pandora

Putting the Rant Pants On

ORDER! ORDER! HE made the internets stupid!

ORDER! ORDER! HE made the internets stupid!

It’s been too long since I’ve updated this blog, internets, but I don’t really plan on apologizing for that today. Instead, I’m going to don the rant pants and do some serious bitching. Here’s the short version: Facebook is stupid, twitter isn’t worth squat, and Hulu is about to get one less user. Whew. Now onto the long version.

Facebook is still hard to use. They’ve added a new feature where you can have a live feed roll down the page in “real time,” except it’s not real time. As a fairly adept internet user, I’ve usually got a minimum of four tabs open, one for each service and then random site hopping. If you are on another tab, the facebook timeline doesn’t update. You have to actually go back and make sure the site is the focus before it will do anything. You can tell that the idea of the “live feed” came from the Friendfeed guys, but it looks and feels like the Facebook guys are the ones who implemented it. Granted, the Friendfeed guys ARE the Facebook guys now so I’ll rephrase: Good idea, shitty implementation.

They’ve also removed cities from networks. So I guess the only networks I *can* have are schools or jobs? I question the usefulness of networks now, especially now that friend lists are becoming a big deal. Also, what good are networks in a twitter-ized environment anyway?

I heard somewhere that Twitter was worth billions. I kind of wish *I* had thought of a service with poor uptime and a shitty API so I could be worth billions too. Oh yeah, they’re coming out with lists, a feature that every other service has had for some time now. Hell, even twitter clients have list-like features.

You’ll remember a blog post I made awhile back bitching about users who couldn’t be bothered to pay the small fees from Pandora. Yeah, those people are still tight asses, but there’s some news that might make this “pay for online content” debate a little bit more complicated. Hulu is expected to charge for their content by 2010. I think this is a fairly retarded decision, considering the fact that the service isn’t out of it’s infancy yet (my opinion). Also, for a service like hulu to start charging, it needs to change the way it’s delivering it’s content. First of all, to me, pay for online content means zero advertising. It also means the service (like the article says) needs to extend beyond the website and extend *reliably*. Also, this eight day delay between episode air date and hulu release would have to stop. In fact, I would say that Hulu should just release the episode as soon as it airs.

Now, there was mention that there could be a tiered pricing scheme, which would make this into a less-sucky idea. But I’m going to put it out there that there won’t be much to the free tier. Sorry, but at this point, I see no reason to move to Hulu from Cable, or to even pay for both. Cable sucks, but at least it’s reliable and it won’t buffer if your connection isn’t as stellar.

Ugh.

On Cheap Asses And Pandora

From the blog of Pandora:

The revised royalties are quite high – higher in fact than any other form of radio. As a consequence, we will have to make an adjustment that will affect about 10% of our users who are our heaviest listeners. Specifically, we are going to begin limiting listening to 40 hours per month on the free version of Pandora. In any given month, a listener who hits this limit can then opt for unlimited listening for the remainder of that month for just $0.99. In essence, we’re asking our heaviest users to put a dollar (well, almost a dollar) in the tip jar in any month in which they listen over 40 hours. We hope this is relatively painless and affordable–the same price as a single song download. (Alternatively, they can upgrade to “Pandora One”, our premium version which offers unlimited monthly listening in addition to its other benefits).

As someone who hopes to one day make a living out of being creative, I tend to side with the people making the content when it comes to issues of compensation. These people need to get paid for what they’ve created just like people who work in any other job deserve to get paid for the job they’ve done. There’s nothing that makes a “creative’s” work less deserving of financial compensation than that of a waiter, an office exec, or a city worker. At the end of the day, we all need to get paid so we can continue to live. In the case of Pandora, they should at least be able to make back some of the ridiculous royalties they have to pay the music industry, right?

Not if you’re a cheap bastard. I can’t count on my hands how many times I’ve heard people state that Pandora charging for extended use is wrong. These people come at it with a sense of entitlement, with the idea that they shouldn’t have to pay to listen to what is essentially “a radio.” When confronted, they backpedal and explain that they’re cheap and can’t afford the fees.

$.99 is hardly expensive in my book. And if you’re a power user, $.99 for the month is ridiculously cheap. Why not pay the small fee and help out a company that provides such an amazing service? Or you know, maybe buy your music for a change?

The big mistake any of us can make is to assume that we deserve ANYTHING for free. These services come to us cheap as a convenience, not as a requirement. These companies certainly aren’t breaking the bank by giving away their content and / or services so we should take a step back and be grateful we only have to pay a dollar for unlimited internet radio.

But…cheap bastards will be cheap bastards.