Today, Apple unveiled their iTunes Music Store with the tag line “Downloads Done Right”. Not much has been published about this yet, but here’s my take based on what I can see from their web site.

Frankly this service will have about zero impact on anyone currently sharing MP3 files. Here are the major problems —

1. AAC format. I don’t know about your media player, but mine plays MP3s. Furthermore the AAC format requires a rather expensive license.
2. Mac only. No Windows or Linux client available, so most computers are excluded from this.
3. License. Playable on up to three computers is probably not going to cut it for most people, but at least it’s a good start. I’m guessing that either the iPod and iTunes units have DRM built in or the AAC files are encoded so that people who post them will be caught. There’s little information posted yet, but I’ll be keeping an eye on it.
4. Price. Still a big problem. No one is going to pay 99 cents for a song. I suspect that the price limit is around 20-25 cents. Just think — at 99 cents per song, it would cost you at least 15 bucks to fill up a single CD.

I think Jobs is smarter than all of this, however. My guess is that this is just a foot in the door to begin to convince the record companies that they need to lower the prices and rethink business models around this to be successful. It wouldn’t surprise me if within a year the service becomes a monthly $20/month, all you can drink sort of thing. Jobs probably just wants to be there first.

I’ve been waiting for cell phone number portability for a long time. I currently use AT&T as my carrier, but have been disappointed with their service, particularly in downtown Washington DC. Today’s Washington Post reports on the upcoming change that requires cell phone number portability between providers.

Put it on your calendars now — November 24 — the day the cell carriers are required to provide this service. Yes, they say it will cost everyone more money, but in the long run, this is really going to force them to compete. People like me who have stayed with their carrier for a long time will be able to try different carriers without losing their phone numbers. Those carriers who provide the best service will win.

This is not like the local and long distance service. The quality of service provided by the carriers is obvious — dropped calls, lack of cell towers, etc. People will start to move around to find the phones that work best where they work, which is a good thing.

But here’s another interesting tidbit. The same regulation will also force wired carriers to allow their numbers to move to wireless carriers. This means that if I moved out of state, I could transfer my home phone number to a cell phone and then retain that number when I move. I could essentially retain a persistent local calling number for those folks where I used to live. Or I could ease the transition to my new phone number by keeping a cell phone with the old one for six months or so.

I think there’s more to this, however. I predict that this will blur the distinction between local and long distance phone calls as well as area codes. After some transition period, I believe that all calls will become local, just as Verizon, MCI, and probably others offer unlimited long distance service now. If all service transitions to this, then all calls become local and area codes become unimportant. We’ll still have ten digit phone numbers, but they will no longer correspond to a particular geographical area.

How we retain phone numbers will be an interesting side effect of this. Area codes keep people focused on seven-digit strings of numbers, not 10. While everyone in the US has a social security number consisting of nine digits, few of us remember more than a couple of them. In contrast I have dozens of phone numbers stuck in my memory, likely because there is great commonality in the first three digits of those numbers.

I have to wonder whether the FCC really thought about this potential issue. I’m not sure they did, but either way, I think economically this will be a good thing for consumers. Of course, only if our memory holds out …

Just read this on News.COM —

“We are a conflicted industry,” [Disney Chairman Michael] Eisner said. “Hollywood studios spend enormous sums of money encouraging people to see its films and TV shows and then spend more money devising ways to control and limit how people can see its films and TV shows. Disney (is) mindful of the perils of piracy, but we will not let the fear of piracy prevent us from fueling the fundamental impulse to innovate and improve our products and how they are distributed,” Eisner continued.

This comment came as Disney revealed its new set-top box, movie on demand technology that uses “spare bits” within the video broadcast stream to download first run movies. These spare bits are created by adding a digital data stream to the analog broadcast system that can run at up to 4.5 Mbps. I can’t wait to see if they can get this off the ground.

As I’m sitting here in a forum discussing the use of blogs, I’m listening to a speaker talk about how those of us who only post every couple of weeks aren’t really taking full advantage of blogs. Being an example of that, I thought I’d go ahead and make my first April post.

Blogs have become fascinating examples of social software. Personally I set this up so that I didn’t have to continually edit HTML in order to add my $0.02 on some particular topic, but it seems that blogs have taken the role today that USENET used to have. In the previous decade, most of the discussion between people was done through USENET and newsreaders. When the technological sophistication of the userbase decined as a result of the massive influx of users, USENET migrated first to the web (was DejaNews, now Google Groups) and now, it seems, into Blogs.

In the old days, individuals would create new news groups for particular topics, often crossposting to several different newsgroups to get answers and discuss issues. (People also used, and still continue to use, e-mail lists for the same purpose.) But with the emergence of the web and the appeal of adding a web-based publishing aspect to this, micropublishing has finally emerged.

Where we were previously mapping the web, now there are some efforts to map the blogs. Take a look at Technorati, where you’ll find out who links to whom in the blog world. Is this important? Not totally clear to me yet. It used to be considered important that we find out who the most linked to sites were. We were discussing this years ago while I was at IBM as part of an effort to build a new search engine. Yet it seems that key words and ranking in DMOZ are actually still more important.

No conclusions yet — just a marker to continue to think about this ….