Martin Weigert's thoughts on the social web. And life.

The whole Megaupload case is starting to look odd.

Here is what happened in chronological order:

First, in December, a viral music video appears, a commercial by Megaupload featuring a couple of high profile US artists supporting. The video was later removed from YouTube due to complaints by Universal Music - which didn’t own the rights to the clip. That led Megaupload to sue Universal. 

Right before Christmas, Megaupload launched MegaBox, a music streaming service. According to the reports, the plan was to allow artists to sell their songs and to keep 90 percent of the earnings. I tried MegaBox without getting too impressed - I expected free full length songs but only found 30 second previews. And in order to upload your own music collection to the service, one had to download a special client, which I didn’t trust (it’s still Megaupload we are speaking about). Nevertheless, the thought of Megaupload and artists working together, removing the labels from the equation, sounds revolutionary. 

A couple of weeks later, it was reported that multi-million selling hip-hop producers Swizz Beats was the CEO of Megaupload. Later, after the raid, it was said that he actually hadn’t signed a contract yet.

A day later, Megaupload was shutdown by federal prosecutors, the people behind the site (including Kim Schmitz) were arrested in New Zealand.

Then, yesterday, tweets by hiphop celebrity Busta Rhymes emphasized how Megaupload proved to be a working business model for artists who got paid by the site if their free songs got downloaded a lot - cutting out the middle man aka the labels.

Putting all those pieces together makes it look as if the Megaupload people were about to seriously attack the music industry - with the help and support of some very popular artists. 

Before this could happen, the FBI stopped it.

Despite the fact that Kim Schmitz and the other Megaupload crew members definitely aren’t the most trustworthy people, and despite the fact that there hardly was any copyright protected media content that wasn't available through Megaupload, this case seems to be more complex than what it initially looked like.

Important!

A few days ago I was at the cinema, watching “The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo”. At several occassions during the movie (which is worth watching if you haven’t already seen the Swedish original), the characters work with MacBooks, with the bright Apple logo at the backside being very visible to the audience.

In 2010, Apple products appeared in 30 percent of the 33 movies that hit No. 1 at the box office. Although I’m not sure if Apple actually pays for these placements (according to this it doesn’t), many other companies do pay for having their products shown. The Wikipedia article about product placements cites an older forecast about spending on film placement which was supposed to reach 1,8 billion Dollar in 2010. Not sure how the actual figures look like, and it seems unlikely that product placement can fully finance a movie, but it’s still a revenue source for movie companies that shouldn’t negatively be affected by piracy. On the contrary - the more copies of a movie are being downloaded, the bigger the reach of the companies that have paid for showing their products. And I wouldn’t be surprised if the number of unauthorized downloads is increasingly affecting the prices of the placement. Like this: “We expect 20 million illegal downloads and eventually 80 million people watching the movie without paying. For that audience we gonna charge you XX percent extra for your product placement”.

This is no fact, just speculation based on obvious facts: 

1. Hollywood movies are increasingly crammed with products that companies pay for to be shown. 
2. Subtile marketing messages work whether the copy of a movie is pirated or not.
3. The movie studios would be stupid not to count those “inofficial” viewers. Hence, they will consider those when defining the prices of the placement.

I guess, nobody would go on the record with that. And again, there probably can’t be enough product placement to fully finance an expensive Hollywood movie without the movie having the feeling of a 2 hour commercial. But it’s something one should at least have in mind: Each pirated copy actually helps the movie studios to charge more for product placement. Because movies are increasingly becoming ads. And they probably will become even more.

Fanboyism is an interesting topic. Instapaper founder Marco Arment, an outspoken Apple fan, argues that the term usually is used by people who own another device or product and who feel insulted by that someone is casting doubt upon their choice of product. Hence, they start to discredit that someone by calling him/her fanboy (or fangirl).

From the accuser’s point of view, fanboy means - according to Arment - someone who is blindly and irrationally devoted to a product that I believe is inferior to what I bought when faced with a similar choice, and whose opinions and arguments can therefore be completely disregarded.

Not surprisingly, Arment is mainly referring to the never ending conflict iOS/Apple vs Android. 

I think, Arment is missing something: Not everybody calling another person a fanboy is necessarily defending the "opposite party” or even owning their product. I use and enjoy the iPhone and iPad, still there are persons that I would undoubtedly call Apple fanboys.

In my eyes, a fanboy is simply someone who has an unbalanced positive view on a product and an unbalanced negative view on the competitor’s products. A real fanboy (or fangirl) is practically incapable of serious criticism to the company or product he/she’s devoted to - at least not without criticising the biggest competitor even more. Fanboys often turn into passionate bashers of the competitor.

So is Arment a fanboy? Not sure, but I think he’s close. As are lots of people who own Apple products. Though I actually don’t mean it as an insult.

There might even be two kinds of fanboyism - healthy (passion) and unhealthy (fanaticism) one. The latter is bad, because it makes people very predictable and hard to have a factual discussion with. 

And something else, while we are speaking about Apple fanboys: In the lights of the latest “Is there value in blog comments?” discussion, it’s remarkable that those usually siding with Apple (like Marco Arment, MG Siegler, John Gruber) all have deactived their comments feature. The need for total control seems to be something Apple and it’s biggest, most emotional fans have in common.

For me, the most exciting new startup of 2011 was without a doubt ifttt, the San Francisco based service that lets you connect about 40 web services and functions with each other. It’s like digital duct tape and an awesome way to become more efficient by automating regular tasks.

I use ifttt for instance to add links in tweets I favour to Instapaper, to tweet articles from RSS feeds including specific keywords and to backup my Instagram photos to Dropbox. 

I asked ifttt founder Linden Tibbets about what to expect in 2012. He replied that he didn’t want to go into details for now but promised that they are building “some really neat stuff for the first few month”.

So under the assumption that his hesitation to tell me more doesn’t mean that he’s about to sell ifttt (which I really don’t hope), there might be some really cool new stuff coming. 

In fact I believe ifttt could become one of the rising stars of the next 12 month. Eventually I expect the service to widen its horizon by not only focusing on web services but to also include devices and things that are connected to the Internet. To begin with, ifttt could integrate with connected devices such as gaming consoles, Nest, Jawbone, Fitbit or Sonos hardware. Just as one example, by enabling Nest support via ifttt, one could change the settings of the intelligent Thermostat through email, tweets or even a phone call. 

The Internet of Things is coming. In the long run, ifttt could partner up with all kinds of electrical appliances manufacturers to allow them to interact with other cloud services and to be controlled through them. 

Establishing these kind of partnerships would require a lot of manpower and well connected people, so ifttt would need to grow and hire staff. Thanks to recent funding from Betaworks, resources to start with are available.

I’m not sure if this is the direction ifttt will aim at in 2012, but I see huge potential which also should help the service to get attention outside of the core user group of hardcore geeks. 

Can’t wait to see what ifttt has up its sleeve for the near future!

During the weekend, I gave the TV show "A Good Wife" a try. I ended up watching 14 episodes almost in a row. 

It's brilliant, and so is the main actor Julianna Margulies. 

It's my discovery of the year. Together with "The Killing".

Over at netzwertig.com we have been conducting our annual poll, asking fellow tech bloggers from Germany/Switzerland/Austria and readers about their favourite online service of the year.

Based on the individual top 5 of 62 bloggers and readers with knowledge in the startup and technology field, we compiled a list of the 11 most-mentioned services. After that, readers had 5 days to vote for their favourite. 1674 people chose to do so.

Here is the result (number of mentions among the 62 experts in brackets)

01. Dropbox (17)
02. Google+ (20)
03. WhatsApp (9)
04. Instagram (11)
05. ifttt (13)
06. Wunderlist (7)
07. SoundCloud (6)
08. Evernote (10)
09. Reeder (6)
10. Instapaper (13)
11. Hootsuite (6)

Facebook, Google search and Twitter (but not 3rd party apps) were excluded to make sure the list doesn't become too boring.

There is a lot of discussion going on about Facebook's "frictionless sharing" feature after this CNET article stating that by automatically publishing any app activity (like songs listened to or articles read) to Facebook the social network is ruining sharing.

Personally, I'm not a fan of frictionless sharing (as described here in German), and I have difficulties to understand those who claim it is the future of sharing (like MG Siegler or Marshall Kirkpatrick - who criticises the feature for other reasons).

It's not that I doubt that sharing everything as default with the chance to opt-out on a item-basis could be in fact the future of sharing - if Facebook sticks to its plans and allows more apps than the initial launch partners to enable frictionless sharing, it might become the default way of sharing (if user and privacy advocates' protests aren't becoming too intense)

But what I haven't seen so far from the frictionless supporters' side is a reasonable argumentation where the real value for the user is. I doubt it actually exists.

Songs people listen to, articles they read or videos they watch aren't necessarily what they would recommend you. Often it's even the other way round: The crap gets most of the attention, which with frictionless sharing means it is also most visible in your network. 

If a friend pushes the share or like button to recommend a piece of content I can be sure he/she really wants everybody to try it.

If a friend listens to the the latest release of Justin Bieber, it doesn't mean anything (of course I don't have friends who do). And even if five of my friends would listen to it, it still doesn't mean anything if they simply clicked on my first friend’s stream, out of curiosity or astonishment.

I would like to appreciate frictionless sharing, because I'm always open for seeing the digital world changing our behaviour in a meaningful way.

With frictionless sharing, I don't see it. It has no value for most users, (Scoble says "I’ve found new music over the past two months.I’ve found new news over the past two months" - I don't doubt that. Still there are billion better ways to find new music and "new news"), but it leads to oversharing and a lack of control about your privacy (I have already seen how hard apps try to get you to share your media consumption. In the future, it means one has to pay even more attention to the settings)

That's why I'm sceptical about it. That's why I switched off Spotify's auto sharing to Facebook (instead I switch it on when I listen to something I really want others to check out), and that's why I hardly look at the Facebook music dashboard to see what my friends have listened to. 

So to sum up: frictionless sharing might be the future of sharing if Facebook wants so, but that doesn't mean it's the best way of sharing. I don't think so. As long as nobody convinces me of the opposite (I'm always open for that).

TechCrunch Europe editor Mike Butcher has just published a post outlining the changes the European tech blogosphere has been going through in the past years in conjunction with the flourishing of European startups and the emergence of tech hubs such as London and Berlin.

One of his suggestions is that more tech blogs covering local or national startup scenes publish in English instead (or in addition) to their native language. 

Mike is not the first one two make this point, and he won't be the last.

Since I'm the editor of a tech blog publishing articles in German, I have been thinking a lot about this issue lately. 

From my point of view, the language issue can bee seen from two different angles.

1. The European tech ecosystem supporter's perspective

From this perspective it's clear that Europe needs more tech blogs publishing startup reviews and tech news in English. One of the main barriers for Europe to create a strong Internet ecosystem with an international impact and the strength to build startups which can become more successful than their Silicon Valley competitors even in the Valley is the intransparency and lack of network effects leveraged caused by the different languages. In Slovenia people don't know what's going on in Spain, in UK people have a hard time following the developments in the Baltics, and so on. And in the US, Asia and Africa, they only know about European startups what's been written on the international Tech blogs (which is not a lot). Each country has its own little hypes and minor-scale successes, but apart from TechCrunch Europe, The Next Web (which is a bit broad for my taste to be seen as a pure European tech blog) and a few conferences there is not a lot to connect all those.

And reading articles in foreign languages with Google translate is not really a solution (although I can recommend Swedish to English translation, which is almost perfect).

2. The reader's perspective

From the angle of the reader, switching from a local language to English to support the European tech ecosystem and please its supporters doesn't automatically seem to be a good idea. At least in the German speaking countries there are lots of people who love to read about tech, who follow the big US sites and who still say that they enjoy reading tech news in German. And I'm confident that this is rather the rule than the exception.

Since most tech blogs are primarily written for the readers (at least they should be), it's not surprising that the blog landscape looks the way it does.

+++

So personally I believe there is a need for both: A real Pan-European tech blog in English with local reporters in most countries would be the best thing that could happen to Europe's Internet and startup ecosystem (TechCrunch Europe is from the content focus still more a TechCrunch UK, although Mike is traveling like a maniac throughout Europe to attend conferences and connect entrepreneurs and investors - and The Europas is a great effort to put a spotlight on the continent).

That being said, for the foreseeable future there'll always be a demand for tech blogs written in local languages - especially in the bigger countries of Europe. 

Ideally, those sites would be the sources for the Pan-European tech blogs' reporters, which could pick up the most interesting pieces of news and most exciting startups and cover them in English (in addition to their own research and stories).

So in the end, what's lacking aren't only more local blogs in English, but the Pan-European player bringing their news to all other European countries + the rest of the world.