What possibilities are you losing sleep over?
A new infographic from Gerson Lehrman Group’s GPlus.com maps out the current online music on-demand landscape from the top 10 players. You can see at a glance what the monthly fees are, whether or not you can add your own tunes to their online libraries, how many current users, whether they have mobile, Web or desktop apps and what the major features are. If you were thinking about trying one of these services, this is a handy place to start to evaluate their basics.
I think their decision to artificially promote Google Plus pages above more relevant pages on competing social networks is the modern-day equivalent of the ’90s era search engines turning their homepages into “portals”. A search engine should be designed to send users quickly and accurately away to whatever sites on the Internet they’re looking for. The ’90s-era search engine portals blew this, because the whole portal idea was to keep users on their sites rather than send them away. This Google Plus integration is the same thing — an attempt to keep users on Google.com for another page view or two.
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Daring Fireball Linked List: Google’s Problem: Relevance Exactly right. That’s what I meant when I wrote this a year ago. Google won search because they prioritized the best answer above anything else. They have crossed that line and it will hurt. (via bijan) |
Google’s recent change to its search engine is losing in the public opinion arena. Analysts have suggested the new feature, Google Search, plus Your World, “Pushes Google+ over Relevancy,” and “just made Bing the best search engine.” Twitter called it “bad for people.” Meanwhile, abou…
Merely measuring something has an uncanny tendency to improve it. If you want to make your user numbers go up, put a big piece of paper on your wall and every day plot the number of users. You’ll be delighted when it goes up and disappointed when it goes down. Pretty soon you’ll start noticing what makes the number go up, and you’ll start to do more of that. Corollary: be careful what you measure.
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| — | Paul Graham |
End Piracy, Not Liberty
Please Help: Oppose SOPA & PIPA today with one easy 30-second step:
SIGN GOOGLE’S PETITION TODAY!
What are SOPA & PIPA and why should you care? [Learn A LOT More Here]
- Currently the Internet is free and open, a platform for innovation, social change, and economic growth
- It has created millions of jobs in startups large and small, from OpenDesks to Google
- It has created an entire industry of freelance Internet Workers and Creative Independents
- Congress is going to vote on harmful regulations that will allow US companies under order by the courts to use the same techniques used by China, Saudi Arabia, and other countries that censor the Internet
- If passed, a website like Google, Facebook, or You Tube could be “turned off” for even a single Copyright infraction
- This is important and real
Why is this happening?
- Internet piracy is a problem
- A small number of media, entertainment, and musics companies with a strong lobby to congress are behind SOPA & PIPA
- A regulation called DCMA already addressed this issue, but Hollywood isn’t satisfied so they decided to go nuclear with a completely self-serving approach
- This approach will fundamentally change the how the Internet operates, putting most Internet startups and even the most commonly used sites like Google, Facebook, YouTube and many others in jeopardy
- This is why 7,000+ websites are protesting today including Google, Wikipedia, and Reddit. Some are blacking out.
Please help by signing this petition today.
Other Things You Can Do
NYC Tech Meet Up Call for Physical Protest of #SOPA
Dear NY Tech Meetup Member:
The future of the NY tech community is in jeopardy. We are writing to call you to an Emergency NY Tech Meetup in New York on January 18 so that we can publicly demonstrate our collective dismay at the unprecedented attack currently being made on the Internet and our industry. We will gather at 12:30 pm outside the offices of Senators Charles Schumer and Kirstin Gillibrand at 780 Third Avenue (at 49th Street). Let us know that you’ll join us by going to http://nytm.org/sos.
Here’s why:
The Internet and information technologies have created a renaissance in startup innovation in New York that now rivals Silicon Valley as a hub for economic growth. Tens of thousands of New Yorkers have been inspired to become entrepreneurs creating thousands and thousands of new jobs and offering professionals in many of New York’s traditional industries the opportunity to start new careers participating in the 21st century global economy.
However, Congress is in the process of rushing through legislation which will not only severely damage the Internet as a marketplace and platform for entrepreneurship and open innovation, but will also seriously impact the ability of our New York tech community to continue to generate jobs, grow and flourish. Within the next two weeks, the US Senate is planning to bring the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA) S.968 to the floor for a series of votes to ensure its passage.
This legislation would give the government and corporations the ability to censor the net in the name of protecting creativity simply by convincing a judge that a site is “dedicated” to copyright infringement. PIPA would give the government and corporations the ability to shut down any site connected to an accused copyright infringer. Its companion legislation in the House, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), H.R. 3261, contains many similar problems, as well as threatening ordinary users with jail for streaming any copyrighted work - even just video of themselves singing a pop song.
More importantly, the legislation amounts to a wholesale re-engineering of the open web in a way that would allow the US government to prosecute Internet users without due process, which in turn would discourage innovation, limit investment, and hurt the our economic future. You can read and hear more about this dangerous and hurtful legislation here: http://www.fightforthefuture.org/pipa or http://americancensorship.org/
As much as we agree that infringing on copyrighted material should be eliminated from the web as much as possible, the cure that is being proposed and championed by the lobbying power of major copyright holding organizations like the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) will create a cure that is much worse than the disease and irrevocably damage the very nature of the internet and by extension, the future of New York.
We believe it is imperative that we stop this bill from passage!
Therefore, please join us for an Emergency NY Tech Meetup:
When: Wednesday January 18, 2012
Time 12:30-2:00PM
Where: 780 Third Ave (at 49th street) – outside the offices of New York Senators Charles Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand
What to Bring: Your bodies and your minds, your entire team, your co-workers, your friends, your family, and your social networks
Who Will Be There: Everyone who cares about the New York tech industry and the future of the web. Special guest speakers to be announced.
How to Sign Up: RSVP at http://nytm.org/sos
You Can Tweet This: I’ll be at the Emergency NY Tech Meetup on January 18 to stop SOPA and PIPA. Join us:http://nytm.org/sos #nytmSOS
Hashtag: #nytmSOS
Thank you for stepping to take action.
Signed:
Andrew Rasiej, Chairman - @rasiej
Scott Heiferman, Founder - @heif
Nate Westheimer, Executive Director - @innonate
Jessica Lawrence, Managing Director - @jessicalawrence
And the Entire NY Tech Meetup Board
Press and General Information Contact: organizer@nytm.org
