But it’s also super depressing, because it’s just another example of how the rise of streaming media has brought crazy digital rights management back into our lives. We’ve completely traded convenience for ecosystem lock-in, and it sucks.
Right now, the Echo can play music from Amazon’s Prime Music service, Pandora, and whatever random music I’ve uploaded to my Amazon cloud locker. This means that the music selection is pretty bad! I stopped buying music around the time I started using Spotify, so I don’t have much new stuff to upload, and Prime Music has a fairly thin catalog compared to Spotify. Basically this thing can play my 2000s-era iTunes collection at me, which means I’m listening Wilco and The Clash way more than I have in the past few years. Is that good? It might be good.
Patel has a point – the rise of all these streaming music services has completely undone the end of DRM in the music industry. It’s most likely entirely unrelated, but Steve Jobs’ scathing letter condemning the use of DRM is no longer available on Apple’s website – just as Apple is rumoured to launch its own streaming music service.
The same has happened in IM, chat, messaging, or whatever you want to call it. It’s 2015, and I have five messaging applications on my smartphone – WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Google Messenger, Hangouts, Skype – and I also use iMessage occasionally (on OS X) because some of my friends are locked into it and don’t want to use something else. These companies – Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook – are actively and consciously making the choice to make the lives of their customers as difficult as possible.
If these companies really cared about their customers – as they always claim they do – they would’ve come together and used or developed a proper open standard for messaging. Instead, we get Facebook (through WhatsApp) banning users for using 3rd party WhatsApp clients on Sailfish, or we have Apple making grandiose promises about turning FaceTime into an open standard, but then backtracking once they realise they can frustrate and lock-in consumers by keeping it closed. Google, meanwhile, seems to have no idea what it’s doing at all, flipflopping left and right (Hangouts? Messenger? What’s it going to be, Google?). Skype is Skype.
Now that iOS and Android (and to a lesser degree, Windows Phone) are entirely and wholly interchangeable, companies are looking for other ways to lock their consumers into their platforms – and much like in music, the companies are placing their own interests above that of their consumers.
The Echo is limited in it’s ability to play music because (a) Amazon has not added support for various streaming music services and (b) Amazon has not opened the Echo to developers.
I have a Sonos system which plays my entire iTunes collection ( that whole thing about Steve’s letter is just absurd by the way ) as well as Spotify, Beats and Tidal – right down to playlists, top lists and so on. This is an entirely solved problem.
The issue with chat interoperability is a very different issue. Some companies close their populations for strategic reasons but most, frankly, don’t consider their chat app strategic in any way. Do you really think Apple considers FaceTime and Google considers Hangouts such a strategic differentiator that they close it intentionally. If so you need to adjust your tin foil hat abecause it’s clearly too tight.
The issues for Apple, Facebook, Google and other major companies is that opening up these platforms to third parties would require a tremendous amount of effort to maintain security, combat spam, ensure performance and so on. Apple can’t even get iMessage to sequence messages properly on all devices when it controls all those devices, how would it manage with 50 apps? And honestly, no one is ‘locked into’ iMessage, you can just use SMS if you don’t like iMessage.
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Yes, indirectly, because they want to tie your identity to their services.
If that wasn’t the case they would all be federated, like email or XMPP. Those are older protocols after all, we already know how to do federated.
If you know the history of the Internet, you know that is how the commercial Internet got started:
“In the early days, Cerf was a manager for the United States’ Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) funding various groups to develop TCP/IP technology. When the Internet began to transition to a commercial opportunity during the late 1980s,[citation needed] Cerf moved to MCI where he was instrumental in the development of the first commercial email system (MCI Mail) connected to the Internet.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vint_Cerf
MCI mail was the first commercial provider to be connected to the Internet. And this was only allowed for one year as an experiment: http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a221856.pdf
Its only solved for you because it plays nice with the services you like.
Until you can build an open system yourself from a raspberry pi or something that can interface with Amazon Music, iTunes, Spotify, etc… then its not a solved problem.
I don’t have the ability to add Amazon Video support to my Nexus Player. I don’t have the ability to add Google Play Movies to my PS3.
The only reason your Sonos can do all of that is because its overpriced and they’re likely paying extortion/license fees to those companies.
On a side note Echo is a good platform. If Amazon opened it up to developers it could be a great one.
You might – in your conspiracy driven world view – assume this is because Amazon wants to build a walled garden. Nothing could be further from the truth, Amazon is desperate to figure out how to make Echo open!
But here is the problem. The Echo is listening to EVERYTHING YOU SAY once you give it the code word! How do you open that up to third parties? How do you assure the app stops listening once you start feeding the data stream to the app? How do you even know which app to hand the data stream to?
This is a hard problem and it’s the engineers saying ‘we don’t know how to open this up’, not the business guys or executives, who want it open because they know it needs to be open to survive.
I don’t believe you. I do believe in the walled garden conspiracy.
I don’t believe it is hard for the user to authenticate to the service and tell the service which other can service provider also can get access to the information. If you want something simple for starters which uses events, try webhooks and a RSS-like feed or something like that.
Basically everything Amazon does is build things as a service. And I do mean everything. See the story below which is famous in the developer community.
They basically popularized what we call ‘cloud’ today, breathing new life into what used to be called SOA ( service oriented architecture).
That is why Amazon WebServices even exists. Everything has a ‘public’ API and it’s just a matter of choice who can access it. See point 5.
____
From the perspective of a person that used to worked Amazon and later worked at Google:
“Jeff Bezos is an infamous micro-manager. He micro-manages every single pixel of Amazon’s retail site. He hired Larry Tesler, Apple’s Chief Scientist and probably the very most famous and respected human-computer interaction expert in the entire world, and then ignored every goddamn thing Larry said for three years until Larry finally — wisely — left the company. Larry would do these big usability studies and demonstrate beyond any shred of doubt that nobody can understand that frigging website, but Bezos just couldn’t let go of those pixels, all those millions of semantics-packed pixels on the landing page. They were like millions of his own precious children. So they’re all still there, and Larry is not.
Micro-managing isn’t that third thing that Amazon does better than us, by the way. I mean, yeah, they micro-manage really well, but I wouldn’t list it as a strength or anything. I’m just trying to set the context here, to help you understand what happened. We’re talking about a guy who in all seriousness has said on many public occasions that people should be paying him to work at Amazon. He hands out little yellow stickies with his name on them, reminding people “who runs the company” when they disagree with him. The guy is a regular… well, Steve Jobs, I guess. Except without the fashion or design sense. Bezos is super smart; don’t get me wrong. He just makes ordinary control freaks look like stoned hippies.
So one day Jeff Bezos issued a mandate. He’s doing that all the time, of course, and people scramble like ants being pounded with a rubber mallet whenever it happens. But on one occasion — back around 2002 I think, plus or minus a year — he issued a mandate that was so out there, so huge and eye-bulgingly ponderous, that it made all of his other mandates look like unsolicited peer bonuses.
His Big Mandate went something along these lines:
1) All teams will henceforth expose their data and functionality through service interfaces.
2) Teams must communicate with each other through these interfaces.
3) There will be no other form of interprocess communication allowed: no direct linking, no direct reads of another team’s data store, no shared-memory model, no back-doors whatsoever. The only communication allowed is via service interface calls over the network.
4) It doesn’t matter what technology they use. HTTP, Corba, Pubsub, custom protocols — doesn’t matter. Bezos doesn’t care.
5) All service interfaces, without exception, must be designed from the ground up to be externalizable. That is to say, the team must plan and design to be able to expose the interface to developers in the outside world. No exceptions.
6) Anyone who doesn’t do this will be fired.
7) Thank you; have a nice day!
Ha, ha! You 150-odd ex-Amazon folks here will of course realize immediately that #7 was a little joke I threw in, because Bezos most definitely does not give a shit about your day.
#6, however, was quite real, so people went to work. Bezos assigned a couple of Chief Bulldogs to oversee the effort and ensure forward progress, headed up by Uber-Chief Bear Bulldog Rick Dalzell. Rick is an ex-Armgy Ranger, West Point Academy graduate, ex-boxer, ex-Chief Torturer slash CIO at Wal*Mart, and is a big genial scary man who used the word “hardened interface” a lot. Rick was a walking, talking hardened interface himself, so needless to say, everyone made LOTS of forward progress and made sure Rick knew about it.
Over the next couple of years, Amazon transformed internally into a service-oriented architecture.”
https://plus.google.com/+RipRowan/posts/eVeouesvaVX
Edited 2015-06-07 13:10 UTC
I agree with everything you just said. In fact, you are enforcing the point I am making. Amazon wants to open up Echo to developers, they just haven’t quite figure out how to make that happen yet.
Once it does happen it shouldn’t be rocket science to, for example, allow the Echo to control your Sonos devices.
Amazon itself says this …
We are working on the public Alexa AppKit to enable developers, content creators, and service providers to build Alexa apps and experiences for Echo. If you are interested in being part of a limited-participation beta ahead of the Alexa AppKit public release, please sign up to provide your contact information.
I forgot to add to my comment: “unless you have any information on the contrary.”
And now you’ve provided that, thank you. 🙂
This is more about ecosystem lock in. What do you expect? If users pay for a streaming service, they’re not buying the music they listen to. That is the point of a streaming service. If you want music without lock in, how about you actually buy it? Last I checked, iTunes, Amazon, Google, etc still sell music and, well, it’s still drm-free. Imagine that. You’re renting when you stream. Get over it, and stop paying if you don’t like it. You always have the option of purchasing the music you want to keep.
Note: none of this applies to the video industry, as they haven’t seen the wisdom of actually being reasonable where drm is concerned.
Yeah, this. I’m not sure what they guy is complaining about other than his own stupidity in not buying music that was drm free. You can buy your own music and stream it anywhere with Amazon or google. If you’re only subscription to streaming, you don’t have any retention of that music. Think how awesome your music collection could be if you instead bought 2 albums a month instead of paying for the fee. Mine is that awesome. Microsoft screwed me over with their Pays For Sure crap, not getting screwed over again.
DRM in music has become fairly transparent. While Spotify and all other on-demands services certainly use DRM most internet radio services actually do not. And the consumer can’t tell the difference.
Except that I can listen to my favourite internet radio stations using any app that I like on any device, whereas with Spotify for example, you’re limited to devices that run their particular app, and having to use their app. Probably not a big deal for most people, but some people like having one general streaming app, rather than a dozen different ones for different stations and services, some with more or less features than the others.
For better or for worse, my obsessive packrat-ism and paranoia about losing things has served me well here. (I’ve been burned many times in the past by encountering things so niche that I spent months wondering if I just dreamed about them)
My policy is that, if I can’t keep it, I won’t listen to it, so…
1. On most sites, I download, then play locally, then delete if I don’t like it.
2. On YouTube, where I trust youtube-dl sufficiently, every play is followed by a youtube-dl call (it’s more convenient and I only ever risk one “saw but can’t save” failure at any given time).
3. For internet radio, I stick to shoutcast/icecast stations and use the “relay server” option for streamripper so I can listen in what is effectively real time, but every bit of audio I hear has also been saved to disc.
Do you really do that for every youtube cat video? Or is that reserved for the exceptional video?
I almost never watch cat videos but I do it for 99% of what I do watch (Mostly news, comedy, riffs, and conference talks. I’m more a reader than a watcher.). For example, for a funny video…
<Ctrl+L><Ctrl+C>
<F12>
(cd ~/in<Tab>V<tab>Hu<Tab>; dl <Ctrl+Shift+V>)<Enter>
<F12>
…which turns into…
<Copy URL to clipboard>
<Quake-style terminal appears>
(cd ~/incoming/Videos/Humour; dl <some URL>)<Enter>
<Quake-style terminal goes away>
(“dl” is a shell script which dispatches to the appropriate downloader based on URL prefix)
For series I watch, I’ll typically have a little three-letter script which does that all automatically and then starts the downloaded stuff playing.
…but, now that you’ve got me thinking about it, I’ll probably lash my Parcellite clipboard actions support to a quick little Zenity-based shell script so it’s as simple as:
<Triple-click address bar>
<Ctrl+Win+A>
<Click “Download” in the actions popup>
<Double-click category (eg. Humour) in list>
Edited 2015-06-09 10:31 UTC
How often do you find yourself rewatching videos you’ve previously downloaded?
I, myself, rather like youtube for its disposable-ness. If I watch some item multiple times, then I’ll download.That ends up being a very small number of videos. No regrets so far.
Depends on the type. For music or humour, quite often. For the rest, it’s mostly a case of being obsessed with the fallibility of my own memory and the transience of online resources.
(I’m still struggling to identify some of the books and videos I borrowed from the public library as a kid)
Hmm, that makes sense. I do wish I had a better record of those. There is a series of books I read, that I do not remember the titles or author. They were really bad, but enjoyable. Like terrible sci fi movies, but in book form. I bet if they were released today it would Harry potter mania all over again. Because they are written just as if not worse than those.
Edit: Thanks for humoring the questioning. I’m always fascinated on why people do various things on line.
Edited 2015-06-09 21:28 UTC
Some of us have avoided using steaming services, and as stated, just upload music to your amazon locker. I have an echo. Really convenient when you don’t have any hands free.
I’m not using any services which have DRM. I buy music to have a file that I can use any way I want (and preferably FLAC). That’s it. Let authors know that you care and vote with your wallet too.
Edited 2015-06-07 04:53 UTC
I ‘m not using any services which have DRM, because DRM is usually found in purchased content and that costs money.
Even if all torrent sites are seized, there is always Gnutella2.
Personally, I think the best way to use streaming services is for music discovery. I have literally listened to hundreds of albums since I signed up for Spotify, but then I go back and buy the songs I like. Sure, I could pirate the same songs in order to ‘preview’ them, but Spotify makes the process a lot more convenient. Plus, I don’t have to worry about getting a ‘cease and desist’ letter from my ISP
The IM comparison is flawed. XMPP looked at some point to be “the” protocol to unify them all. Then it lacked several important features such as file or voice/video, which all the vendors had to implement with their own extensions to the protocol. At that point, the standardisation of the protocol became irrelevant, due to incompatibilities in features and extensions.
I’ve lamented several times now about how disappointed I am that they’ve let XMPP rot and don’t seem to care about standardizing on a more modern feature-set. Even the limitation of a 64×64 avatar is, in this day and age, just plain ridiculous. It is a nice enough protocol in and of itself and it being completely open and free is great, but someone needs to step in and modernize it.
Google could open Hangouts just fine and submit it to IETF for standardization. But it’s Eric Schmidt for you.
It especially needs to be modernized for mobile.
The last I heard, it needs to keep an open connection to the server which is hell on battery life.
It actually isn’t as bad as you may have heard. The battery-drain depends on the extensions the client and the server support, so there are obviously going to be lots of bad combinations out there, but I am using Conversations ( https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=eu.siacs.conversations ) as the client and Prosody.im as the server; after I installed all the extensions in Prosody that Conversations supports its battery-use is barely a blip in the charts and yet it works magnificently.
That app never stays connected for me for my server. Never quite figured that one out.
Go to “Manage accounts,” then choose your account, then turn server info on. You’re probably missing XEP-0198, ie. stream management.
Not sure. At this point the use case for the app no longer exists. But thanks for the pointer.
now is kinda late. the big players tried XMPP for a few years, found it unsatisfactory and moved forward with their own technologies. unlikely they will go back.
XMPP have those features, at least as extensions. It just didn’t catch on (or get adopted by the big guis).
Exactly, this is a failure of open standards to keep up with the market demands.
The company I work for uses Skype for team meetings. Why? Because it has video, group video, voice, and group voice chat. They would run XMPP, or anything else really, but Skype does it the best.
Does XMPP support this? Yes. Does any XMPP server bother to implement these things? Not really, no. Everything is built around the idea of being an inverse version of IRC. Some servers have janky, half-baked implementations that no one bothers to update or explain how to get them working.
XMPP’s deficiencies are well known, and no one has bothered to do jack about it.
I concur. Like anything good, leadership is required. The technology exists. Leadership toward an open, common goal does not
I’m using Psi+ with a GMail account, Jabber.ru account and a Facebook account. I think everybody can pretty much reach me through that. My friends who use smartphones tend to write me on my GMail account or Facebook account. Not ideal, but it’s still one client with one protocol.
I think Thom’s smartphone should be able to support an XMPP client which would mean he could at least reduce the number of clients he uses on it.
I never saw the need for any of these paid music services. There is so much content available without restrictions or costs nowadays and it doesn’t look like it’s going to change.
Actually is a wonder Facebook chat still works with XMPP clients, it was scheduled to stop some weeks ago https://developers.facebook.com/docs/chat Don’t count on it still working in the future.
Damn
I didn’t know that. Seems similar to what happened with VK. Do you happen to know whether someone created a transport already or whether there’s a Ubuntu client?
In a climate where these companies are trying to peddle services just as much as anything else, I’m amazed anyone would actually believe they would, or should, create a standardized messaging protocol. If anything people should expect the opposite – that these devices and services NOT play nicely together. They are competitors after all, not best friends.
“….the companies are placing their own interests above that of their consumers.”
Welcome to been happening since humans have been interacting with each other.
I have read a few articles recently where people have complined about needing too many messaging apps or two many music services. I find it hard to understand where they are coming from. My phone has one mssaging app (sms), my PC has two (e-mail and skype). I have one music app on both devices. I cannot imagine why I would need more.
Why would I want so many messaging programs? Why would I ever subscribe to three or four different music streaming services? I find it difficult to understand why people would so complicate their lives. and, for that matter, once they complicate their lives, why complain about it rather than just uninstalling the extra items they don’t need? It seems like an entirely self-made problem.
I like my friends.
I have friends, family and business contacts all over the world too. I stay in touch with them on a regular basis. Somehow we all manage without a half dozen different messaging clients. I listen to music every day, somehow without needing three different streaming services.
SMS, in many cases, isn’t free. A messaging – service that uses Internet for transmitting and receiving messages is often cheaper or completely free.
SMS also doesn’t transfer between devices.
The thing I like about Hangouts is that I can switch between devices and continue the conversation I was having.
On streaming services:
Each service is slightly different in how they go about things. Pandora is more like radio, and Spotify/Rdio are more like record stores. Not all services have the same music or bias. Spotify is more mainstream oriented, and Rdio is more eccentric. Then there are things like 8tracks, which is service that lets people create and share curated playlists built around themes.
On multiple message clients:
Because people need to get work done, and each company has a different work flow. At my old position, it would have been great if we could have federated or IM service with those of our clients, but that’s not really possible. The solution was to use email or phone calls since installing clients and getting logins would have been too much trouble.
Because not everyone is on the same platform, and really, they aren’t going to switch because of one person. In my life, I have Hangouts for my wife, Facebook for my friends, and Skype for business.
Email isn’t a messaging app. It’s much to formal and slow to be a messaging app. The thing about IM is that it’s supposed to be near realtime, and it’s supposed to be a lot like interacting in person.
On people complicating their lives:
People don’t. Companies create silos and ecosystems to force people to use their products. People just want to communicate with their friends on their phone, PC, and tablet.
Complicated technology is just the price of living in the world with proprietary standards.
Also, I’d like to point out that SMS, Skype, and email don’t interact with each other in any way shape or form, so you redundant information silos too. You’re experiencing the same problem, except you don’t recognize it as a problem.
People complain about not having enough to choose from, and they complain about having too much to choose from. It’s almost as if people believe what they think matters, or should anyways, to the companies they rely and/or depend on. Consumers and business are not on the same side of the fence.. Doesn’t seem like a hard concept to grasp.
I thought the problem with open source FaceTime was that Apple lost a patent lawsuit to VirnetX.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-20236114
I doubt Apple would’ve open sourced it even if they hadn’t been targeted by a patent troll. It’s a compelling feature for them. Why would they open source it anyway? Personally I think they should make versions for other platforms, but charge a bit for them so the services would still be more compelling on their own products. Then again, considering how bad Apple’s non-Mac software generally is, perhaps that’s not such a good idea.
Google doesn’t flip flop. Its goal is consistent. If someone (some company or service) is happening on the net that grabs a lot of user attention, they are now a threat to Google’s revenue stream from advertising. Instead of users googling away, they are using whatever new service or app it is. Google can’t have that, so they undercut that competitor by releasing something very similar for free. They only appear to flip flop as they move from one target to another. Their activity remains fixed.
to the Mobile phone (or other) network. I’m not talking about a small ‘Not Spot’ but a major black spot.
Streaming anything in these zones is just about impossible.
Personally, if I can’t download it and play it while I’m offline then there is no chance of me using the service. I know that I’m a Dinosaur but I like to be in control.
I’m also a skinflint in that I’m not going to pay through the nose for a connection (if it is even possible) when I fly from Buenos Aries to N.Z. in a couple of months. My MP3 player has around 7 days worth of Music on it. Works fine offline and well, it just works wherever I want it to. I can even take it to places where all phones with a camera are banned.
To me this is all marketing hype and more of a solution looking for a problem(IMHO). Even my grandkids seem to agree but that might be due to their parents insisting that they pay for and ‘addons’ out of their allowance that they want to use beyond their basic phone service.
I used iMessage because I am locked in to it, is a very different motivation than I use iMessage because I don’t want to use something else.
iMessage users are no more locked in that Skype users. They can move to a different service/app any time they want. They don’t have portability, but that is a different story.