Status-Q

There’s been much debate here in the UK about whether the BBC is giving too much coverage to the football (soccer) World Cup. On their web site, they’ve come up with a neat solution: you can choose whether or not to put the site into ‘World Cup mode’.

It probably won’t be long before we’re able to do such things with our TVs and radios as well. The concept of discrete channels is so 20th century; soon your channels will be hierarchical. (‘Tonight I’m going to watch cnn.sports.hockey’). Or maybe you’ll simply tune your TV to a set of your favourite keywords…

Tim Berners-Lee warns of the dangers of a two-tier internet.

The telecoms companies don’t really have a leg to stand on here, I don’t think. I’ve heard them complain that companies like Google and Skype are making lots of money from customers on their networks, and they’re not getting a share of it. But they are, of course. The whole reason people want to buy their broadband services is that there are companies like Google and Skype out there.

And that’s not counting the fact that those companies are already paying for their bandwidth at the other end. A recent estimate put YouTube‘s connection costs at $1M/month. So if service provider X is concerned, for example, that they failed to win YouTube’s contract, but they’re handling lots of traffic to and from YouTube’s site, they should sort it out with the other service providers concerned, not simply try and aim at the people for whom they feel the most jealousy.

For those of you who, like me, find yourselves running out of disk space too quickly, here’s a statistic to help keep your problems in perspective:

Yahoo Mail’s storage requirements are measured in terabytes per hour.

from Jeff Bonforte’s talk at e-Tel, when he was talking about the ‘SMTP fiasco’ – the spam problem

A new blog is created every second, more than half of them are still going three months after creation, and the number of blogs has been doubling every six months for some time.

This, and lots of other good stuff, can be found on a page on Dave Sifry’s site.

Status-Q, for what it’s worth, is more than 5 years old now. I wasn’t very early to the game, either, but looking at these graphs makes me feel like a pioneer… 🙂

Google’s latest attempt to show that the only thing you need on your desktop is a web browser has now gone live here. It’s nice, too, as long as you’re using one of the supported browsers.

Mac users will need to pick something other than Safari. On the other hand, they can use the addresses listed under ‘calendar details’ to subscribe to Google calendars using iCal.

A nice article about the problems of finding domain names by Dennis Forbes.

Thanks to Guy Kawasaki for the link.

Amazon S3 – “Simple Storage Service” – is coming very shortly. Others will no doubt follow – talk about Google Drive has been floating around for a bit.

The trick with all of these services should be that many people back up a lot of the same stuff. The same DLLs, the same MP3 files, the same application binaries. An intelligent client should be able to checksum the stuff on your local disk and only upload it if it’s not already stored on the service by somebody else, in which case it should just upload a pointer. Likewise, many files are very similar, and some intelligent differencing should mean that only patches need to be uploaded.

Your PC will soon just be a cache of your online world…

Some recommended weekend reading for you:

Why the net should stay neutral by Bill Thompson:

A canal has no idea what is being carried in the narrow boats, and it doesn’t really care.

and John’s column in The Observer highlights what happens when market forces go wrong.

Want to be an anonymous police informer, or call somebody and demand a ransom? SpoofCard.com lets you choose the caller-ID that appears on the destination phone, and can also modify your voice… I see a whole new life of crime stretching out before me, starting at just $10…

I’m getting more and more fond of Gizmo. If you haven’t met it, Gizmo is very similar to Skype, but based on open standards. It hasn’t always got Skype’s firewall-traversing capabilities and sound quality, but it’s pretty close, getting better all the time, and in some ways is nicer to use.

It’s hard to argue with Skype’s 60M registered users, though, 6M of whom are typically online at any one time, and I use and like Skype too. So why do I think Gizmo is important?

It’s because I see a fairly clear analogy here between Skype and the walled-garden approaches of online systems such as AOL in the past. David Beckemeyer made this point in his e-Tel talk; AOL could never hire enough people to compete with the innovation happening on the internet, and in the end they had to let their customers out of the garden. Skype is in the same position, and they are smart enough that they must know this. In fact, they may even be using AOL as their model: start closed, get a few million on board, and then open things up when you’ve built a big enough brand.

In the meantime, most of the innovation in telephony is happening around Asterisk, which is to telephony what Apache is to the web. Everything that happened with text and graphics in the early days of the web is starting to happen now with voice. I can do all sorts of really fun stuff with the Asterisk server I have at home, and the e-Tel conference has been full of other people doing other fun stuff with it.

But I cannot connect to it using Skype, not without paying, anyway, and it cannot connect to my Skype session. Gizmo, on the other hand, is perhaps the Netscape/Mozilla of this new world, and I can do so much more with it. I have UK phone numbers which will forward to my Gizmo session here in California. For free. I can use Gizmo to call up my Asterisk server and listen to MP3 files and podcasts stored on my hard disk. For free. I can connect directly to Google Talk, or to dedicated VoIP phones. For free. Some of this I would have to pay for with Skype – much of it I could not do at all.

The Skype guys deserve their success, for showing people that VoIP works, and can work well, and doesn’t have to be complicated. But as with the web, open standards will win in the end, and keywords like SIP, IAX, Asterisk and XMPP are the ones to watch out for if you want to see the next big thing coming.