Google prepares for world domination with new product lines.

Sure Google is Evil but so is my ex. But just because they’re evil doesn’t mean they aren’t attractive. Buzz on the web indicates Google is poised to shake some pillars just in time for the end of the world in 2012.

Project Tungsten

Mobiledia reports that Google is nearly finished with a “Smarthome” platform code-named Project Tungsten.  This is straight out of every damned future-movie we’ve ever watched. You pull up the driveway and the door unlocks, the lights turn on, (to a preset level dependent on time of day and ambient light intensity) the stereo pulls up your favorite playlist, and your android-enabled kitchen mixes you an unnecessarily strong Iron Butterfly.

Just add a holographic model in a French-maid outfit, and we’re all set. Except we will need a new vision of what the new future living quarters will look like.

Google Music Player

Finally. I’ve been waiting for someone…anyone to come out with a decent music player and online storage system  so I can tell Microsoft and Apple both to suck it.

I would have bet money on Amazon’s new cloud storage, or maybe Dropbox or Sugarsync, but I never thought our musical savior would be Google. Lifehacker.com gives a sneak peak of Google’s new cloud music player.  Store 20,000 songs in the cloud, and access them through the android smartphone app. Yet another way to suck both your phone batteries and your data plan minutes dry, but it trounces carrying two devices or suffering with I-tunes.

By invite only, so make sure to get on the list.

Google Voice

I was grandfathered into Google Voice a few years ago when they bought Grand Central, so this service isn’t very *new* and I’m surprised that Google really hasn’t bothered to promote the “One Number To Rule Them All” but I think it’s a damned miracle. One number rings all your phones at once, or you can set rules based on time of day or the incoming number. For example, if anyone from my Family group calls between 8AM and 5PM, then forward to these phones. If my student loan officer calls at any time,  dump it directly to voicemail.

Custom messages means you can leave a “Hi There! I sure am sorry I missed your call!” for your mom and your sweetie, while unlisted numbers get the generic “Leave  a message, but don’t hold your breath.”

Messages left for you get translated into text and e-mailed to you, meaning you can actually get your voicemail messages during meetings with your ringer turned off, AND messages are now stored forever in your e-mail, AND searchable via text.

I could keep going, but QED. Google Voice rocks, and the reason I add this to the list is because Microsoft just announced plans to purchase the mega-online phone mogul, Skype. This action alone will call attention to Google Voice as an option, and  so they won’t even have to promote it, and it may force Google’s hand and make them fess up as to their big plans for such an awesome and underrated service.

Regardless, I predict that you’ll be hearing more about Google Voice in the near future.

Google TV

And if that wasn’t enough, Google TV should just about clench it.

Evil is the new Good

So Google’s got your personal communication device, your entertainment center and your house in their digital pocket. Oh yes, and they are sifting through your contact list so they got all that, too.  I’m just going to send them my credit card now and get it over with. Who am I kidding? They probably already have it.

When you add it up, it really does look like Google is going to take over the world. Maybe it should. Google may not be able to run for President of the United States of America, but it could certainly take a position as a world-dominating authority. Google knows all our secrets (Well, except maybe China)  so it wouldn’t be a difficult task.

Come on Google, you’ve already botched your Don’t Be Evil slogan, and Be Evil, but just evil enough to make your online experience better isn’t going to cut it.

If you don’t step up and take over the world, I’ve got Cthulhu on speed-dial. Wait a minute, does Cthulhu own controlling stock in Google? That would explain a lot.

Don’t recall how I came across Richard Florida’s The Great Reset: How New Ways of Living and Working Drive Post-Crash Prosperity, but it sounded like an interesting and timely read for someone curious about where things are heading here in Post-Crash America.

The last thing I was expecting was a book written by a geographer… sorry, I mean a self-proclaimed “leading urban expert.”  It’s too bad, because although there are a lot of insightful observations in The Great Reset, they’re buried in so much geographic factoids and musing that if you tore out all the pages filled with tripe about megacities, megaregions, corridors, belts and coasts, you’d have an amazing, thoughtful pamphlet easily one fifth the size of The Great Reset.

Where’s the Web?

One thing missing from The Great Reset is a fad called the Internet.  Mobile computing is also conspicuously absent. Richard Florida must not think these things have a bearing on the current situation or our “new ways of living” because they aren’t mentioned. This is probably because Mr. Florida is a self-proclaimed leading urban expert, and he’s more interested and versed in the physical world than the virtual one. Note that he’s not a suburban expert or a rural expert, so you can probably guess his suggestions for post-crash prosperity, but I’ll touch on some of his main points:

Houses Bad, Apartments Good

He calls suburban houses McMansions. There’s no doubt they played a major part in the housing bubble burst, and were a major contributor to the current recession, but it’s not the houses themselves that are bad. Not even the big ones. It’s people buying houses they couldn’t afford that caused problems. Even I know that, and I’m just a hack writer from Minneapolis. The Great Reset tears down the American Dream of owning a home, equating it to a nightmarish anchor that limits your flexibility, ties you down and sucks all your money away, giving nothing back. Not true of course, but I’ll get to that in a moment.

Mr. Florida believes you are better off living in more consolidated housing. He doesn’t do this himself, mind you. He lives in a house near Toronto, Canada. Most of his rationale about housing is the debt that comes with them, which ties into his next major point:

Owning Bad, Renting Good

Mr. Florida says that housing can no longer be considered an asset that increases in value over time. I don’t know who thought this, but I guess some people did. Anyway, he suggests renting becoming more prevalent as part of the new post-crash economy, which will allow people to be flexible in their employment and living options.

He mentions a housing concept that makes your rental living space more like a subscription that you can change on a moment’s notice. An interesting concept, but one that he doesn’t dwell on long enough to consider its effects. I would have liked to hear what he thought about how ‘subscription housing’ would effect human migration patterns or working conditions or influence job markets.  (Would people move to follow nice weather? Would states change their laws or taxes to attract residents? What if businesses were free to move about like people?) Exactly the kind of things I’d hoped to find in this book, sadly lacking.

The internet also makes a case against The Great Reset’s tend towards renting vs owning. What kind of flexibility do you need in housing when you can telecommute? Doesn’t it seem more likely that people will scatter away from high-density (Read: Expensive) areas to get larger property for less cost, and make up for the distance by utilizing high-speed communications technology to trade video/audio/ideas?

This all overlooks an important aspect of owning a home – after you pay off your mortgage, you DONT HAVE A HOUSE PAYMENT ANYMORE. What’s more, this conveniently happens at an important time of your life -  retirement, when your income also tends to decrease. And once your home is paid for, even if it’s only worth a fraction of what you bought it for, that equity is profit when you sell. Houses may decrease in value, but they won’t decrease to $0 in thirty years. If you rent, you’ll PAY FOREVER and OWN NOTHING, so keep that in mind, because the “leading urban expert” did not.

Suburbs Bad, Cities Good.

I’d hate to see Richard Florida’s dream world. It would probably look like Zion from the worst parts of the Matrix trilogy, stuffed with living cubicles that look like Bruce Willis’ apartment in The Fifth Element.

Then there’s  that pesky internet fad I keep talking about.  If a large portion of work, social interactions and entertainment move online, then it doesn’t really matter where you live. In that case, why not get more property for less money? Besides, if you put anyone like me into a hell like that, I’d kill everyone in a half-mile radius so I could have some personal space.

The MegaCity solution provided in The Great Reset doesn’t make sense to me.  I’m more inclined to believe cities will go the other way – breaking down into MicroCities; tiny sustainable communities similar to the villages of ye olde days, or the Happy Hippy Communes of the 70s. One person grows crops to feed the village, another raises cattle.  One works on computers, another works on the wind turbine and solar panels that power the village. They all pitch in and work together to keep their little community running.  Strangely, our Leading Urban Expert never even considers or mentions this possibility. Probably because if it came true, he’d be out of work, and have to retrain to be a Village Expert.

Cars Bad, Bullet Trains Good

Mr. Florida sees cars as an outdated mode of transportation. He advocates connecting large cities together with high speed transit, turning multiple MegaCities into MegaRegions.  He suggests that high-speed rail connecting lame-o cities like Minneapolis to important cities like Chicago would allow people to commute to where the jobs are.

But doesn’t this just bump the McMansion problem to a larger scale? Isn’t taking the bullet train from Minneapolis to Chicago every day just like driving your Humvee to work from your McMansion the suburbs? Not to Mr. Florida, who sees a half-hour car trip from the suburbs to the city as wasteful, stressful and pollutive, but a ninety minute bullet train ride between Pittsburg and DC is “reasonable”. Huh? And how this is different from Airplane travel (that we already have) isn’t clear.

I’m sorry, but public transportation does not solve all the problems.  If you agree that one of the key features of the “new normal” will be flexibility in jobs, housing and entertainment, public transportation fails, big time. Personal transportation wins. Once again, it isn’t the big cars that are the problem, big cars that people can’t afford are the problem. Easily solved by making smaller, more efficient transportation like smart cars, motorcycles and mopeds, which we already have.

Another possibility that Mr. Florida never considered is that people might start to collect multiple forms of transportation. They’ll walk/bike to work. They’ll take the bus or rail downtown on weekends. They might have a moped/scooter for traveling to friends who don’t live near a busline.  And they might still have the big Range Rover under a tarp, but it’s only for the occasional vacation or longer trip.

The Upshot

The overall impression I get from The Great Reset is that Americans should all move to New York and LA. This would not only be efficient and reduce our carbon footprint, but it would make us more connected, so we are better able to exchange and ideas and… well, stuff we share over the internet now.

There is a saying that when the only tool in your toolbox is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. I’d say when you’re a “leading urban expert” everything looks like a problem that can be solved by packing into a Megacity where life is more ‘efficient’. Perhaps he would have a more balanced view if he specialized in geography instead of just urban areas.

Despite many fallacies, omissions, and fluffed up geography discussions that would bore a city planner, The Great Reset poses useful thoughts on consumerism, education,  political policies and trends regarding the current recession and comparisons to previous “Resets”. But you’ll have to read ten pages to get one page of useful info.

For those who don’t know, Twitter is a service that lets you post bursts of random nonsense onto the internet in a format called a ‘tweet’. Tweets are limited to 140 characters, so it’s an exercise in succinctity for people who have a lot of nothing to say. Tweets can be sent/received from the web, cell phones, and automatically (as this blog post does through twitterfeed) 

The real-world equivalent of Twitter would be: standing in the mall courtyard, shouting out short sentences along with everyone else, as if the whole world had suddenly come down with Tourette’s Syndrome. It’s interesting to simply watch the rolling stream of collective consciousness going absolutely nowhere in thousands of small steps.

Even when you understand it, it still doesn’t make sense. Twitter about as useful as a wet-nap is to a scuba diver.

I’ve been on Twitter since middle of 2008 www.twitter.com/conradzero, and its undergone quite a shift in both popularity and purpose. People everywhere are scrambling to see how they can use Twitter in new and different ways. I have to admit that part of me finds it exciting when some new odd open-source project comes along, and the innovators dive in headfirst trying to twist it into usability. 

The number of Twitter-ish applications are growing at a preposterous rate, and you can keep track of them at twtbase.com. Lots of people are desperately trying to integrate music and video ability into Twitter. And of course you can’t help but be amazed at people trying to figure out how to use Twitter to make money. I can tell you there will always be a market for idiots buying books on ” How to make money using Twitter,” even when the only obvious way is to sell a book titled, “How to make money using Twitter.” 

I was surprised to discover this message in my inbox last Monday: “The Dalai Lama is following you on Twitter!” My surprise was only matched by my disappointment when I found out that it wasn’t the Dalai Lama at all. [UPDATE: Turns out the account was turned over to His Holiness, so you can color me re-surprised!] I’m guessing God and Satan on Twitter aren’t really who they say they are either.

One of the more interesting uses of Twitter that I’ve seen is people using it to release short stories, fiction or poetry in small, 140-character pieces. I might consider doing that myself later this year, with a tie-in story to my upcoming Demonslayer’s Handbook.

So, what’s the future of Twitter look like? Looking into the Magic 8-Ball; I can imagine where my cell phone is programmed to post tweets for me based on my GPS location and a wetwire connection to my central nervous system, requiring no interaction on my part:

• 1:31AM – Still at the computer. [Mood: Passive/Receptive/Gathering | Elapsed time: 2hrs 41min)
• 1:38AM - Wandered into bathroom [Privacy mode activated]
• 1:42AM – Standing in front of open refrigerator [Mood: Hungry/Active/Hunting]
• 1:51AM - On the couch, eating Ben and Jerry’s Heath Bar & Coffee Ice Cream (Yum!), watching Pray For Daylight. [Mood: Sated]

Basically my entire day getting poured out into the rolling consciousness cesspool of Twitterville. From there, it would be searched/scanned/filtered for target marketing purposes and aggregated Sociology studies, and the important bits tagged and stored in Evernote for future reference.

Privacy issues notwithstanding, we’ll be able to pull up every moment of our lives, and/or stalk anyone on the planet without bothering them.   This should be handy for settling court cases (where were you on the night of August 6th?) and interpersonal arguments (When did you eat the last of the Ice Cream?), not to mention any debates on how boring our lives really are. 

Add some audio/video ability to Twitter, and now you’ve really got something. We’ll get together for the holidays and pull up Twitter to play back “The Infamous Shaving Cream Incident” from each persons’ point of view. We can even pass these moments on to future generations, so instead of telling our kids what it was like heating the house with gas or electricity instead of an in-home fission reactor, we’ll be able to show them. Over and over again. And we’ll all wonder how we ever got along without it.

That’s when someone will look up this old blog post and read my quote:

Twitter is about as useful as a wet-nap is to a scuba diver. – Zero

So, what do you-all think of Twitter? Any predictions about it might evolve into? Comment below or throw me a tweet.

Sounds like it’s only a matter of time before you get rid of DRM and the idiot who signed off on it. You don’t have a choice really, you simply are not going to stop file sharing.

Remember when CDs came out and people could make high-quality copies of new releases from CD to cassette tape ? Remember how you cried yourself to sleep thinking of all those lost dollars? What did you NOT learn from that experience?

Remember Buisness 101 Law of Supply and Demand? Until the price of songs comes down to meet the demand, people will simply P2P their music, or pass on it. Its a mixed blessing: the internet has INCREASED THE ACCESSABILITY of music, and DECREASED THE VALUE. Accept it, and bring the prices down enough that your customers will gladly pay to download the song from you, rather than to try and figure out how BitTorrent works. Hell, if songs were a quarter apiece, I’d pay you to download it instead of walking out to the car to get the CD!

Instead of crying about how the price of music has gone down, rejoice that your distribution costs have reduced exponentially! Rejoice that you can reach markets you never dreamed of, in countries where CDs have to be sent in by carrier pigeon or camel-ed across the desert!

Where are the New Bestsellers?

Now that that’s all cleared up, where is the next “Hotel California”? Where is the next “Jagged Little Pill”? Where is the next “Nevermind”? The crap you put out now is the ‘Reality TV Programming’ of music. You are quick to push shitbands like The Fray, but have you even heard of Vampire Hands? Jagged Spiral? Nothing Gained? Betty X?

Where is the imagination? Where is the experimentation? Is Trent Reznor the only Visionary you could find? You need to MAKE new genres, not try to copy ones which were designed to poke fun at you. Let the kids have their “Indie”, and make something they haven’t even dreamed of.

Stop wasting your resources fighting a losing battle AGAINST YOUR OWN CUSTOMERS, and spend them on making it even easier to get music to your customers!

Get in bed with companies no one else could imagine. Fire your marketing staff, and hire some 16-year olds to run the think tank. Give away free mp3 downloads with Happy Meals or Apple Jacks or Little Debbies.

Figure out why people can’t buy a song the second they hear it, anywhere, anytime. If there was a “MINE!” button on your radio, and it cost a quarter to push it, and whammo-o! people could own a copy of the song they were listening to… If there was a way to access the song purchase via cell phone… If there was a simple way for people to provide access to your downloads through links on their own website or e-mail signatures…

If you diverted your funding away from lawsuits against your customers and into ideas like these… can your tiny minds grasp how much money you would make?

Also, get people to think about music when they are NOT near their computer, because if you read http://lefsetz.com/ he will tell you that radio simply isn’t doing it.

No charge for this advice.

Love,
-CZ

PS: Abolish Dashboard Confessional. In fact, abolish the entire Emo genre. It is the open chancre sore on the the face of music history.

Check out this story in the NY Times by Jeff Leeds, about a group just signed by a record label..

…to do Two songs. TWO. Thas’all.

Sound Familiar?

Singling out the Bestseller

The album distribution model was perfect for hard-copy records, tapes and CDs. So you really liked Pour Some Sugar On Me because you heard it on the radio. You had your mom drive you down to Musicland on 3 August in 1987 and bought Def Leppard’s Hysteria the day it came out, because if you didn’t get it, you swore you would die. You paid $11.99 just like I did.

Why did you pay that much for one song? You didn’t. You only wanted the single, but it was only available on cassette tape, and it cost $3.99. A total gyp. The CD with 12 songs for $12 is a hell of a deal in comparison. Those were your options, and they sucked.

But not anymore.

Thank God For The Internet

On the internet, you preview each song before you buy it, and you pick and choose the songs you want. Who the hell wants to buy the entire CD of Wang Chung’s Points on the Curve for ten bucks, when all you really want is Dance Hall Days for a dollar?

Yes, the time is up for the album. It’s just as well, since few bands use albums to their full potential anyway. The article mentions Tool and Radiohead, but has anyone heard of Jethro Tull’s Thick as a Brick? The CD has one track on it, about 45 min long. Its not even a concept album. It’s a 45 min SONG.

Concept albums? Pink Floyd mastered the art form, but that was back in the day when people listened to albums. Nobody does that anymore. You’d have to be drunk or stupid to even try that shit nowadays.

Subscribe to the Future

But even buying a single for a dollar is going to become unnecessary:

Another solution being debated in the industry would transform record labels into de facto fan clubs. Companies including the Warner Music Group and the EMI Group have been considering a system in which fans would pay a fee, perhaps monthly, to “subscribe” to their favorite artists and receive a series of recordings, videos and other products spaced over time.

From: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/26/business/media/26music.html?ex=1332561600&en=7a34accc8988c811&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

I wonder if I’ll get any credit for coming up with the idea first.

Blog on,
-CZ

Strange dream last night that something odd happened to Hawaii. Or maybe IN Hawaii. Something Big, and possibly Bad. Like maybe Hawaii sinks into the ocean instead of California. Or maybe Atlantis rises up next to it and attacks. Or maybe Don Ho dies. I don’t know. The harder I try to remember the dream, the more I get: Reply Hazy, Try Again Later.

It did not help to see several people dressed in Hawaiian Shirts today. Maybe my dream was trying to warn me that people would wear Hawaiian shirts?

Anyway, I would rather look like an idiot for saying something then have nothing happen, than to say nothing and then something happens…

Blog on,
-CZ