5Words for March 26th, 2009

I’d love an interplanetary vacation:

Word creator returns to space.

Windows 7 download page: oops!

Google and Mario: finally together.

Ads take over Meebo chat.

Firefox readies a security fix.

The president is tweeting again.

Birthday present coming for Gmail.

Coming soon: Conficker activation. Greeeaaat.

Twitter business model: more hints.

iTunes Price Hike Set to Take Effect on April 7

Get ready for it. If you like any current music, it would probably be a really good idea to buy it right now. This is because Apple appears to be set to institute variable pricing beginning on April 7. The price of most popular music would go up to $1.29, including some classic tracks.

In all fairness to Apple, we should also state that some tracks will actually become cheaper at 69 cents apiece, but it is not clear how and what the record industry plans to charge. Package deals of music would also be offered.

I think raising the prices for digital music is a big mistake. 99 cents is a good price (and a fair one too) considering the overhead is much less. I do support however making older tracks cheaper: that just makes good sense.

We’ll know pretty much right away if this price hike will work. A good thing to watch will be P2P traffic: if it spikes, we know consumers are turning back to piracy rather than pay more money. iTunes has a big enough userbase to cause such a shift.

Hopefully like Apple says, most tracks will stay at 99 cents. But I’m not holding my breath as the record industry has proven to be a greedy bunch.

Got a Few Minutes to Take a Survey?

Mind if ask for a favor? Federated Media, Technologizer’s advertising partner, is conducting a survey to learn more about the demographics of Technologizer’s community. The information we collect won’t be used in any personally-identifiable manner–just to do a better job of targeting ads to the type of folks who visit the site, and therefore making them more relevant and useful. If you can take the survey, I’d appreciate it.

Click here to begin the survey.

Thanks!

“Whatever Happened to…?”

Old computer products, like old soldiers, never die. They stay on the market–even though they haven’t been updated in eons. Or their names get slapped on new products–available only outside the U.S. Or obsessive fans refuse to accept that they’re obsolete–long after the rest of the world has moved on.

For this story–which I hereby dedicate to Richard Lamparski, whose “Whatever Became of…?” books I loved as a kid–I checked in on the whereabouts of 25 famous technology products, dating back to the 1970s. Some are specific hardware and software classics; some are services that once had millions of subscribers; some are entire categories of stuff that were once omnipresent. I focused on items that remain extant–if “extant” means that they remain for sale, in one way or another–and didn’t address products that, while no longer blockbusters, retain a reasonably robust U.S. presence (such as AOL and WordPerfect).

If you’re like me, you’ll be pleasantly surprised to learn that some products are still with us at all–and will be saddened by the fates of others. Hey, they may all be inanimate objects, but they meant a lot to some of us back in the day.

Click on to continue–or, if you’re in a hurry, use the links below to skip ahead to a particular section.

Hardware Holdouts
More Hardware Holdouts
Software Survivors
Sites, Services, and Stores

Continue reading this story…

At Last, the Wii Gets Real SD Storage

Funny thing about the Internet age: When a video game company announces a significant improvement in its console, there needn’t be any countdown to implementation.

So it went at the Game Developers Conference today, where Nintendo announced common-sense SD card support for the Wii and said users could reap the benefits right now. Sure enough, when I updated my console (which, admittedly, took about 5 minutes), a small SD icon appeared in the lower left side of the Wii menu. Popping an SD card into the console’s front slot and selecting the menu icon revealed a bounty of open channel slots, ready to store my data. Kotaku reports that cards of up to 32 GB are now supported.

While downloadable games — such the classic NES titles offered through the Wii Shop channel — could be transferred to an SD card before, it was impossible to play them without transferring the file back to the Wii’s internal memory. You can now download games directly to the card, or transfer existing ones from the Wii’s internal memory, and load them from the SD menu. To protect against piracy, the Wii still uses a bit of system memory to load these games, but it’s a much more serviceable solution than before.

If you’re the kind of Wii owner who hasn’t drifted far from Wii Sports and maybe a few classic Virtual Console selections, you’ll probably never use the SD support. Still, it’s a big deal because of last year’s addition of WiiWare, a library of new games available for download. Nintendo has been quietly adding titles to the WiiWare catalog since last May, including the excellent World of Goo, but the Wii’s 512 MB built-in flash drive made it difficult to download too many of them. Maybe SD support will change that.

Now, if only Nintendo would allow demos for those WiiWare games, then we’d really have a fully-functional console on our hands…

Hulu Users Grow by 42%, Advertising Likely Helped

The Super Bowl ad featuring Alec Baldwin probably worked wonders for Hulu — comScore reported the site jumped two positions to become the fourth most watched video site with 34.7 million visitors viewing about 333 million videos during the period.

Hulu’s growth came among a 12 percent drop overall in the number of videos viewed on the web. However comScore says that this was more a function of the shorter month rather than any discernable change in online video viewing habits.

Obviously Google sites, which includes YouTube, stood at #1 with 99.4 million viewers watching a staggering 5.3 billion videos. The next closest was Fox Interactive (MySpace, etc.) with 463 million videos viewed and 53.8 million visitors.

Hulu has continued to advertise past the spot with Alec, and I’ve seen these commercials several times outside of the Super Bowl. Whatever you think of the site, you have to hand it to them for a effective advertising campaign that is unique and fresh.

Digg This: The White House’s Social Media Experiment

Reviving an experiment it conducted during the transition, the Obama administration is using a Digg-style collaborative system called Open for Questions to collect questions for the president to answer. Here’s why it’s doi–oh, heck, wouldn’t you prefer to hear it from the horse’s mouth?

Open for Questions lets registered users submit questions and vote on questions submitted by others. I can’t understand why the interface is trapped inside a tiny window that involves lots of scrolling, but the questions that are rising to the top are no worse than those that citizens tend to ask when presented with the opportunity at town-hall style meetings with elected officials. Here are the ones at the top of the rankings when I checked:

I’m not sure what anti-tampering measures are in place at Open for Questions–you gotta think that even now, someone’s plotting a prank like the one that resulted in Hank the Angry, Drunken Dwarf being voted People’s Most Beautiful Person of the Year in 1998. And I found that it’s more fun to read the unfiltered questions that the service shows you for voting–they’re wackier and crankier. A high percentage are from folks who are fretting about immigration (illegal and otherwise), and some are from conspiracy theorists, obsessives, and people with unique ideas for fixing the economy:

.

The president will answer questions from this round of voting tomorrow (on the Web, naturally). I’m not sure if he’ll simply respond to the most popular ones, no matter what they may be–or if he’ll be more selective. Betcha that none of the four above will make the cut, though..

5Words for March 25th, 2009

No history-making news today:

The White House’s Digg clone.

Yahoo closes FareChase travel site.

Guy Kawasaki provides Twitter tips.

Mozilla plans 3D graphcs Web.

Canon DSLR does 1080p video.

Sprint details WiMax rollout plans.

HD radio: a progress report.

Finally! Castle Wolfenstein for iPhone.

PCMag likes Wacom’s latest tablet.

This Eee PC’s a keyboard.

TiVo Gets a Blockbuster Card

Blockbuster, the video rental giant that’s trying to figure out a role for itself in a world of digital downloads, has struck a deal that should help: Its Blockbuster OnDemand service will be offered on TiVo DVRs. TiVo owners will be able to rent and buy movies from a selection of 5,000 to 10,000 titles (including new major studio releases, but nothing from Disney), with prices typically ranging from $4 to $10.

Blockbuster will also start selling TiVos in its stores, helping its customers make the inevitable transition from driving to the video store to choosing movies via remote control.

The deal adds yet another video provider to TiVo’s already well-rounded list: The TiVo HD in my living room already offers Netflix Watch Instantly, Amazon Video on Demand, Jaman, Disney releases via CinemaNow, and more. Each one’s a bit different in its scope and focus–Netflix, for instance, offers all-you-can-watch pricing but doesn’t have major new releases; Amazon has a ton of stuff, but each item is priced separately; Jaman specializes in international films.

The experience is a little disjointed–each provider has a separate interface, so it’s a little like visiting a mall with multiple video stores rather than one giant store–and TiVo needs more high-definition content. (It should get that once Amazon launches HD titles.) But TiVo’s doing a good job of giving folks reasons to buy a box that go beyond recording cable TV–which is essential to its future, since it’s competing with renting a cheap DVR from your cable company.

As I said in the piece on Internet TV boxes I just wrote for PC World, I’d much rather have one multi-purpose box in my living room than a bunch of specialty ones. There’s no one Ultimate Universal Box yet, but TiVo’s doing enough to keep me from buying and finding space for something like a Vudu or Roku box. But if you know of anyone who makes a cable-ready DVR/DVD/media streamer that also plays Wii games and can replace a Slingbox, please lemme know…

Initial Impressions of Boxee NYC

Well, this post came a little later than I had hoped (car troubles on the way home), but here were my initial impressions of what I saw Tuesday night in NYC. This was definitely a good showing people wise for Boxee — the company reportedly had 1,000 RSVPs. I don’t think everyone showed up, but there were at least 400-500 folks in attendance.

The presentation was marred by glitches, both with the system itself (shows why they’re still in alpha yet), and on the production side. They also tried for the first time to stream the event live over Boxee, which was probably why there were so many issues.

Continue reading this story…

Samsung Releases the First Yahoo Widget-Enabled TV

[UPDATE: I credited Walt Mossberg with the column I mention below--wrong! The column's called The Mossberg Solution, but it's by Katherine Boehret. Corrected, and sorry about that.]

Walt Mossberg Katherine Boehret of the Wall Street Journal has reviewed Samsung’s LED TV 7000, the first set that supports the Yahoo Widget Engine platform for Internet-enabled applications that run right on the TV. Walt Katherine is impressed with Yahoo’s system, which is based on the cool Konfabulator, the application that started the whole widget craze a few years ago. I was impressed, too, when I visited Yahoo and got to try out the Widget Engine on a Samsung TV a few weeks ago. (Unfortunately, the Samsung set wasn’t ready for review in time for an article I recently wrote for PC World on ways to bring Internet TV into the living room, although I did squeeze in a mention.)

The Widget Engine is slick–the applets I tried reminded me of iPhone apps that happened to live on a TV rather than a phone. And the best thing about it is that it’s open: Anyone who wants to can build applications for it, and any application that anyone builds is available on any TV that supports the platform. That’s a far cry from most previous approaches to putting the Web and Web services such as Internet video onto TVs, most of which have been highly proprietary. (Panasonic’s Viera Cast is conceptually similar to what Yahoo is doing, but it’ll only deliver the services that Panasonic signs up–which means, so far, YouTube and a couple of others, with Amazon Video on Demand on the way.)

I’m not going to have a Widget-enabled TV in my living room any time soon, unfortunately–I don’t need a new TV, and Samsung’s set, at $3,000, isn’t an impulse item. But Yahoo has signed up not only Samsung but also Sony, LG, and Vizio to make Widget-ready sets. Those four companies are responsible for a sizable percentage of the TVs sold in this country, so chances are good that Yahoo’s software will be showing up on plenty of sets. If developers are as enthusiastic about the platform as electronics manufacturers are, the Widget Engine could end up being reason in itself to be tempted by a new TV.

You Gripe, Facebook Listens

Do stuff. Make mistakes. Listen. Learn. Fix. That’s a corporate culture that just about any company would be pleased to claim as its own, but Facebook really lives it. And since the whole point of Facebook is to help millions of people express themselves, it it makes its mistakes in public in a way that few companies do. Fortunately, it also does its listening and learning in the open, too.

I kind of like Facebook’s new, more Twitteresque home page-or at least am willing to give it a chance–but evidence seems to suggest I’m in the minority. And Christopher Cox, the company’s director of product has posted about changes that Facebook is making based on user feedback. He mentions lots of them, most of which involve providing more control over the content that gets displayed and/or making it easier to find important stuff. (And maybe the new design does obscure some significant items: I just noticed that I had a backlog of eleven friend requests, because they no longer occupied prime real estate at the top of the right-hand column where they were easy to spot.)

Anyone who’s ever redesigned anything used by more than a handful of people knows that change is hard. We certainly heard immediately from unhappy campers every time we gave PC World an online or print makeover during my time there. The best you can do is listen hard, be good at distinguishing between things that are unpopular because they’re new and those that are unpopular because they’re bad, and be careful about assuming that one or two extremely agitated users represent the view the majority of your users. (Sometimes they do, and sometimes they don’t.)

I once had a smart boss who, when I asked him for money for a PC World redesign, asked whether changing things that are already successful was an inherently bad idea. The answer, of course, is that it’s far better to change something that’s successful before the world passes it by than to play catchup later. (I told him that, and we came up with the dough.) But it’s fair to say that change is inherently risky–but that the Web mitigates some of the risk, since you get immediate feedback and can just keep on changing until you get things right. With print magazines, it’s possible to make changes that readers despise, and not even know until months later when you find that they stayed away from an issue at the newsstand in droves.

I can’t think of another company in tech that’s better at handling change than Facebook. Kudos to it for having the right attitude, and I hope that Facebook fans, no matter how irate they may get, give the site credit for trying to do the right thing. Even when it takes multiple attempts.

OnLive Will Change Gaming Forever. Or Will It?

There’s a sweet, sweet buzz in the air this week with the unveiling of OnLive, a start-up computer game service that’s inspiring eerie prophecies on the demise of the console and the subsequent rebirth of PC gaming.

It’s a tall order, and I love being a skeptic, but we’ll get to that later. First, let’s talk about the concept.

To use an appropriate buzzword, OnLive is cloud gaming. Instead of relying on $5,000 water-cooled PC rigs with alphabet soup specs, OnLive handles all the processing on its own servers. Thanks to once-impossible compression methods, the data comes to the player over the Internet, allowing even $400 netbooks to play Crysis.

OnLive plans to demonstrate 16 games this week, but some reporters, such as Dean Takahashi at VentureBeat, have already watched a preview, and they like what they see. In addition to smooth gaming, OnLive offers player-friendly features such as voice chat and video sharing. With a small device, televisions can run the games in standard definition or 720p high definition.

Game publishers like the idea because it takes the focus off individual consoles and emphasizes the games instead. The possibility of cutting Gamestop out of the equation couldn’t hurt, either, as it puts more money into publisher’s pockets and less into the used game business. Electronic Arts, Take-Two Interactive, Atari, THQ, Codemasters, Eidos,  Warner Bros., Epic Games and Ubisoft have already signed distribution deals.

With all this in mind, here’s my counterargument to the prophecies:

It seems like OnLive has all the bases covered, but if there’s one serious vulnerability, it’s what we don’t know. The service will be offered as a monthly subscription — presumably, it has to be done this way to pay for server upkeep — but there’s no word yet on pricing or service plans. Obviously that information would be premature now, but eventually OnLive will have to figure out how to attract enough monthly payments to stay viable as a business.

A little rough math shows that a new console every five years and three new games per year (that’s basically the consumption rate we’ve seen in the latest generation, according to Gamasutra) works out to roughly $22 per month, but the actual number depends on the individual player. To truly disrupt that model, I wonder what price OnLive will have to offer and whether it can afford to do so.

I’m not saying the service has no chance of obliterating the existing games industry, but we can’t rule out peaceful coexistence just yet.

China Allegedly Blocks YouTube

Google has found itself on the other side of China’s “great firewall’” of Internet censorship. YouTube is presently inaccessible in China, while its foreign minister has assured Reuters that the ruling party is “not afraid of the Internet.”

Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang told reporters that he had no knowledge about YouTube being blocked, but Google confirmed to Reuters that the service is unavailable to users in China. The company said that it was working toward a solution, and avoided placing blame on the Chinese government.

The Chinese government has a longstanding practice of filtering Internet traffic by using techniques such as DNS poisoning. Its targets have traditionally included news, religious groups, and anything else that could be construed as critical of its policies, as well as pornography.

According to Reuters, Qin said that Internet regulation was necessary in order to prevent the spread of,”harmful information and for national security.” He also said that China’s 300 million Internet users and 100 million blogs was proof that China’s Internet was “open enough.”

If the government has objected to YouTube’s content, it is likely that Google may cooperate in censoring it, as it does with Google Web search. In any event, here are some YouTube videos that its citizens are missing, with apologies to the ruling party:

Tiananmen Square Protests:

Tibetan Riots:

Protesting Parents of Earthquake Victims Jailed:

Human Rights: Dissidents Placed in Mental Hospitals:

Petitioners Arrested:

Pollution:

Support for Sudanese War Criminals:

I’m Dying to Get My Hands on an iPhone Keyboard! I Think!

Last week, right before Apple’s iPhone 3.0 unveiling, I compiled a wish list of things I hoped the company would make possible in the new software. One of my items was the ability to connect external hardware accessories to the iPhone–and, specifically, to enable the use of Think Outside-style folding keyboards.

When I attended the event, I got all excited: One of the first new features Apple disclosed was the ability for software to interface with external devices via the phone’s dock connector or Bluetooth. But none of the examples it gave involved keyboards. And then, during the Q&A session at the end, somebody asked about keyboards and whether iPhone 3.0 would support the Human Interface Design standard that would let keyboards talk to iPhone apps that involve alphanumeric input. The answer: No, no plans for that. I slumped in my seat a little bit.

And today, I perked up: Some clever hackers have modded an infrared keyboard to work with the iPhone. They’re really clever hackers–their mod works with the current version of the iPhone software, and doesn’t require it to be jailbroken. Here’s a demo:

For a number of reasons, I have to temper my excitement. Their mod is a technology demo, not a product you can buy. And if it did become a product you could buy, it would only work with applications designed to support it, if I understand correctly. You couldn’t use it in Apple’s own browser, e-mail, calendar, note-taker, and other apps. In a way, external keyboards are like cut and paste: It may be possible to get them working, kind of, without Apple’s support. But Apple is the only company with the power to make them work the way you really want them to work.

Guessing Apple’s priorities is always a bit risky, but I suspect that external keyboards are way, way down on its to-do list, if they’re not officially banned from it. It surely wouldn’t build an external keyboard itself–it must see the market as limited, and the idea as clunky. And it might see enabling external keyboards as an admission that the iPhone’s keyboardless design has its downsides.

Thinking about external keyboards again has me questioning my hankering for them. If I had one that worked with the iPhone, would I really use it? I’ve owned several in the past, and used them with various PDAs and phones, and while I got good use out of them in some situations (meetings, long plane trips), they didn’t change my life. And the iPhone’s synching capabilities are good enough to eliminate the need for some types of data entry that would otherwise make an external keyboard appealing: There’s no need to enter dozens of contacts into the phone itself when you can wirelessly sync them over from a PC or Mac.

Here’s the thing that leaves me still thinking external keyboards make sense: long weekends. And other short trips. I still don’t want to do anything on an iPhone that involves typing more than about fifteen words at a time, so it’s not a true notebook replacement. But if I had a folding keyboard that worked in every iPhone app, I could leave home for brief, low-pressure excursions and do everything I needed to on my phone. (Um, assuming that wherever I was going had decent 3G coverage, that is–but that’s another blog post.)

Part of me wants to see an iPhone keyboard simply as a matter of principle: As remarkable as the iPhone is, I don’t want it to be limited by Apple’s take on what’s important. External keyboards are kind of ungainly, aren’t as useful as they once were, and probably won’t sell in the millions? Fine–there are still some folks who really, really want them. As today’s keyboard mod shows.

On The Way to Boxee NYC

So I’m en route with a friend to NYC with a friend to hit up the Boxee meetup. Not exactly sure what we’re going to see, but I am expecting to hear at least a bit about the new upcoming beta from execs Avner Ronen and Whitney Hess.

At least two partners are expected to show up, including representatives from NextNewNetworks, who will show off their music video service, and Blip.tv.

Of course there will be giveaways, food, and music. Maybe I’ll be able to snag an exec to ask them a few questions, we’ll see. Anything you all would like to know?

Boxee is saying that a surprise partner will be making an appearance. I’m hoping it’s Hulu playing nice, but I doubt it since they have their own set top box now…