As expected Apple jumped into the cloud-based music game yesterday when Steve Jobs announced iCloud. While I download iTunes and update my iPad to try out some of the features that are available now, here are a few thoughts on the announcements.

It’s about time that there will be iPad synching via wifi.

The mere ability to sync to the cloud is worth the cost of admission, saving space, memory and time, especially for those apps.

If you think about it the iCloud feature allowing you to access songs you bought previously is about the same as what we currently have for iOS apps, which you can delete and re-download.

All that synching addresses and email with the Cloud stuff didn’t seem revolutionary to a Gmail and Android user, though it sure excited the Apple fan boy in the office next to me. Ditto with the Twitter integration with Contacts and enhanced notifications.

iMessages the next BBM? Maybe, but a dagger in SMS, I doubt it. Sure for close friends who you know have iPhones, but if you don’t know what phone they have? There are reasons why here in the States we prefer SMS over mobile IM and email and I suspect they are the same ones that will limit the popularity of iMessages.

There sure was a lot of Twitter integration with iOS 5, but none with iTunes. Kind of a shame.

Apple’s thorough Twitter integration seems like a big middle finger to Facebook, will it appease our social media desires or just make us hungry for Facebook features throughout iOS?

I can’t find any mention of streaming in all of the iCloud and iTunes in the Cloud descriptions, just downloading to multiple devices. So just because I have uploaded 20,000 songs to iTunes in the Cloud doesn’t mean I can access them at a moment’s notice unlike Google Music. I need to download a track first before I play it. Seems like we’re still playing off the hard drive and dealing with hard drive space with this option.

TechCrunch is calling iTunes Match (where for $24.99 a year iTunes will scan your music library, identify the existing tracks that match tracks available on iTunes and give you access to them through iTunes in the Cloud) as paying “$25 a year to legalize all your content” and CNNMoney calls it “music pirates permanent amnesty.”. But before you go matching all those songs you laboriously ripped from your CD library think about the quality you ripped those songs at. I know that mine are all better than 256 kpbs so the matched tracks are actually a step down in quality.

I’ll post a deeper dive into the new iTunes features once I’ve had a chance to try them out.

Initial iCloud Thoughts is a post from: Trumblog

Last month Google announced their cloud-based music service Music Beta by Google, why it isn’t Google Music or GMusic I don’t know, because no one is going to be calling it by a name that is meaningless when shortened to 2 words and what happens when some day it is out of beta? Music by Google? Yeah right. Anyway, 2 weeks ago I got my invite and I’ve been using it exclusively since then. It’s not the cloud-based music service of my dreams, but it has promise.

To get started you need to download the Music Manager program that scans your hard drive for music files and then upload them. This is music only mind you, so you won’t upload photos, movies, etc unlike the Amazon Cloud drive and rumblings out of Cupertino about what they have up their sleeve. But then why would Google include photos and video when they have Picasa and YouTube? Uploading music is click and go, straightforward, though you can tweak the upload rate and frequency for checking for new files as well as which music files are uploaded, I picked the iTunes option, which has worked well and included my playlists, which I can’t guarantee the other options will.

I have well over the 20,000 track limit so it took several days for them all to upload, but the good news is that you can play tracks as soon as they have uploaded. There is grumbling online about it taking days to upload a full music collection, and while scanning my library and then giving me automatic access to my tracks would be great, uploading takes place in the background and it’s sure faster than when I ripped many of those albums from my CD collection into iTunes and I didn’t hear any grumbling about that at the time. Whether it was luck or a feature, my favorited tracks from iTunes seemed to be the first to upload filling a Favorites playlist right away which was much nicer than doing it alphabetically and being stuck with Abba to test with. And actually if you have over 20,000 songs in your library the the Music Manager will “will prioritize [the uploading of] songs based on a combination of your listening preferences and ratings.”. Cool huh?

The Google Music online player itself is pretty basic. You can view your music in 5 ways; New And Recent, Songs, Albums, Artists and Genres. Clicking on any of those displays your music grouped based on your selection and displaying album artwork, except for the Songs display, which gives you an alphabetical list of every song in your library. Clicking on an individual artist or genre then gives you detail of the albums with track listings.

Selecting a Song or Album reveals an icon like a dog eared page that opens options for playing it, adding it to a playlist, editing the metadata, deleting it or shopping for the artist. There all do exactly what you expect. The meta data editing is limited. I found that some of the album artwork was wrong after importing and needed to be updated, a task that requires uploading a jpg or gif rather than the easier cut and paste like with iTunes. There are also less fields for editing, no BPM, composer, comments or lyrics and sadly just a single genre, no tagging. The “shop this artist” just opens a Google Shopping search for the artist, there is no music store per se.

A few other areas where the Google Music Beta disappoints are the lack of social media integration, the lack of auto playlists beyond Thumbs Up, Recently Added and Free Songs (my auto playlist of music just from 2011 is the go to soundtrack for my commute), no sorting by year and no instant mixes by artist, just song or album. Perhaps the biggest omission of functionality is Podcasts and audiobooks. Podcast mp3s will upload from your collection to Google Music, but you can’t subscribe to or manage podcasts from Google Music. The same goes for audio books, which upload, but aren’t handled well for easy playback.

While the Google Music online player merely satisfies, its mobile integration truly impresses. With the Music app on an Android phone Google Music puts your entire music library in your pocket. You can access every track and almost every playlist from your phone whether online or off. Just like the online player, the mobile app groups your music by Artists, Albums, Songs, Genres and then gives you a extra tab for Playlists. Click on any track and, assuming that you have cell service, it plays after a few seconds for buffering. Think about that, 20,000 songs from your library accessible any time from your smart phone.

Now sometimes, on the subway, on vacation in Rural Maine and certain parts of San Francisco, you don’t have cell phone service, no problem. First of all you can “pin” albums and playlists to make them available offline and they will be downloaded to your device. The Music app also pre-buffers music for you based on what you are listening to so if I’m listening to my collection of songs on random it pre-buffers the next few songs so that on my subway ride from Boston to Cambridge my music keeps playing without missing a beat.

Music syncs automatically so new music is available from your device as soon as it’s added to the player, meta data changes show up quickly and all of your playlists from the browser-based player are on your device, with one exception, your Thumbs Up dynamic playlist. Why this is missing I have no idea. Instant mixes are synced from the browser to mobile and vice versa, but for some reason the playlist of tracks you are most likely to have at your finger tips is missing. Also missing is the ability to thumb up or down a track from your phone when you find a forgotten gem you’d like to hear again or trash you want to delete. Hopefully those features will be added soon.

Music Beta by Google feels like a beta. There is a lot of promise here, you can feel the potential, but there are still missing features. Comparing it to my dream music service it certainly gives me easy access, with the only hold ups being lack of download capability and my issue with iPad playback. It’s a little lacking in the data area and then there is no social component, but the browser and mobile integration is superb and they have a great foundation to build from.

Review: Music Beta By Google is a post from: Trumblog

These are exciting days for cloud-based music services. Amazon launched their Cloud Drive in March. Then Google rolled out the Google Music Beta at their I/O Developer Conference. And of course all signs point to Apple announcing iCloud or some similarly named cloud-based music service soon, perhaps in a couple weeks at its Worldwide Developer’s Conference. So, with this glorious opportunity ahead of us here’s what I would like in the music service of my dreams:

Easy Access

I want all of the music files that I have collected in one place and have no hear of losing them to a hard drive crash, natural accident, vindictive co-worker, etc. At some point I may also need them back, because of one of those aforementioned issues with my backup, so I want an easy download option too.

And when I say my entire music collection, I mean my entire music collection, not just the album cuts from the major labels, but rare indy singles, alt takes that never were supposed to see the light of day, unauthorized remixes, live versions, mashups, etc. I worked hard to collect it all and I want access to it all.

Then I want to access those tracks any time and anywhere that I want on any device. PC, Mac, iPod, iPad, Android. Online and offline. If it has a browser and a speaker I want to hear my music coming out of it. I can live without an official Roku channel, but provide an API so some enterprising folks can integrate it with Roku, Google TV, Apple TV, and whatever comes next. Also if my device has memory that can be written to I want some of my tracks to be available if the wifi goes out or I’m outside cell range (like on the subway during my commute).

Plenty of Data

I admit that I get a little anal about my music meta data, the correct year, album artist, disk number, artwork, etc. It simultaneously drives me nuts that I have to pick only one genre for a song (is Paper Planes rock, electronic, world, hip-hop, alternative or all of them?) and to have both the genres Electronic and Electronica represented in my library. Give me the control to edit the information about my music the way that I want it and tag it to my heart’s content.

The flip side of that is that I want to pull plenty of data about my collection and listening habits. What albums from the past year did I listen to the most? Which of my albums are on the 4AD label (why is label not included in music meta data I ask you?). Presumably this service will be doing some data mining of my music taste so give me recommendations about artists, albums, tracks, playlists and even blogs that I should check out.

Social

A perfect music service will integrate with social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and Blogs so that I can let friends know what music I like, share what’s new, what mood I’m in, and I can find out the same about my friends. Those social features of course promote discovery of new music, which then the service would support through access to music blogs, band websites, music stores, etc so that I can learn about bands, listen to new tracks and find new music.

Finally, the service should be free and has no memory limits. How do you make money? Well, a music store is the obvious economic model. Targeted ads based on my music collection is another. Fully integrated, media rich, band/ label micro sites could be sold at a premium. Then there’s the benefit of keeping consumers within your online ecosystem (think Google keeping you in the GMail, YouTube, Google Voice, Android set of services and away from Apple).

Ok, so that is my wish list. Next I’ll start writing about how some of the existing services that I’ve tried in my quest to find the music service of my dreams stack up.

The Cloud-Based Music Service Of My Dreams is a post from: Trumblog

If you are a marketer in Boston next week and interested in the future of marketing, especially digital marketing you have a great opportunity available to you because all next week is FutureM.

FutureM is a series of events put on by agencies and marketers around Boston on everything from social networking to mobile marketing, ecommerce to geomarketing and more.  There are panels, virtual events, roundtables, summits, meetups and of course a few parties. Most of the events are free, but there are a few marque events like the Inbound Marketing Summit and Monitoring Social Media that you have to buy tickets to.  Check out the complete FutureM schedule for details on times and locations and to register.

I’ll be attending a lot of these events, check out my Plancast to see where I will be next week, as will a bunch of my colleagues from Jack Morton.  We’ll be tweeting the events at @JackMorton and you can review my Twitter feed at @TPapi for my personal take on things. Like I did st SXSW I’ll liveblog the events I attend using Twitter and you can read them all here at TTrumble.com.  Also follow my colleague Steven Duque on Twitter at @StevenDuque and StevenDuque.com. We’ll also be posting lots of updates on the Jack blog, our personal blogs and anywhere else that the conversation flows.  If you can’t attend, listen in and join the conversation.

FutureM: October 4-8, 2010 is a post from: Trumblog

Language defines, or at least provides structure for our thoughts and therefore our actions. A language without singular pronouns is probably used by a culture that sees the world as made up of groups. How would this culture act versus a culture whose language uses the first person singular pronoun in every sentence? Would one culture be more prone to narcissism? Would one focus on the good of the group over the individual? If we were building a language today and could see how its structure was constraining our culture how should we change it?

In computing this is even more true because the language and its structures are the foundation of thought on how programs will function. It places limitations on what the program can perform or at least makes some things easier to perform and makes others much more difficult to achieve.

Now think about how hard it is to understand these restrictions from within the system itself. What sudden blow to your understanding of the world would be needed to see it? Jaron Lanier delivers that shock with “You Are Not A Gadget.” Lock-in of structures from computer languages restrict us and disregard our humanity. The drop-down lists of relationship types, religions, ethnicities and the like on Facebook pigeonhole us as individuals and the strict layout of profile pages hide our unique and messy personalities. Crowdsourcing is not the answer to everything and subsumes the unique individual into the masses. Online anonymity releases the inner troll in us all. Open-source culture makes the building blocks of culture of greater value than the original composition and strips context from the content. We have stopped being original and merely churn through the detritus of past decades. The promise of the web in the mid nineties has let us down.

Alternately sounding like a truth-teller and a crank Lanier rails against the limits of MIDI, status updates on Twitter and Facebook, open-source culture, the lack of original music since the 1980s, Wikipedia, search engine optimization and belief in the Singularity. It’s not hard to find chinks in his arguments and overreaching leaps, but focusing on those errors avoids the real issues that he delves into. Anyone who works with web 2.0 and espouses openness owes it to themselves to read this opposing view and not dismiss Lanier as a late hippie lamenting the good old days and unrealized promise that they held.

You Are Not A Gadget is a post from: Trumblog

This 2010 State of the Internet video is along the same lines as “Did You Know” videos, plenty of stats on the internet, email and social media sites as a video infographic with an electronic beat.

2010 State of the Internet Video is a post from: Trumblog

Mayor Bill Bunten of Topeka, Kansas this week moved  to rename his city Google, Kansas for the month of March as a stunt to secure their selection as the location for testing of Google’s ultra fast internet infrastructure and receive the jobs, investment and who knows, tourism, that goes along with it. Interestingly Topeka means “to dig good potatoes” in the Kansa and Ioway languages.  I imagine that Bill Bunton wants it now to mean “dig for fiber optic cable.”

It reminds me of course of Hot Springs, New Mexico that in 1950 hitched it’s star to a different media channel (radio) and renamed itself Truth or Consequences.  2010 is a different time than 1950 and Bill Bunton is either smarter or less committed than the people of Hot Springs because Truth or Consequence’s name change was permanent while Google, Kansas will revert back to Topeka on April Fools Day.  And that’s probably a good thing anyhow since any city that permanently names itself Google would quickly find themselves on the wrong end of a copyright lawsuit rather than showered with thanks for the PR.

I wonder if the results will be fleeting.  Truth or Consequences (the quiz show) was broadcast from Truth or Consequences (the city) once, but then host Ralph Edwards was dedicated enough to the city that he visited every year for half a century as part of the city’s “Fiesta” held on the first weekend of May.  I seriously doubt that the hardware and fiber optics laid by Google will still be in use in 50 years and if it is then it will be as outmoded as the Victrola used to listen to quiz shows back in 1950. If Topeka’s smart, and I have no doubt that they are, they will need to capitalize on a Google investment by luring tech companies with cheap bandwidth and become a sort of “Silicone Plains.” But they’ll need to act fast because if Google’s plan is a success then Topeka’s window of opportunity will be short and the digital divide closed before they know it.

Photo: Truth or Consequences by einelam

Topeka’s Google Gamble is a post from: Trumblog

I found out last week that I have become something of a web design stick in the mud.  It was because of my friend Eddie Perez”s review of JimCarrey.com.  Fittingly the design and user experience of the site is as unique as the actor and as Eddie puts it,

The site was clearly designed to give visitors a chance to unearth the content through exploration. Cinematic transitions between pages, coupled with great use of sound effects and eerie background music make it seem as if you’re not just discovering the content on the site, but also the mind of Jim Carrey as well.

That same day I met a woman who’s website home page was a mosaic of randomly generated set of YouTube videos that expand when rolled over.  For both sites I reacted violently against the design.  I didn’t want to work so hard to discover I wanted the content that I was looking for and I wanted to find it easily and accessibly. My God, I thought, I’ve become Jakob Nielsen!

What made me such a curmudgeon? Maybe it’s the hours that I’ve spent in usability testing.  Maybe it was the fights about the logic behind cues for wayfinding in website navigation, work that led me to consider writing a book about best practices?  Maybe it’s that I lived though the early years of web design where an image of an office served as the metaphor for the navigation of a corporate website?  Maybe I’m just old, but I like standard, left navigation, no bells and whistles web design.  I don’t want to explore, I don’t want unique experience.  I want to find things quickly and easily so that I can move on. Maybe it’s ADD?

Even the bottom navigation of Jim Carry’s site was not enough.  I needed the nav easily accessed, spelled out and easy to understand.  Maybe I have too many toolbars on my browser? I want what is the target of each link to be  obvious  and I want to get there fast.  I’ve become a stick in the mud when it comes to that stuff.  I am set in my ways and cringe at navigation that is spaced across the page beside little logos or pictures and clearly not governed by CSS.  I know what I like and what I don’t and I’m not going to change.

Now, you damn kids, get off my yard!

Update: Yesterday Conor Brady shot another spitball at my love of highly usable web design and navigation in his post Web Design Has Changed Since 2000, Why Haven’t Evaluation Standards? Argh, back in my day….

I Hate Artsy Website Navigation is a post from: Trumblog

More wi-fi travel news.  Jaunted has a nice little chart with details on the status of wi-fi for the airlines in the United States, availability, provider and cost.  Their report on the subject also includes details on the crucial AC outlet at your seat in order to make the most of that wi-fi access.

Your best bet is still Virgin America (for both wi-fi and AC outlets, love you guys), with Delta a close second.  Come on airlines, this is 2010.  Get your wi-fi on.

Airline Wi-Fi Availability Chart is a post from: Trumblog

In my continuing recap of 2009 as documented by our activity on search engines and social media sites here are the results from YouTube.  It wasn’t Barack Obama nor Michael Jackson, but Susan Boyle’s remarkable voice in a humble package (not to mention some great stagemanship from Briton’s Got Talent) who was the top video of 2009.

Most Watched YouTube videos (Global):

1. Susan Boyle – Britain’s Got Talent (120+ million views)
2. David After Dentist (37+ million views)
3. JK Wedding Entrance Dance (33+ million views)
4. New Moon Movie Trailer (31+ million views)
5. Evian Roller Babies (27+ million views)

While not as detailed as their cousins over at Google YouTube does break out their data into some more detail.  In addition to music videos (who knew Miley Cyrus was popular enough to take 2 spots of the top 5 globally) I’d love to see television shows, movie trailers, news events, user generated videos, video podcasts, etc. as some additional categories.

Most Watched music videos on YouTube (Global):

1. Pitbull “I Know You Want Me” (82+ million views)
2. Miley Cyrus “The Climb” (64+ million views)
3. Miley Cyrus “Party in the U.S.A.” (54+ million views)
4. The Lonely Island “I’m On a Boat” (48+ million views)
5. Keri Hilson “Knock You Down” (35+ million views)

Finally I’d like to see this monthly data and global/ US split from other search and social media sites, which is a nice reminder of what captivated us over the course of 2009 and how US taste coincides and diverges from that of the global online population.

Fastest Rising YouTube search terms by month (Global):

Fastest Rising YouTube search terms by month (U.S.):

Most Watched YouTube Videos Of 2009 is a post from: Trumblog