Joe Ross

I love Seesmic. I use their web interface every day. Their Android app is still wonderful, despite being wholly ignored by the company since Summer 2011. Seesmic Ping is an app for iOS, Android, and Windows Phone that lets you schedule updates to Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, including attachments.

It sounded intriguing at first. After all, the Seesmic team has done some amazing work. But the truth is: Ping is basically an entire app that consists of a single feature from a solution--Seesmic for Android, iPhone and Windows Phone--that already does what Ping does.

Okay, so Seesmic never scheduled from mobile before, so I guess that's an improvement. I schedule a lot of tweets, but I'm always at my computer, on Seesmic Web or Tweetdeck for Chrome. I suppose there's a market out there for folks who often need to schedule from the road (is there?), I'm just not one of them.

The downside is that this will eventually become a paid service, according to the company's blog post about it. They promise more services, posting by email, and some other features once the product is out of beta. But would you pay for something that update social networks if it can't read them as well?

Update: Seesmic for Android just got an update this morning. Nothing earth-shattering, but Trending Topics is fixed, it now supports t.co links, and they have removed Google Buzz support. There are also apparently lots of bugfixes. I'm installing the update now.

My Motorola Triumph is bad on battery, partially due to the time it spends in "Cell Standby" trying to find a signal from Virgin Mobile indoors. Auto Airplane Mode keeps the radios off when the screen is off. It isn't always ideal, but it's easy to turn off and really helps battery life. I can keep an eye on incoming SMS and missed calls via the Google Voice extension in Chrome. Everyone wins.

This isn't an article, but a presentation put together by venture capitalist Ryan Spoon and some colleagues (although Spoon guest-posted it at TechCrunch). It's great for developers and entrepreneurs, but I think it's just as good for app users and people who think and write about this stuff a lot.

We all have complaints about even our favorite apps, and this presentation is a great starting point for thinking about how better to express ourselves in the feedback we give devs.

As I'm sure you know by now, Facebook filed an S-1 with the SEC in anticipation of an initial public offering (see Josh Constine's write-up at TechCrunch).

They included the above image in their SEC filing, but left out what I think is the craziest piece of data:

December 2010 = 327 million daily active users
December 2011 = 483 million (!!!) daily active users

That's a 48% increase in one year.

That's crazy.

Update: @aworldgoesnova pointed out that it's only a 30% increase, and Facebook's S-1 is, well, wrong when it calls it a 48% increase.

Update the second: @aworldgoesnova pointed out that I misquoted the December 2011 number as 425M. I've fixed that, too. So, the original percentage was right, and I've changed it back. Boo to me, but thanks to her! Oh, and numbers and I remain in a lifelong feud.

I can't wait to test drive this, especially because I recently tried using the original Seesmic for Android again. I'll post a proper review sometime next week, but the ability to schedule updates to Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn from within the new app is a welcome feature. In fact, any word from Seesmic on the social networking from is welcome, considering they haven't updated their original app since June 2011, focusing instead on their Salesforce CRM partnership.

Update: The new app is available on iOS, as well.

Byron Tau of Politico writes that the Obama campaign will be taking payments via mobile payment system Square. This is a very good idea, Mr. President. This way, people at rallies, town halls, and other large gatherings of supporters can give as little or as much as they want. It's all handled via mobile phones and tablets, and Square's card-swiping dongle. Of course, I guess the real question is whether people will be comfortable swiping their credit card via a mobile phone and whether they will trust that their money is truly going to President Obama's campaign and not to some Democrat-hipster's bank account.

Update: I called the upcoming service an ISP, but it's really going to be a hosting provider. Think Hover.com rather than Comcast. I was wrong but now it's fixed.

Rob Beschizza at Boing Boing reports that Zurich-based ISP Ort Cloud bought the domain Righthaven.com at auction after Righthaven was shut down in the face of huge debts and a lack of standing in all its pending cases.

The copyright troll Righthaven made a business out of licensing the right to sue infringers of newspaper copyrights, until they were told that the right to sue, although technically valid, does not constitute standing to sue without a license for one of the exclusive rights the Copyright Act gives to copyright holders, as well.

The company sank into debt and was dismantled and sold off in bits and pieces to appease creditors. Ort Cloud plans to build a hosting service at the domain that is more deferential to the rights of its customers than many others. They were explicit, however, that piracy and torrents wil be banned.

Long-term there’s no future in printed books. They’ll be like vinyl: pricey and for collectors only. 95% of people will read digitally. Everybody in publishing knows this but most are in denial about it because moving to becoming a digital company means laying off like 40% of our staffs. And the barriers to entry fall, too. We simply don’t want to think about it.

This anonymous email sent to Sarah Lacey, formerly of TechCrunch and more recently founder of PandoDaily, is full of interesting insights into the publishing industry's Amazon problem. It looks to me like it boils down to the fact that publishers spent so much time and money fighting the shift to e-books that Amazon has emerged, whether naturally or unnaturally (read: through deliberately anti-competitive tendencies or practices...), at the top of the game. We know they're making about $134 per Kindle Fire purchased. VentureBeat's Ben Popper cited reports that Amazon loses about $2 per Kindle Fire sold, but they may make an estimated $136 per Kindle Fire user. That strategy, of using the hardware as a loss leader and the content as the revenue source, is a very good one for the modern content industry in general.

Aggressive changes in strategy may allow some traditional publishers to make up for lost time, but those changes would probably require loss leaders, probably in the form of e-book prices meant to undercut Amazon, and sold in formats compatible with all e-readers. A market-wide shift to electronic publishing may mean job losses, as well, or at least a shift in what kind of workforce modern publishing will require. Jobs lost at publishing companies may be indirectly replaced by additional employment needs at services like web hosts, web designers, systems administrators, etc.

I don't want to see anyone lose their jobs, especially when things may be looking up, but the change in desired skills I wrote about last month is happening either way. Some types of employees are simply becoming more desireable in a modern business environment, and that change is driven in large part by the increasing ubiquity of internet access and lower barriers to entry. It's possible that the traditional publishing industry is far behind the curve on this shift, and due to catch up.

History tells us the traditional publishers are not probably not keen on the kind of bet-the-company strategy loss leader plans sometimes require, but it does look a lot better than simply surrendering to Amazon without a fight.

And that's exactly what publishers appear to be doing with their current strategy, or lack thereof.

[PS: I'm taking a course in antitrust law this semester, so expect more posts about monopoly and related topics.]

[PPS: If you haven't spent time at PandoDaily yet, do so now. It's a great new addition to the tech/start-up space.]

Even if we don’t watch their movies in a theater or buy their plastic discs of hostility, we’re still supporting them. If we watch their movies on Netflix or other flat-rate streaming or rental services, the service effectively pays them on our behalf next time they negotiate the rights or buy another disc. And if we pirate their movies, we’re contributing to the statistics that help them convince Congress that these destructive laws are necessary.

Marco Arment makes some great points, and he is probably right that a boycott of the intellectual property produced by MPAA members, coupled with support of campaign finance reform, would reduce the ease with which the Association purchases pro-industry, anti-consumer legislation.

The depressing thing, though, is that it's just not a realistic suggestion. Netflix is one of, if not the, most bandwidth-intensive services in the world (see Todd Wasserman's write-up at Mashable). People won't stop going to theaters, or purchasing films online or in stores, or simply pirating them.

The problem is one of delayed consequences. Smokers continue to smoke, despite widespread knowledge about the undisputed health dangers, because the consequences are so delayed (cigarette now, cancer in ten years). The same principle applies to the fact that consumers won't stop buying films now to prevent consumer-hostile legislation in five or ten years.

Image via Briar Press