Evening Reading: 3/11/09

There are several burrs under my saddle today.

Here’s why people don’t walk around naked anymore.

car over the lake Today is Worship of Tools Day for everyone. Every day is worship of tools day for lots of Twitter users.

If you drive your car into the water, here’s a tutorial on trying not to drown. They had me at “you’ll need self-composure.” I’m pretty sure if my car was sitting in the ocean, I would not have a lot of that. On the other hand, I like this topically relevant record by the Ozark Mountain Daredevils.

There’s a new version of iTunes available. I just want folders. F-O-L-D-E-R-S.

Who needs cowbell? What we need is more mobile app stores. I won’t be sated until there is one mobile app store for every person on earth.

In another before and after moment, some PR firm launched a “Twitter trend analyzer.” Here’s a trend for you- the single biggest buzz kill on Twitter is watching all the PR people trying and failing to post without sounding like the host of a Tupperware party.

Photobucket has new sharing features. I need to try Photobucket again. I tried it a year or so ago and found the interface to be lacking. I’m going to take another look.

I’m not all that excited about Google targeting ads at me. I’ll pay the ad tax by having them occasionally litter my browser space, but I’ve never intentionally clicked on a third party ad and Adblock Plus and I intend to keep it that way.

In the greatest sales job since Tom Sawyer’s fence got painted, Google now lets you target ads at yourself. Please, please, please tell me there aren’t a bunch of nerds over there mapping their own advertising genome. Some of the stuff that happens on the internet defies description.

This breaking news just in: it’s March 11, 2009 and Steve Gillmor has still never responded to a single one of my @replies. I need Garrett Morris to translate. Actually, I just wish if these cats weren’t interested in conversing with anyone other than each other, they’d take it offline. Sure, it’s sour grapes on my part, because I’m interested in some of the stuff they talk about and would like to join in. It’s like the blogosphere all over again.

Harry McCracken is cracken’ on Office Depot with a semi-secret cashier script and a link to a more troubling allegation. Office Depot should be so happy about the demise of Circuit City that they give away those service plans for a while. Post CompUSA and Circuit City, the lines at Micro Center have been epic. Someone should do a dead pool for computer stores. Computer City, Incredible Universe, CompUSA, Circuit City. Who else?

The other day, I took a look at online storage services. I tried ADrive, and liked it, but today came the deal stopper. An ADrive email informed me that public links to files stored on free accounts expire after 14 days. I don’t fault them for this policy, but it means I’m not going to stick around to see if ADrive wins the feature race. That’s too bad, because ADrive has some favorable features, not the least of which is 50GB of free storage. Dropbox is rapidly becoming my service of choice.

I am probably repeating myself, but if you like music and/or art, you simply have to subscribe to LP Cover Lover. Highly recommended.

To which I say: Sure, as long as me and my buddies can play pickup hoops in Madison Square Gardens.

Begging for Retweets: Anatomy of a Tweet Gone Wrong

The other day Mashable reviewed this pox on your web service that lets people put annoying Retweet links in their Twitter posts, or Tweets as the cool people refer to them. Being all concerned about the betterment of the online experience, I immediately spend all day writing this great Twitter Best Practices post so everyone could completely ignore it, thereby simultaneously proving the dire need for best practices and the complete absence of a need for blog posts about best practices. All in all, it was a fine time.

Still, I held out hope that this ridiculous trend of begging for Retweets like homeless drunks beg for Thunderbird dollars would not get legs.

But lo and behold, while I was trying unsuccessfully to engage in conversation with @stevegillmor and @stoweboyd, both of whom I’ve met in the real world; actually engaging in a little conversation with @guykawasaki and @ajkeen, neither of whom I know in the real world; and bombarding @amyderby and @Joe_the_Stoner with witty and topical quotes from Raising Arizona and The Holy Grail, I saw something more horrifying than Woz dancing. I saw a Tweet from Mashable with a Retweet link at the end.

Right there, bigger than Elvis, were some Tweets from the same Mashable that has 216,497 followers (oops, they’ve already gained 128 followers since I started this post), asking people to Retweet its posts. Not just once, but multiple times. Dude, I love Mashable, but do you really think you need Retweets?

And while every Mashable Tweet was not infested with these stupid links, there were lots that were, including a couple of self-Retweets asking for third party Retweets. That is everything wrong with Twitter marketing in one Tweet.

Maybe I don’t get Twitter after all, but isn’t there supposed to be at least some conversational element to Twitter? Isn’t there some natural law equivalent that dictates how we are supposed to act on Twitter? Or is it just a giant flea market where everyone’s out to make a quick buck and the new people are the easy marks?

Sure, I used Mashable as an example of a content provider that is exempt from the Fg/Fs Ratio, and, at least up until now, it’s probably my favorite web site for tech news. But don’t these leading companies have some obligation to help keep Twitter beautiful?

Somewhere Iron Eyes Cody is shedding a tear.

Breaking Out of Live365

So the other day, as part of my internet improvement post, I ranted about the incarceration of Rancho Radio, my internet radio station, behind the unnecessarily high walls of Live365, the broadcasting service I pay for and have used for almost 10 years. For some insanity-inducing reason, Live365 requires unregistered listeners to use its music player to listen to Live365 radio stations and makes it really hard for registered users to play the stations through other software. Even though Live365 stuffs lots of ads in the stream, it does not allow non-professional stations (e.g., ones that don’t pay a fortune for a professional broadcasting package) to publish streams that can be played on any music player. To make this utterly frustrating situation worse, you have to register as a listener just to listen to stations in iTunes or your other preferred music player- and even then Live365 tries to wrap your preferred music player over the Live365 music player.

live365player1
This little player is the bane of my radio existence

What I mean by wrap, is that the Live365 player will be open, but it will push the stream to another desktop music player, like iTunes or Winamp.

This makes Facebook seem like the wide open Serengeti and puts Live365 stations at a huge disadvantage compared to the plethora of other online music options.

So my good friend and IT guru, Dave Wallace, started poking around to see if he could navigate around this problem- if there’s anyone on earth who can figure this mess out, it’s Dave. He made some progress and was able to get the stream, at least temporarily, into iTunes. It even looks like the artist-song information was displaying. Mazzy Star. Hope Sandoval. . . . OK, I’m back.

I followed Dave’s tutorial, and actually got my stream to play in iTunes, with the artist-song information. That Jerry Garcia- Merl Saunders record is awesome.

itunesrr

I created a new Playlist, named it Rancho Radio, right-clicked the stream and added it to that Playlist. Presto, I now have an entry in that Playlist for Rancho Radio. I was able to stop and start the stream several times, including after closing iTunes.

itunesplrancho

While this is certainly promising, there is at least one problem. You have to register with Live365 to have access to the Listen Settings Dave describes in his walk-through. Given that Live365 puts ads in the streams and that each station has a maximum amount of listeners (depending on the broadcaster package you buy), why is that necessary? Why can’t we just have a stream link that can stream directly from our music player of choice? We (me the broadcaster and Live365 the in-stream ad seller) should want to make it EASY for people to listen to our station. This is too HARD. I don’t want my listeners to be forced to register with Live365, because I know that for every one who will there are untold numbers who won’t. There is no conceivable legitimate business reason to make people jump through this hoop.

None. Nada.

And there could be a bigger problem. A little digging reveals the stream URL to be:

http://www.live365.com/play/11174?auth=8b64a2f702854181f5e8d7ebe4d0c684-1236680459-errbearmusic&ss=errbearmusic%3AVE30jMFgIG0BgWk3&tag
=live365&token=8965de820136fdc2267d00b64082298d-2002100084200000&sid=98.201.123.161
-1232926918910378&lid=618-usa&from=pls

I can think of only one reason why the URL has to be that long- because it’s temporary. Plus, why make us go to all this trouble to find a stream URL? And that “usa” reference doesn’t bode well for Dave and my other mates down under. I tried to open the URL in Windows Media Player, and it opened, without the artist-song information, but that could be a player configuration issue. I tried again in MediaMonkey, and it opened, but skipped horribly. This could be a software issue too. Say bye bye Mr. Monkey.

If- and I think this is a big if- the stream URL I came up with above is permanent, will work for everyone who wants to listen to Rancho Radio without having to register at Live365 and doesn’t violate an enforced Live365 term of service, then the problem is solved. I saw something in the Live365 forums indicating that non-professional stations aren’t supposed to have direct streams. I don’t know if what I am trying to do is OK with Live365 or not. If not, I’ll delete the URL upon Live365’s request, though that would be silly since anyone who wanted to could use Dave’s tutorial to find and bookmark the stream URL. My bet is that the URL above is temporary and/or won’t work for anyone but me.

I hope I’m wrong.

Clearly, Live365 wants you to be chained to the Live365 music player. Once you go through Dave’s tutorial and get the stream into iTunes, closing the Live365 player results in this:

itunessilent

If you delete it without opening the aptly named “silent.pls,” the stream continues to play in iTunes. If you open it or if you’ve configured PLS files to always open in iTunes by checking the box, you get. . . silence and a notice that the broadcast has ended. I can’t tell you how much that pisses me off. Unless there is a constitutional amendment requiring this, it is unacceptable.

I know I’m coming across as a Live365 hater, and I know that they have the right to sell whatever product they want- and that if I don’t like it I don’t have to buy it. I get all that. But the thing is that Live365 has such potential. But for these unnecessary walls, it is a very good service. And – and this is probably a big part of the problem – it is the only service of its kind that I know of. It has the market cornered for broadcasters who want to upload their music and have it streamed from the host’s server. Sure you can broadcast live by uploading your songs to Live365 in real time, but that simply doesn’t work. I’ve tried it, only to have some hiccup knock out my upload – and thereby my station – for hours while I was away or at work.

Live365 is very close to rocking. They just need to knock down the walls and set the music free.

Strip Generator Hatches a Tweetie Bird

Strip Generator is a cool, easy to use online application that lets you easily create and share comic strip panels.

I am nobody’s Hugh MacLeod, but here’s one I did in about 10 minutes. Tweetie Bird might morph into a regular Newsome.Org feature or it may be a one-hit wonder. Either way, Strip Generator is cool.

tbird1

Technorati Tags: tweetie bird

Twitter Best Practices (Version 1.0)

Now that I’ve been pretty active on Twitter for a few weeks, I have come to some conclusions about the best way to use it. Here, for review and comment, is Version 1.0 of my Twitter Best Practices.

1. Respect the Fg/Fs Ratio. This is the ratio of Following to Followers, which is indicative of conversational intent. For example, at the moment I follow 354 people and am followed by 412 people. That’s a ratio of .86, which is not bad given that some percentage of your followers will always be quasi-spammers and extremists/nut jobs (see below). I need to follow quite a few people I missed along the way, and plan to use Friend or Follow to do that later tonight. People with a very low Fg/Fs Ratio should be unfollowed, subject only to the legitimate news source exception (see item 2 below). For example, @JasonCalacanis has a Fg/Fs Ratio of .0027. He should be unfollowed immediately. @fredwilson‘s is .0022, he too should be unfollowed. Compare for example, @guykawasaki‘s ratio of .92, which proves that you can be a well known internet figure and maintain a decent ratio. @Scobleizer, perhaps the most famous Twitterer of all, has a ratio greater than one (1.1), though Fg and Fs numbers that high tend to lose some of their relevance. Even @ajkeen, who thinks we’re all a bunch of idiots, has a ratio of .60. Sure, you have no control over who follows you and maybe you find most people boring, but the internet is full of places where you can pontificate (blogs, RSS feeds, Gillmor Gang podcasts, etc.), we want Twitter to be better than that.

2. But Acknowledge the Legitimate News Exception. We all read certain blogs and other web content without the implied expectation that the people who post that content will read our blogs and engage us in conversation. There are old media examples of this like CNN and C|Net, and there are new media examples like Mashable and Engadget. So it’s OK for those sites to have a Twitter presence with a low Fg/Fs Ratio, as long as they aren’t quasi-spammers (see item 3 below). One important caveat: the threshold for this exception is high. If you aren’t completely convinced it applies to you, it almost certainly doesn’t. Lots of people with very low Fg/Fs Ratios mistakenly believe this exception applies to them.

3. Don’t Be a Quasi-Spammer. We don’t want spam in our email inboxes, and we don’t want spam in Twitter. You may fool yourself into thinking you are adding value, but if all you do is promote yourself or your product, you are not adding value and should be unfollowed. You may think we want to see repeated links to your latest get (you) rich quick scheme, but we don’t. It’s perfectly appropriate to link once to your new blog post, but if that’s all you ever do, you’re abusing the system. Leave Twitter and go buy a real billboard. There is, of course, a subjective line to be drawn between what is quasi-spam and what isn’t. The best way to approach this issue is to act communally (see item 8 below). If you don’t want the rest of us to bombard you with links to our stuff, then don’t do it to us.

4. Use Reasoned Conversational Etiquette. Just because you aren’t face to face at a cocktail party or nerd gathering doesn’t mean you can be rude. Don’t stand for unkind or hateful acts. Act honorably and demand the same from others. Become a better conversationalist by learning how to listen. Remember, unless you follow someone, you will not see his or her tweets. If people engage you in a positive way and try to add value to your conversation, you should generally follow them, at least long enough to assess your common interests. For example, I generally respond to @DaveTaylor‘s polls and questions, but I have no idea if he sees my replies because he does not follow me back (that is going to come across as whining, but I’m not offended or mad at Dave- I am just giving the best personal example I can think of). The point is that it takes some effort at reciprocity to nurture inclusive conversation.

5. But You Can Ignore the Extremists and Nut Jobs. Twitter, like the rest of the internet, is comprised of all sorts of people. Most of them are cool and rational. Some of them are extremists, some of them are nut jobs, and some are both. In life, I avoid those who are so psychologically bound by their positions that they cannot understand why people feel otherwise (Rush Limbaugh is the best example of this, and there are others on both ends of the spectrum). When I inadvertently end up in a conversation with an extremist/nut job in real life, I simply turn and walk away. It’s perfectly OK to do the same thing on Twitter.

6. ReTweet Wisely. There’s nothing wrong with retweeting an especially good tweet for the benefit of your followers. Retweets ad value. But you have to do it wisely and with moderation, and for the benefit of the recipients and not just for the benefit of the content producer. Tweets are not ads. And unless someone’s safety is in jeopardy, you should never ask that your tweets be retweeted. Anyone who does that more than rarely should be unfollowed. And anyone who puts retweet links in every tweet should be immediately unfollowed. We need to get together on this before Twitter becomes overrun with quasi-spam.

7. Take the Bjorn Borg Approach to Your Profile. Seriously. Do not write something like this: “Mr. Cool is the world’s leading authority on social networks and ginger ale. He’s your real daddy and has an IQ of 7000.” I’ve seen some that are pretty close to that. Everyone knows that you wrote your own profile, so take the Bjorn Borg approach and let your game speak for itself. Absurd, bragging profiles should result in an immediate unfollow.

8. Act Communally. It’s impossible to cover everything in a list of best practices. Technology and current events will always present new opportunities and challenges. When this happens and you are about to do something new on or with Twitter, ask yourself one question: “if everyone started doing what I’m about to do, would that improve or detract from the collective Twitter experience?” The answer will generally be pretty clear.

That’s version 1.0. It’s open for comment!

10 Things That Would Make the Internet a Better Place

awesomeinternet

Here are 10 things that would make the internet a better place:

1. If those so desperate to rank Twitter users would weight heavily the number of @Replies responded to and the number of people followed, and not the number of followers or Retweets. After all, isn’t it supposed to be about conversation?

2. If ReadWriteWeb would enact a policy strictly prohibiting the use of jargon that cannot be explained in a single Twitter posting. If you can’t describe it effectively in 140 characters, don’t talk about it. By my count, RRW has mentioned the Semantic Web 262 times and they still haven’t adequately explained what the heck it is. Other than this, RRW rocks.

3. If Robert Scoble would decide that his next project would be to create and publish content around his blog, and not spread his content all over the seven seas. Unlike many of the self-appointed blogostars, it’s impossible to meet Robert and not like him. He seems like a genuinely good guy, and he is a great source of tech-related information. I’d like to see him be the brand instead of promoting the brand.

4. If all the hypesters would realize that Twitter is a great ancillary tool for the creation and management of online content and not the be all, end all of the internet. All these people trying to make Twitter the everything machine are merely further fragmenting the already scattered state of online content. There doesn’t need to be an everything machine, but if there has to be one, it’s Google. Not Twitter.

5. If Apple would scrap iTunes and create a command central that is as elegant as the hardware it controls. With folders. iTunes is fine for buying stuff, but it is the worst I have ever seen at managing a large media library.

6. If Facebook would die. All of the time and effort spent trying to stuff content into Facebook’s bizarre organizational structure and then export it outside the walls could be much more effectively applied elsewhere. Sorry. I tried, but it’s just too restrictive. And there’s no depth of content there.

7. If Google would atone for a missed opportunity and buy Flickr from Yahoo. That would add the last missing piece to Google’s arsenal.

8. If someone would create a platform for online radio that does what Live365 does right and fixes what Live365 does wrong. It is sheer insanity that Live365 broadcasters cannot publish a stream URL that will play in any media player. It’s also ridiculous that your choices are to have a ton of ads in your stream or pay a fortune to become a pro station. I don’t know how much money Live365 makes off the ads on Rancho Radio, but I’m pretty sure I would pay that amount and more to lose the ads and to free my stream so people could actually use it.

9. If the next iPhone had a flash for the camera, the ability to record video, landscape functionality for all applications (most importantly email), cheap tethering and the ability to mass delete email. That would make a near perfect device perfect.

10. If I had several thousand additional RSS subscribers who commented regularly on my blog posts, lived for my Twitter updates and listened to my Blip.fm songs every day. Now that would make the internet a much better place!

Do you think any of that is possible?

Sins of Omission: The No Jerks, No Assholes Rule

People are pretty cool in small numbers.

But put a bunch of them together and some of them will invariably start to act like jerks. In young people, this jerkage often manifests itself in one or more acts of exclusion. Sometimes it’s sitting apart from one designated outcast or another at lunch. Sometimes it’s the issuance of semi-secret invitations to “I Hate So and So” clubs designed to create an sense of inclusion for some at the expense of others. Sometimes what starts out as exclusion evolves into outright harassment or physical assault.

Some people just aren’t satisfied being a face in the crowd. They need to be special. And they will go to great measures to appear so. Sometimes these actions have tragic results. There is no debating that they cause unnecessary harm. All in the name of being different.

Who gives a crap about being different? And even if you do, acting like an asshole is a really stupid way to try be different. Assholes are the white sheep of the herd. They are a dime a dozen. It reminds me of a joke I heard at the Safari Room in Winston-Salem back in the seventies. Do you know why you see more white sheep than black sheep? Because there are more of ’em. In my inebriated state, I thought that was the funniest joke ever.

But it turns out it wasn’t. And neither is unkindness towards others.

nojerks This age old desire to be different manifests itself in various ways. Sometimes in positive ways, like hard work, good deeds, etc. Other times it manifests itself in hurtful ways. If you knock someone down, you have created a sense of separation. They are down, you are still up. It’s not as noble as separation via positive actions, but it’s also not as hard to accomplish. Obviously, we should denounce those who knock others down to create this false sense of separation, but shouldn’t we also denounce those who stand by and let it happen without taking a stand against it? These silent conspirators think they are benefitting from the system, but in reality they are pawns too.

There is an irresistible impulse for a crowd to rank itself based on one criteria or another. The allegedly powerful rank themselves near the top of the list. The truly powerful pick the criteria on which the list is based. It’s a messed up system where a few benefit at the expense of many.

People who let others be assholes are like those who wear sunglasses indoors. They either have vision problems or are assholes themselves.

And this problem isn’t limited to the school yard. The internet is full of new playgrounds.

The school yard bullies grow old, if not up, and some of them migrate to the various online applications, where the world wild web and perceived sense of anonymity further emboldens them by increasing the victim pool and making all the victims seem faceless. But they aren’t faceless, and those of us who witness this sort of behavior online and do nothing are just as culpable as those who stand idly by while it happens at recess.

I see this crap happening all over the internet, in one form or another. There are minor-jerks who work tirelessly to create some sort of caste system within the various online locales. There are those who want to create false measures of value and watch as others fight for a place in their self-serving hierarchy. There are medium-jerks who want to dominate the so-called social networks with their private conversations like actors in some theater of the ego. And there are major jerks who are simply rude and hateful to others. I have noted many examples of all of the foregoing, as has anyone who has spent significant time online.

And it’s wrong. And it should not be tolerated. I say we enact and communally enforce a no jerks, no assholes rule.

Who’s with me?

Evening Reading: 3/2/09

I rarely use the music features on my iPhone, but I would be mildly interested in a Sirius/XM player, if it is (as the rumor says it will be) developed by Sirius/XM itself and doesn’t have a bunch of neat in theory but useless in real life extra features. What I’d really like is a Blip.fm app that would let me add to my Blip.fm page and listen to Blip.fm music. I’m guessing that’s not going to happen, but to paraphrase the great philosopher David Wooderson, it’d be a lot cooler if it did.

My Facebook experiment continues, sort of. While Facebook is the best if not only place to efficiently reconnect with old, non-geek friends, the depth of content on Facebook is pretty minimal. For most of my internet-acquired (lower and upper case) friends, there’s just the same regurgitated content I see in my feed reader and via Friendfeed (which is exactly what they see on my Facebook page). On a positive note, I’ve been rejected as a (upper case) Friend by a lot of the blogging elite, and that’s almost as fun as observing their private conversations on Twitter.

I’m no economist, but I’m not seeing the payoff to these rolling bailouts. Mark my words, the states will be next. What is the realistic end-game here?

I am getting a lot bored and a little annoyed with all the smoke people are blowing up our butts about so-called social media. These people must think a Tupperware party is the highlight of the real life social season.

Speaking of the hype, how can anyone really argue that Twitter can replace RSS feeds? That’s like tossing out your Tivo in favor of rabbit ears. Can’t we just agree that Twitter is sort of cool and leave it at that?

I can’t believe I’m about to type this, but I’m starting to think I may opt out of the expensive Microsoft Office never-ending update cycle in favor of Google Docs. If you have to put these applications on a family’s worth of computers, and there is a free app that can serve as a reasonably acceptable alternative, why not choose free? The oft-rumored GDrive could become the straw that breaks Microsoft’s back.

This quote is funny: “It’s a phenomenon the geeks are already calling “Dancing with the Woz” and is potentially the greatest terpsichorean trainwreck in television history.” I have never watched a second of Dancing with the Stars, but I may actually tune in for this. Maybe.

I’ve tried several networked web cams over the years, and none of them worked worth a crap. This looks promising enough to make me try again.

I’m also going to buy these for my girls’ iPod Touches. These little microphones and (one day) a Skype iPhone app would turn an iPod Touch into a pretty decent phone.

Does anybody other than tech writers trying to fend off writer’s block really care- I mean really care to the point that it would change your mood one iota- whether or not the White House uses YouTube? On the other hand, all three Flock users are highly concerned about this.

Today’s Thought: Ping was a duck. In a book. I read as a child.

Technorati Tags: kent’s news

ZumoDrive vs Dropbox

zumodrop

Well, no one hooked me up with a ZumoDrive beta invitation the other night (sort of like nobody ever responds to any of my other @Twits, but that’s a topic for another day), but that’s OK because ZumoDrive opened to the public today, which means even lowly outsiders like me can use it. And use it I did.

Here’s my report and the reason why I prefer Dropbox.

Sign Up and Installation

Sign up is simple and, like Dropbox, involves the installation of a local application to mount the service as a virtual drive on your computer. Upon installation, ZumoDrive shows up as a removable storage device on your computer. Here it is, amid the extraneous and empty disks courtesy of my card reader.

zdmycomp

The virtual drive looks and operates like any other hard drive on your computer. You can drag and drop files, add new folders and generally manipulate the virtual drive the same way you would with your local hard drives. ZumoDrive installs itself as the “Z” drive on your computer, which worked fine for me, but might be a problem if you already have a disk mapped to the “Z” letter. I saw a post in the ZumoDrive forums indicating that there may eventually be a way to change ZumoDrive’s drive letter. This should be a priority.

You can install the ZumoDrive application on as many computers as you want, and each computer can then access the files in the same manner, via Windows Explorer.

All of this works well. It’s similar to Dropbox, except that your storage space shows up as a virtual drive as opposed to a “Dropbox” folder in your Documents folder. ZumoDrive has the advantage here. It also has a slight edge in the web page design category, though so little of my activity will be through the web interface that this doesn’t really matter. So far, ZumoDrive works as advertised and is a very solid application, particularly for one that went public today.

Sharing

But there lurks a dark lining inside of every silver cloud.

Oddly enough in these social media/sharing crazed days, the ZumoDrive experience breaks down when you try to share your files. As a test, I uploaded an MP3 of one of my songs (“I Know Better Now”) to ZumoDrive and to Dropbox. It was an easy drag and drop experience in both cases. Next, I tried to share that file, so I could link to it, use it on my Blip.fm page, etc. With Dropbox, it was as simple as right clicking on the file right there in Windows Explorer and selecting Dropbox > Copy Public Link. The URL is copied onto your clipboard for easy use. Blipping the song on Blip.fm is as simple as pasting that same URL into the search box. Easy as pie.

When I tried to do the same thing with ZumoDrive, things got a little complicated. When you right click on the file, again right there in Windows Explorer, you have an option called ZumoDrive Share. Click on that and a box pops up with 3 options. Link, where you get a link that supposedly links to the file (more on this in a moment); Shared file, where you can enable other people to access and modify the file (this looks similar to the way access is granted in Google Documents); and Embed, where you get code to embed the file in a web page, using an iframe (flash would be cooler, but OK). Unfortunately, the embed feature did not work with my MP3 or another MP3 I tested it with. That wouldn’t be a big deal, as long as the Link feature worked.

But it doesn’t.

The link that ZumoDrive presented for my MP3 doesn’t link to the actual file, which means that it doesn’t play when you click it, and you can’t use the file on Blip.fm or any other similar service. Rather, the URL links to a page at ZumoDrive where you can access the file. If that’s not enough of a buzz kill for you, you can’t even play the song from that page- or at least I can’t. I get a message that the file cannot be viewed and may be corrupt. Sure, you can download the file, but that’s three steps to listen when it ought to be one.

zdmessage

Maybe there’s a way to do what I’m trying to do via ZumoDrive, but a half hour of hard looking, a reading of the FAQ and a visit to the user forums did not uncover it. It took no time at all to figure out how to do this via Dropbox.

iPhone Applications

Of course, to get total love, an app like this has to be accessible via my beloved iPhone. Dropbox has an iPhone-designed web interface, which seems fast and stable. It’s easy to select and stream a song right from Safari. I’d actually prefer a dedicated iPhone app, but it’s hard to find anything wrong with Dropbox’s iPhone integration.

dbox
Some mighty fine music in there

ZumoDrive offers an actual iPhone app called Supersize me (iTunes link), which interestingly turned up as the only search result when I searched the App Store from my iPhone for Dropbox. Accessing files through this app is as easy and enjoyable as trying to access the files via URL was frustrating. The app is stable and fast, and my song streamed quickly.

zdiphone
Only one song in there so far, but it’s a good’un

Overall, I’d give both services high marks for their iPhone implementations. Maybe the slightest of edges to ZumoDrive because it is an app.

Price

You can’t truly decide between the two without comparing their prices. ZumoDrive gives you 1GB for free and Dropbox gives you 2GB for free (or stated another way, paying customers subsidize a free gigabyte or two on every desktop). Here’s how the paid plans compare:

	Dropbox	ZumoDrive
1GB	N/A	Free
2GB	Free	N/A
10GB	N/A	$2.99/mo.
25GB	N/A	$6.99/mo.
50GB	$9.99/mo.	$11.99/mo.
100GB	N/A	$19.99/mo.
200GB	N/A	$37.99/mo.
500GB	N/A	$79.99/mo.

At the present, Dropbox only offers the 50GB paid plan, but the FAQ says other plans will be available in the future. I’d say ZumoDrive is one good reason to hurry that up.

Dropbox is cheaper, at least for the comparable 50GB plan. If I were to go all in, I think 100GB would be my sweet spot, which is a bit of a drawback for Dropbox.

And Then Comes the Deal Stopper

It would be a tough call if the URL sharing for ZumoDrive worked as well as it does for Dropbox. But, at least as of now, it doesn’t. The jacked up way ZumoDrive handles URL sharing is a deal stopper for me. If they fix this, it would be a virtual tie: Dropbox’s lower price battling it out with ZumoDrive’s larger space options.

I’m going to watch both of these horses. When I reach my free space limit, I’ll probably jump on one of them (unless my historical preference Box.Net matches some of these plans, in which case it would have the incumbency and good customer service advantage). But for now, I’m going to enjoy my free gigabytes and watch those ponies run.

Zebra Melody Rocks with a Great Twitter App

Earlier tonight, my buddy Dave Wallace tipped me off to a great music site, with an even cooler Twitter app.

Zebra Melody is a new music aggregation site where you can search for and view music videos and hear songs from your favorite artists. For example, a search for one of my favorite bands, Slobberbone, turned up a bunch of songs, including excellent live videos of Josephine and Engine Joe, two of my favorites, and an audio link to Lumberlung, my favorite Slobberbone song.

After finding an artist, there’s a music discovery tab (“Similar”), where you can explore for new music. The “Similar” tab for Slobberbone includes Old 97’s, Uncle Tupelo and the Drive-By Truckers, among others. That seems pretty accurate. There’s also a tab where artists can add tour info and other events.

Now for the cool part. Send a Twitter message containing the name of an artist or song to @getsong, and magically, Zebra Melody will send a reply with a link to the Zebra Melody web page for that artist or song. I first threw a softball by inquiring about Whiskeytown. I got a reply with a link to this page, full of videos and song files. Interestingly, some of the listed songs are covers (see Dancing with the Women at the Bar, for example). This is cool with me, as anyone who has been following my recent Blip.fm covers series would know. Next I threw a little heat by inquiring about another of my favorites, the Deadstring Brothers. I immediately got a reply with a link to this page. More musical goodness.

The navigation (particularly clicking on songs in the “Top Melody” list) is a little shaky, but all in all, I think this service rocks, figuratively and literally. Check out their blog for more (eventually).