Category: Analysis

I’m approaching my second anniversary of hosting my sites (including MediaSavvy and Parr.org) at Dreamhost. I bounced from host to host for seven unhappy years until I landed at Dreamhost. They had the right combination of products and services. I can recommend them without reservation.

They’re a small company, but their uptime has been excellent.

Dreamhost’s control panel works really well and does everything I need to manage my account.

They supply all the software support I need (Perl, PHP, cgi, MySQL, and more). I’ve been able to install and use all kinds of CMS and other software on my Dreamhost account without any problems.

Their customer service and tech support have been outstanding.

They’re prices are great. They have surprised me a couple of times by increasing and improving the services I get for what I pay.
Their packaging is simple and I don’t feel like I have to buy any more service than I need to do what I want to do.

Disclaimer and invitation: If you use the link above or the one on my navigation bar to sign up, I get credit against my Dreamhost bill.

I’ve been looking for a content management system for a new community project I’m working on.

My requirements were simple. It had to be easy to set up and maintain. It had to be template-driven and the templates had to be editable by someone more proficient at HTML than Perl, PHP, or Python. It had to use either a weblog or Slashdot-style structure, but be flexible enough to accommodate changes in the structure and menus. I had to be able to use it on a virtual host where I didn’t have access to the http server. The software also needed to support registration and posting by users, without a lot of intervention from the administrator. It needed to be a finished product with good documentation and an active community of users. Finally, I had to be able to find the software, install it, create a prototype, and set up my site without using a lot of time.

Movable Type would have been ideal. It’s what I use for MediaSavvy and my family sites, but it doesn’t support user registration and posting.

I spent a lot of time examining open source CMS’s, but none seemed to be both broadly-supported and really simple. But it’s really hard to tell sometimes. There is still not enough information available on open source CMS’s.

I looked at wikis, but that was a frustrating experience. I never found one that was both easy to install and able to support more than minimal design improvements.

I looked at Scoop, which I liked a lot. I went so far as to get an account on a Scoop host, create a prototype site, and modify the templates to use CSS. But it didn’t work with my virtual host and required too much Perl to make the modifications I needed. It became clear I would need to hire a Perl wizard to maintain my site.

Postnuke looked great and has the best installer of any package I’ve used. But its formatting wasn’t flexible enough. That’s too bad, because it’s a great piece of software in many ways.

I installed pMachine this morning, and I think it’s what I’m looking for. It’s not open source, but at $45 for a noncommercial license it’s hard to beat. It’s as impressive as Movable Type in its power and ease of use. Plus, it has much better support for multiple authors.

David Isenberg notes that price discrimination in networks is probably inevitable, but that it needs to take place at the ends, not in the middle:

One of Mile O’Dell’s aphorisms that has stood the test of time is, “Today’s optimization is tomorrow’s bottleneck.”

…

We need to accept that price discrimination happens, and focus on where it happens, for what and to whom. According to the End-to-End Principle, if you have a choice to put a function at the edge of the network or in the middle, you should put it at the edge. Price discrimination in the middle of the network is a risk to new app discovery and to free speech. We should keep the network stupid — and put the “for what” and “to whom” of price discrimination at the edge.

I had never heard the O’Dell quote before. It’s brilliant.

I certainly agree that price discrimination puts the brakes on innovation in networking applications. But I’m not sure how it can be moved to the edges the network, or if that is the right solution to the problem.

There is a huge opportunity that the cellco’s are ignoring. All kinds of devices should be connected to the Net, but aren’t.

Why doesn’t my digital camera have an “email this picture” option? Why can’t my iPod be updated with news or email or RSS feeds? Why does Tivo require a physical connection to a telephone landline? Why is data access so much more expensive than voice access?

The cellco’s are tightly controlling what devices can connect to their networks and are stifling innovation in the process. Right now, they make money on the hardware and selling hardware is a big part of their distribution model.

If they opened up their networks to well-behaved devices that could be traced to a known account holder, they would greatly increase the amount of innovation on applications and devices that used mobile networks. Furthermore, if any one of the big cellco’s did this, they would have a significant competitive advantage. And, finally, if they don’t do it soon, WiFi could preempt most data-based applications of cellular networks.

No single company can innovate a fast as a market, especially a networked market. Cellco’s could achieve Internet-style growth rates in users and traffic if they opened up their networks to all kinds of devices, protocols, and applications. Is it too late for Congress or the FCC to make this a licensing requirement?

The Sony Ericsson T616 has tons of features, including dozens of shortcuts. I’ve read the manual a couple of times, and I’m not sure I’m ever going to master all of them. It’s critical to read the manual if you’re going to get the most out of this phone. Fortunately, the manual is pretty well written and organized.

Synchronization with iCal and Address Book is seamless and painless. The address book and calendar on the T616 are very good. I’m still confused about one thing. There are two places numbers can be stored–either on the phone’s built-in memory or in the SIM card. It’s still not clear to me how these two phone books work together. Also, the process of setting up speed-dial numbers is unnecessarily cumbersome.

Email works well, and you don’t need to use a proprietary account to do it. I was able to set up my POP account, and send and receive email without a problem–including emailing pictures I took with the phone. I’m still struggling with how to use email with this device. Fortunately, the T616 allows you to set up and choose from multiple email accounts. I can see that I’m going to start racking up some significant data bills with this device.

The ergonomics of the phone are good. Despite its square shape, it has curves in the right places, making it comfortable in my hand and easy to grip when I’m using it. The limited number of keys are well laid-out, and it’s (usually) easy to figure out what to do next. My only other complaint is that the functions of the special-function keys, clustered around the joystick, are sometimes difficult to figure out. Also, the keys (and the clickable joystick) are a little smaller than I would like, resulting in a great deal of pressure on your fingertips. After a lot of use, the tips of my fingers can be a little sore.

The menus are ugly and hard to read. Nearly every other part of the phone acknowledges that upper and lower case is more readable than uppercase, but the menus are upper-case only.

The camera is fun and doesn’t appear to add a lot of overhead to the phone, but its resolution is pretty low. But it’s better than nothing when you need to send a picture. If mobile networks were more open, we could have “email this picture” function into cameras as well as cameras built into cell phones.

I still haven’t set up voice control or explored AT&T’s mMode walled WAP garden. I’m excited about one, and couldn’t be less interested in the other.

Douglas Rushkoff says it’s not content that matters on mobile phones, it’s communication.

He’s right. That means that the cellco’s are doubly stupid. Not only could they have virtually unlimited content on their systems if they opened up their networks, they’ve completely missed the point that content doesn’t sell phones.

As the wireless industry begins on its long, misguided descent into the world of content creation, it must come to terms with the fact that the main reason people want content is to have an excuse – or a way – to interact with someone else.

Ideally, this means giving people the tools to create their own content that they can send to friends. Still cameras is a great start. Some form of live digital video would be fun, too. (“We’re at the Grand Canyon, mom, look!” or “Here’s the new baby!”)

But elaborately produced content – like prepackaged video shorts, inscrutable weather maps, and football game TV replays – are not only inappropriate for a two-inch screen, they are inappropriate as social currency.

Why are they trying to reinvent themselves when they can sell the single most valuable thing of all…human contact? Why are they trying to create the elaborate content superstructures when they should be enhancing how their hardware and their networks enable communication? Why are they nickel-and-diming us for text messaging when they should be looking for the next killer communications app?

The next killer app on mobile phones will be hosted by the first cellco to open up their network to developers.

My new phone has given me a first-hand experience with how telephone companies would like to see the Internet work. It’s a chilling vision, and one that publishers, regardless of size, should be fighting.

Right now, telcos are working behind the scenes to control your access to the Internet. They have already turned wired broadband into a duopoly. They have already turned as-yet-undeployed fiber broadband into a monopoly.

As the telcos tighten their grip on the Internet, you can expect to see Internet access look more like the mobile network.

Complicated and confusing pricing: Right now, you can get unlimited Internet access at a specified speed for a flat monthly rate from the telcos and cable companies. That’s because they’re still competing with dial-up, which is a wide-open free market with plenty of real competition. Even so, duopoly pricing has suppressed broadband adoption in the US. If the telcos ran the Internet and could structure access pricing, you could expect to have “plans” that would offer multiple tiers of service, allowing you to “choose the plan the met your needs”. The result, because your needs are less predictable than you think, is that virtually everyone would pay more for the same amount of service. The unpredictability of our monthly bills would suppress usage almost instantly. This would be a hidden tax on the free Internet.

Discrimination among traffic. Despite the fact that it’s all bits, AT&T bills separately for voice and “data”. There are two separate plans and the prices are wildly different. AT&T’s cheapest data plan is 8 MB for $19.95/mo + $.006/kb after that. Their most expensive is $.03/kb with no plan at all. I’m not sure how fast AT&T’s network is, but let’s assume its 14.4 kb/s. At maximum throughput, this works out to be about 10 minutes of data use (8,000 kb / 14.4 kb/sec / 60 sec/min = 9.26 min) for $19.95/mo. It gets worse if their network is faster. AT&T wouldn’t get very far selling voice plans that provided 10 minutes a month for $20. Why are they charging more for “data”? Because they can.

Charging for messaging: In addition to the hourly charge for voice, and per-bit charge for data, there a per-message charge for text messaging. Imagine having to pay for each email or instant message you send.

Walled gardens and discrimination among destinations: The cellco’s invented the term “walled garden” to describe a subset of the Internet that they control, which their subscribers would be forced into, and which content and commerce companies would be forced to pay for access. You could expect it to be more difficult (or impossible, depending on your provider and your plan) to get to content providers who are not paying to reach you. This hidden tax on Internet access would result in more fees for content, more advertising, and higher prices from Internet merchants.

Dedicated hardware: Why can’t you buy any cell phone and hook it up to your cellco’s network? Why do you have to pay a fee to add an approved phone that you bought from another user? The cellco’s are selling access to you to the handset providers. There is no free market for mobile hardware. The other result of this is that there is no free standard for data access on cell phones. Imagine an access provider that didn’t support anything other than the latest version of Windows, which included lots of goodies like digital rights management, copy prevention, telco control of which applications and protocols you can run, and advertising.

Limited protocols: Why can’t you use MP3 rin, display HTML pages, access POP and IMAP email, or use AOL instant messaging on your cell phone? Why are the access companies already limiting access to email servers or bouncing mail from people who operate their own email servers?

This is the direction in which the Internet is moving. This is the vision of the telcos and the current management of the FCC. Its bad for users, small hardware and software companies, publishers, merchants, and anyone who uses the network to work, communicate, or gather information.

And the irony is that it’s probably not that much more profitable in the long run for the telcos than providing us with open, unlimited access to bits via whatever devices and protocols we choose.

I’ve ranted here a few times that I don’t want HTML in my email. Today I did something about it. Virtually all of the HTML mail I get is spam. I was sick and tired of my mail client parsing the HTML and going to the Net and every time I clicked on one of those messages. And spammers could use those accesses to track whether I read their message.

I set my email client (CTM’s PowerMail) to flag all HTML email as spam, mark it as read, and put it somewhere that I can review it at my leisure. Newsletters and commercial email are filtered out before they hit the HTML filter.

This has eliminated about three-quarters of the spam that Razor missed. I was especially pleased to see all that Chinese-language spam was being tagged.

I know that this may not be a good long-term technique, because more and more email clients are defaulting to HTML, and it does offer some advantages over plain text. But, for now, friends don’t send friends HTML email.

I’ve been looking for a while for a phone to replace my ancient and reliable Startac. I finally found one (Sony Ericsson T616) that meets my criteria:

• Addressbook and calendar that are Mac friendly: I can use iSync to synchronize by addressbook and calendar via Bluetooth. It was pretty easy to set up and now it’s very easy to use. This pretty much eliminates any need I had for a PDA.
• Small and light: It’s not some huge PDA, like the TMobile Sidekick or Palm Tungsten or Handspring Whatever. It’s just a phone and it fits in my pocket. And it’s really light.
• Good service: I wanted to switch to AT&T or Verizon, because they’re the best of a bad lot. I was done with Sprint PCS, and the thought of TMobile or Cingular just made me weary.
• Simplicity: The hardware is simple and has a look I would describe as “Scandinavian”. It avoids all the design excesses of most new feature-rich phones. It has a number keypad, four navigation keys and joystick. The keypad is arranged like a traditional telephone keypad and you can find the buttons by touch. The software interface isn’t great, but it’s acceptable.
• Email access: I haven’t set this up yet, so I’ll report on this later, but I’m looking forward to accessing my email from this gadget.
• Fun factor: It has a lot of fun features I don’t necessarily need, but which are fun: a camera, games, voice control.

It’s hardly perfect. Many of the problems are tied to the mobile industry’s desire to keep us in a walled garden, because it serves their needs, not ours:

• Nonstandard connectors: Not only is it incompatible with standard accessories — such as power adapters and headsets — the T616’s connectors are more Baroque than any I have yet seen.
• Garish interface: It’s not an iPod, that’s for sure. Its overuse of color reminds me of Windows XP. The background patterns that come with it are awful. However, I was able to use Apple’s Bluetooth utility to upload my own background. There’s still a lot of unnecessary and over-decorated junk on the screen.
• Weak menu system: There are too many menus and they’re too long. There’s no reason for a phone that is able to easily display six lines to have menus that scroll off the screen.
• Too much space dedicated to extra-price services: There are dedicated icons, menu items and a button for AT&T’s mMode service, which costs extra. I’ll be talking more about this later.
• Deadly ringtones: They must want to sell me ringtones, because the ones that come with the phone are just plain awful. It can’t play MP3 files, so my ability to customize the ringtones is limited.
• WAP: The tortured, broken zombie protocol continues to live as a crude but effective walled garden. After all, who but a cell company would produce or serve pages for WAP? The T616 does not do HTML.
• Display: Some reviews have said the display isn’t readable in bright sunlight. Here on the foggy SF coastside, I haven’t had that problem yet.

I’m really happy with my new phone and I’m looking forward to using it. It’s the most complicated consumer electronics device I’ve ever owned and it’s going to take me a while to understand how to use it and make it my own. My guess is that a year from now, there will still be features I don’t know how to use.