting on related blogs is a good way to reach readers that are interested in your subject area.

Commenting on blogs, like other methods of social marketing, walks the fine line between spamming and contributing to a service by adding helpful information and a link. If you run a blog, you probably receive hundreds of spam comments per day, and most are filled with gibberish and a few links. These are obvious garbage, and most get filtered out anyways. However, other posts contribute a brief snippet of commentary, and a big fat link to another site. They often say something along the lines of “great article. check out Zalinsky Auto Parts [url]“. These comments are also garbage, because they don’t contribute anything to the discussion, and are obviously there only to promote another site.

A good rule of thumb is if you can’t contribute something meaningful to the article through your comment, don’t post one. On the other hand, your site may be a great resource to readers of that article. If that’s the case, in the comment box, add a unique point of view, and then somewhere in the comment, mention your site. Most blogs moderate their comment posts to avoid spam, so the more you can contribute to the discussion along with your link, the better the chance that the blog author chooses to keep your comment on the page.

Connect with Popular Bloggers in Your Space

Figure out which bloggers are the most influential in your area. There are a variety of ways to do this — start by Googling for certain keywords associated with your website and see which blogs come up. Add these blogs to your Google Reader (or other RSS aggregator) and start reading them every day. Pay attention to other sites mentioned in articles, and check out their blogrolls.

Once you’ve identified some of the important blogs, contact the author and introduce yourself. Tell them a bit about your site and ask them if they’d be willing to help spread the word. Many blogs are happy to help out, especially if they have the first chance to “go public” with a cool concept. Be sure that you don’t look overly spammy — send polite, personalized messages to each author. I often try to respond to an article the blogger has written to break the ice and let them know that I am a reader and that I find their content valuable.

Engage in Discussions on Other Websites

On some sites, the user community is already large and established. If your product is a great complement to such a site, one great way to promote yourself is to become an active and respected user in the well-known community.

For example, if you have a restaurant reservation service, users on a site like Yelp might be interested in your offerings. One great way to promote your site is to become a very active and trusted member on the “mother site”, and rely upon the fact that your credibility will make people naturally interested in learning more about you and your service. To build this following, you need to contribute content to the existing community that others find worthwhile and valuable, and do so in a way that’s not overly promotional in nature. For Yelp, you might consider posting several restaurant reviews with thoughtful feedback and commentary. You don’t necessarily want to post a link to your site in every review, but definitely have a link in your profile so that when people click on your name to learn more, they see that link and click on it.

You might get fewer impressions by promoting this way (since users will have to see your profile before they see your links), but you’ll get more conversions too, since those who visit your site are people who have already decided that they find you interesting and worthwhile enough to click on your profile. By leveraging your credibility in one arena, you are able to apply it to another to increase the impact you have for each visit.

Overview

Creating online buzz about your product takes time and effort. Simply dumping links all over the internet with very little content around them will simply make you a spammer, and there are mechanisms online that will ensure that your links are quickly relegated to the spam heap. On the other hand, if your product is one that people find valuable, and you promote it with thoughtful contributions to a variety of places online, you will eventually meet success and attract visitors.

• One number that rings all your phones
• The ability to direct certain callers to certain phones
• The ability to add and remove phone numbers from the list
• Advanced voicemail capabilities like transcription-to-email and web access
• Different greetings based on caller
• Switch phones on the fly, mid call
• Record and store calls
• …etc

What struck me about this post wasn’t anything about Google Voice specifically, since I’ve heard all those features discussed ad nauseum. It was the last line:

This is the kind of stuff our telephone companies (land and wireless) should have been doing for us already.

Let’s think about this for a minute. Who are the major losers of the last decade? To name a few: the recording industry (RIAA), newspaper publishers (NYT, Tribute, etc), telcos, radio broadcasters. Why are they failing? Do people no longer listen to music, read news, call on the phone, or listen to broadcasts in their car?

In every one of these cases, these companies have seen their delivery mechanism fundamentally change. Who has taken their place? Technology companies. Apple/Amazon on the music front, Google News, blogs and other online sources on the newspaper front, IM/email/Facebook on the communications front, and podcasting/satellite radio on the broadcasting front. The content itself is basically the same, but these providers are getting crushed because they have failed to innovate.

Google is taking over the world because they are amazing with technology. They might not know a thing about news or phones, but they are miles ahead on the innovation front — its not even a fair fight. Google sees where technology is going — better, faster, cheaper, and has a proven record of jumping on it.

What the entrenched businesses need to do is to stop looking backwards — forget about CDs, let go of paper news, and figure out how you can deliver your content faster, better, and cheaper to the consumer. Reduce the size of your legal department, and build up an “innovation” department to figure out ways to change your business with technology. Experiment — try giving stuff away free, charging, micropayments, ad-supported — there are business models that will work on the internet that haven’t been invented yet. Find them.

Because if you don’t, Google will.

When I was 8, I got a 14.4 modem and an AOL dialup subscription for my birthday. It was one of the best presents I’ve ever received, and I quickly started exploring all that AOL had to offer. Soon, I started to wonder how web pages actually got on the internet, so I found AOL Personal Publisher and started messing around.

In most cases, 8 year olds don’t have too much to contribute to the world, and I was no exception. I just wanted to create a web page for something, so I settled on one thing that was well known to me and friends — video games. I created AJ’s Code Page (specializing in infinite lives, double damage, god mode, and the like) hosted on the now-defunct members.aol.com, and started trying to figure out how to get users.

It was near the beginning of the web (1993), and nobody really knew what was going on, so it was an amazing learning experience. I had never heard of Photoshop at that point, much less have any experience with it, so I found some graphic designer on a forum that made a [pretty cool] banner logo featuring a Playstation logo on the left, the words “AJ’s Code Page” in the middle, and the Nintendo 64 logo on the right. I scoured the web for links to the best code pages, and found, among others, hyper@ctive (also defunct), which had a seemingly endless supply of codes for nearly any game.

The AJ's Code Page Banner

I kept trying new ways to get traffic, and signed up for some banner exchange programs which were an early form of banner advertising where people in a network would agree to show your banner (rotated among others in the network) in exchange for you showing their banner on your site. The goal was more to get traffic than to actually make any money, although I’m sure that some people figured out ways to profit from it. To a third grader, money isn’t the first thought when you’re just trying to get people to look at a site you’ve thrown up on the net.

I plugged along, and for months the counter at the bottom of my page registered barely any page views. I continually submitted my page to every search engine I could find, yet nothing really boosted my audience. I wasn’t discouraged — after all, my goal was first to see if I could make a cool page, and second to actually get visitors to that page. However, all of the sudden, one week something just “clicked”, and the counter had over 2000 hits! The next day, another 500! A few weeks later, I was at 8000 hits, and I felt like I was on top of the video game code world!

Who cares? I had all but forgotten about “AJ’s Code Page” and the beginnings of my foray into creating a web community until several weeks ago. I was laid off from my job in Wall Street, and I wanted to set up a web site for people that were in the same position and just wanted a place to go and chat, and network informally with others. Not a job site, but a place where you could feel comfortable asking where to find a cheap drink or talking about interesting places you’ve traveled during your time between jobs. I took a quick look around the net, and soon The Free Agents was born.

It turns out that the biggest obstacle you have to overcome when beginning an undertaking like this is the self doubt that inevitable springs into your mind. Could I get any users? Would anyone care about the site? Why would someone visit my site when they could just as easily spend their time on Facebook?

The doubt almost doomed my project before I had put a single page up. But strangely, what motivated me was not anything I learned in college, or any encouragement from others. The final push that I needed was simply thinking back and remember that, 15 years ago, I set up a web page that people actually visited. If I could do it then, why not give it another shot now?

The whole idea here, and the title of this post, is the power of ignorance. Eight year olds don’t generally know that something is hard, or that they are almost definitely going to fail. They just go for it — if for no other reason, because they are ignorant of the possibility, or likelihood, of failure. Is AJ’s Code Page still around today? Nope. But that endeavor was enough to motivate me on another project, and convince me that failure isn’t a bad outcome. Will The Free Agents be a roaring success? I hope so, but probabilistically, no. However, I know that if it fails, one day I might look back and say, “I created this social network — its gone now, but it succeeded in convincing me that [whatever] is possible”. And that knowledge may very well eventually lead to something that is a roaring success.

MythTV turns your computer into a media center

1. Linux can be customized far more than Windows or OSX, so your system can be set up to do exactly what you want it to do. In college, I had a spare Pentium 3 computer lying around that I wanted to use as a frontend to my media server. I didn’t care about (or want) a desktop or anything other than a media player that would play my files fullscreen. Since I had a wireless keyboard but no mouse and no remote, I wanted everything to be completely keyboard-driven. There were a few options from a “nice frontend” standpoint, most notably MythTV. However, since I wasn’t recording shows and I didn’t care so much about a fancy interface (I was fully happy with doing everything from command line since its easy enough to browse folders and play files), I settled on Ratpoison for the window manager. I set the system to boot up to a full-screen command line with a large font, and did all browsing from the command line. When I wanted to launch a file, I used mplayer set up to launch full screen. As a result, I could very quickly play a large variety of files without any GUI hassle or slowness.This was a special use, but it goes to show that Linux can be tailored in a nearly infinite number of ways. Want a large, cushy GUI? Try KDE. Want something barebones? Try XFCE or Fluxbox. Want to create a server and stick it in the closet? Just leave off the GUI — everything can be done command line. Choose what servers and services you want installed and what you want to run in the background. Finally, perhaps the best part — if you build a system using a distro like Gentoo (my distro of choice), you know and have control over everything going on. That’s power.

 

2. You can chain together basic system services to create your own custom software routines. A few months ago, I decided I wanted to wake up each morning to a different song from a playlist of about 100 songs that I had on my computer. When I got up, I wanted to first hear a random song from the playlist, then listen to current business headlines and weather read to me as I got ready. With Linux, setting this up was pretty basic. See my other blog post Talking Linux RSS Alarm Clock if you’re curious how I strung together several off-the-shelf components to create this app in only a few minutes.

 

3. You can custom-configure the OS to run well on even your old, underpowered computer.
   

   SSH clients like TouchTerm allow you to administer your machine from anywhere, even a cell phone

   
   The newest versions of Windows or OS X will run painfully slow on a computer that is more than 3 years old. This is because Vista and Leopard have become extremely bloated because of “features” like enhanced visual effects, indexed search and always-on spyware and virus protection. Visual effects are nice, but you certainly don’t want or need them when you’re using older hardware for basic tasks. Spyware and viruses are much less of a problem on Linux than on Windows, so you can get away without running any protection software on Linux (provided that you update they system regularly). Indexed search is one of the better features and almost worth the cycles it takes; however, if its an older computer, its nice to be able to forego this. Granted, you can turn off or lessen the effects of any of these three, but your system will still not be as peppy as it could otherwise be. With a stripped down Linux install, your old Pentium II can run basic apps with plenty of speed.

 

4. The system is fully accessible remotely, even over the slowest connection — even from a cell phone!With Windows, you only have control over the system remotely if you set up remote desktop, and even then, you’re severely limited to where you can connect from because sending a full screen requires a pretty fat connection. OSX is a little better — you can do the remote desktop, but you can also connect remotely over SSH, which only sends text and commands, so its a lot speedier. The problem with OSX is that most of the Apple software is designed to be used and configured through a GUI, so often there isn’t much that you’re able to do over command line. Almost anything in Linux is available over the command line, so when you connect remotely over SSH, you have as much (or almost as much) power as you have when sitting right at the desktop. If you regularly login this way, you can find applications that easily let you access your mail, play music (on the server computer) and even chat on IM all through the text-based terminal. Perhaps a special use, but its pretty convenient to be able to reboot your computer or restart your web server over your cell phone when you’re in the next state and need to retrieve a special file.

 

5. Its free, and you can try it without reformatting a computer. Check out a LiveCD like Ubuntu or Knoppix, both of which will bring you to a full-fledged Linux desktop as soon as you pop in the CD/DVD and reboot the computer. They allow you to get a very basic feel for the system without having to remove or disturb the existing OS underneath. Knoppix especially has a huge suite of applications that let you test out several programs for any given use without having to worry about downloading or installing them

 

6. Installing, maintaining and upgrading your software is a snap.Modern Linux distros (short for distributions) have very advanced package managers, which are programs that handle the search, installation, and maintenance of all of the programs on your system. Gentoo uses a system called portage, which downloads the source code for all the applications, compiles it, and installs it. This is a bit slower than just copying over pre-compiled binary packages, but [in theory] results in software thats exactly tailored for your PC. Ubuntu uses a system called apt, which is much faster than portage because all of the packages have already been compiled. In either case, finding an application is a quick command away, and installing it is only a few more keystrokes. When it comes time to upgrade, another few keystrokes can update an individual program, only system files, or every program on the computer. This is heads and shoulders above the OSX or Windows way of doing it, where you need to browse the web for a file, download it, and then go through the setup routine.
7. Linux is great with networking. Sharing files across a network? Want to set up your own web page and serve it to others? Want to connect automatically every time to other shares that people have set up, and have them seamlessly integrated into your file structure? Linux has industrial strength support for a variety of networking applications, such as Apache for web serving and Samba, NFS, scp, and a variety of other protocols for filesharing. Many of these are a click away from installing on a major distro, and can be seamlessly integrated into your files. While OSX does a pretty good job at this sort of thing, support for these services on Windows is spotty and incomplete, especially on the home versions. For example, if you have a music directory shared on Windows that you connect to using SMB (Samba), you can just set that share to appear in your home directory as /home/user/music, so it looks identical to any other directory in your system and can be manipulated and used by other programs just as easy.

 

8. Almost all of the best software for Linux is free! Just about anything you want to do with Windows is relatively easy to do with Linux, and chances are someone has written some very good free software to do it. In fact, I’ve found that software for Linux tends to be better-written and more powerful in many [most?] cases than its Windows or Mac counterpart. The reason behind this is that there is a huge network of software developers that use Linux, so when there is a glaring omission application-wise on Linux, the community is quick to step in and fix it. Furthermore, as I mentioned above, it is relatively easy to string together tools with Linux, so often application development is quick because application C makes use of applications A and B in an efficient way. Here is a [very, very brief] list of great free software on Linux:- Firefox [same program as Windows and OSX]
   - Amarok [music manager, syncs with an iPod. Comparable with iTunes, has some other interesting features]
   - KWrite [text editor, far more powerful than Notepad]
   - AbiWord or OpenOffice [word processing and office software, comparable to MS Office]
   - EasyTag [MP3 tag manager, very powerful for getting your songs tagged and named properly]
   - KAlarm [alarm clock program, can set alerts, timers and alarms on a one-time or recurring basis]
   - Pidgin [IM application, connects to AIM, Google Chat, Yahoo, MSN, etc. Lots of cool plugins]
   - The Gimp [Powerful image editing program, comparable to Photoshop]   

   These are some of the applications that are free and useful to get going on a day-to-day basis. You’ll find that a huge amount of specialized programs exist, and are free, to do things like photo management, backup, games, etc.

9. LiveCDs exist for countless specialized uses, so advanced applications are just a disk image away Because Linux is so modular, any type of system can be built around the core. For desktop users, this typically includes a nice desktop graphical environment, a web browser, a word processor and a media player. However, not all computers and configurations need this much in terms of user applications.When I was in college, I wanted to be able to compile software on Gentoo faster by using a cluster of computers to break up the workload. The good news was that there was an abundance of powerful computers on the network (namely, my friends’ machines). The bad news was that none of them had Linux or the software needed to compile over the network. The solution was distccKnoppix, a LiveCD that came pre-setup with the DistCC compiler software I needed. After downloading and burning a few copies, I went around and rebooted the computers around me into the LiveCD environment and was soon compiling on 5 separate computers.
   Lots of other great LiveCD systems exist: MythBuntu turns your computer and TV into a media center, gOS creates a very simple cloud-computing enviroment built on Google Applications, Redwall Firewall turns a spare computer into a logfile-rich firewall for the network. Tons of other CDs exist for every other conceivable use from network attached storage (NAS) to kiosk-style arcade games. The old computer that was sitting in the closet collecting dust can easily be reborn in many different ways with a LiveCD install. Check out The LiveCD List for an extensive listing of LiveCDs.

 

10. New and cutting-edge features come very quickly to Linux because of the wide network of smart programmers all over the world.Since Linux is a collection of software made by programmers all over the world instead of simply an OS packaged by one company, you can have new developments on your desktop in days or weeks by simply updating your system instead of waiting years for the next release. Furthermore, the sheer number of different minds working on the problems creates a multitude of choices for any given application.For example, in the media player area, Amarok incorporates sophisticated music analysis and fingerprinting technologies that help identify your music and suggest music that you might also like. Similar features are now trickling down to iTunes, but Linux has had them for years. Users that were interested in incorporating information from databases like Last.fm could do much more quickly by using software in Linux than they could waiting for mainstream apps for Mac OS and Windows.Desktop environments like KDE 4 and Gnome are constantly pushing the envelope in user interface technologies and new features come every day that improve the experience and add functionality. Of course, not everything is a slam dunk, so some degree of willingness to test out cutting-edge technology is required, but for those that like to be at the forefront of new tech, Linux is the place to be.

However, I was watching today, and when I clicked on a channel to watch a movie already started (Click! with Adam Sandler…so/so), I was presented with this option:

I clicked it, and sure enough, the movie started over! Pretty cool. It was a on FX, so I figured that it was just some gimmick that FX had going.

Later that night, I flipped on House on TNT. Same message! Seems like a bunch of channels are participating.

The ‘Enhanced TV’ features allow you to start from the beginning, pause or rewind the shows (no fast-forward, however, presumably to prevent you from skipping commercials). I checked out the Time Warner Enhanced TV site and it seems like there is a whole slew of features available in certain markets:

	Start Over – Missed the start of your favorite show? With Start Over™, you’ve got the power to restart and watch it from the beginning. Over 60 popular TV channels currently offer Start Over™ and it’s free with digital cable service.
	Quick Clips – Watch video clips of your favorite shows and news programs whenever you like with Quick Clips. New content is added every day and it’s free with digital cable service.
	Look Back – Ever wish you could go back in time and catch a show you missed? Now you can. Look Back lets you watch shows you missed, as many as 48 hours after the program originally aired.
	PhotoshowTV – PhotoShowTV is a new, easy, and FREE way to share your digital pictures and videos with friends and family, right through your computer and TV! It’s free when you subscribe.

Not bad. Seems like Start Over is the only feature available for me right now, but I’m particularly intrigued by the PhotoshowTV option. If they do it right (a big if — pictures are hard, since everyone already has their favorite backup and picture services, and its a pain to switch), it would be pretty neat to be able to pull up your pictures on your TV to show. Those photos from Costa Rica probably look a lot better on a 52″ plasma than on your smaller computer monitor in the den.

The next decade will be about deconvergence. Perhaps you still have a PC in your den that can browse the web, play music, watch videos that you downloaded off of iTunes and myriad other PCish activities. However, that device will be far less important than it is now, or than it has been in the last 10 years. The idea of using your main PC for everything will fade as smaller, more specialized devices take over and cannibalize the attention that this big, expensive box receives.

Since trading my Treo in for an iPhone, my use of my laptop has greatly diminished. Since getting my laptop, my use of my desktop has greatly diminished. The idea here is that, like just about anyone, my main use for a computer is browsing the web and reading emails. When I got my laptop, no longer was it necessary to be chained to a seat in my room in order to read my websites. It was replaced by sitting on the couch in my living room, where I was able to browse the web without being secluded in a den. Email was similar — the iPhone handles Gmail admirably, so in the same vein, no longer did I have to be chained to a laptop [or desktop] to check my messages — instead, I just clicked on the mail icon on my phone, and there they were.

The exciting thing next on the horizon is small devices that don’t do it all, but do one thing really well, and do it in the most ideal location. I can easily imagine a kitchen device that does little more than email, recipe database, and a basic web browser. Want to write a paper? Too bad, can’t do it here. Want to play a video game? Nope. However, what you do want is basically a kiosk that makes it dead-simple to look up a recipe or follow up on an email with grandma, and this machine does it perfectly. Of course, the price point is important too — however, since the hardware requirements will be extremely modest since we won’t be storing large files or running lots of apps, we can get away with very basic hardware. Eventually, things like these will sell in the $100-150 range, and thats where we get critical mass. Devices like this do exist (the 3M Audrey was perhaps the first, and others have come and gone), but haven’t caught on, probably due to a high price point, poor or nonexistent marketing, and overly complicated or overly simplistic feature sets.

Similar equipment will come for the home stereo and theatre. AppleTV, which has [regrettably] gone largely unnoticed, is a very good first effort at this. Plug the $300 device into your home theater, and you can buy TV shows or movies from the iTunes store and easily watch them on the big screen. Pictures and music stream from your base computer as well. The next step improvement on this is the Roku Netflix Player, which streams 15,000 titles from Netflix into your home. It costs $100, which is barely more than a decent DVD player.

Why haven’t these devices fully caught on yet? For one, people just aren’t really used to getting their television content from a computer. Its still easier to tune into ABC at 7:00 on a Monday night to watch a TV show. Music has all but entirely transitioned to the web and to iTunes (and its better competitor, Amazon Music Store), thanks largely to Apple and the iPod. TV won’t be far behind, but will certainly take a bit more to get there.

Three things stand in the way: the first is simply society — people have to get used to getting off their main computer and allowing satellite devices to take the place for some activities. At this point, a lot of people simply aren’t thinking about how they could link up their computer to their home system and achieve a sort of media nirvana that doesn’t exist right now. DVDs are on their way out, and even BlueRay won’t be the next thing — forget physical disks, its all coming into your house through your internet connection. But it will take some time for basic home users to associate computing and home entertainment, and for the time being, its the job of the early-adopters to spread the word about this killer union.

Second is the price point. Many of the home devices try to be too much, or end up using hardware that is overkill for the most basic purposes that they will be used for. Others just haven’t hit the sweet spot where the price of the hardware and the market-clearing price of the unit have come into alignment. It will, though, and I think this zone, if not upon us, is closer than we think.

Finally, there are still technical barriers. Killer embedded systems will never run Windows or Mac OSX. These operating systems are designed for hub PCs, not for tiny devices running on a basic microchip. A fledgling startup, the kind of company that could likely hit this idea on the head, can’t easily strip down Windows to the point where it runs efficiently on the most basic of systems. Linux is perfectly suited for this, since you can take out all of the excess and leave just the basics, which I see as a kernel, some display drivers, perhaps some sound drivers, some networking, and a few services on top of that to handle communications with other computers in the home. Perhaps a generic server can power your kitchen device, your AV device and your bedroom web-browsing device. DRM is poison to the process, so hopefully the nascent push out of DRM will continue and spread to video content as well as audio content.

My vision of the future? Technology won’t be something you sit down at a desk to access — instead, it will be something that surrounds you and assists everywhere you go. The web isn’t something you open a browser to get on, but rather, the backbone for a dozen of your daily activities, without you even realizing it.

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