Pretty much how I felt using cached Spotify on airplane flight.

I realized a few months ago that I was not listening to much music. I didn’t have a streaming app I liked, I had grown to loathe iTunes, few of the services I once used to pirate music still operated and I didn’t feel inspired to muck around with torrents.

There wasn’t time in my daily life for much discovery, I was busy launching Betabeat and helping my girlfriend transition to living in NYC. But just as I slowly realized how much not going to Jiu Jitsu was hurting my quality of life, it struck me on several different occasions how unhappy I was not to be enjoying music on a regular basis.

All this changed in the last two months with Turntable.fm and Spotify. The former was a blessing, because I was able to cover Turntable.fm as part of my work at Betabeat, so using the service paid double dividends. The same is true to a lesser degree for Spotify, which is not local enough to merit continued coverage from Betabeat, but big enough to deserve the occasional story. 

I hope to write a lot over the next couple weeks about how the two services help me to discover new artists that I love, which for me is probably the most powerful thing a music service can do. I’ve already subscribed to my friend Jake’s playlist, Todayz Jamz, through Spotify. Since I met him in Memphis six summers ago, he has proved to be the best way to learn about artists and records that will stick with me. He signed up for Spotify premium and if he keeps this playlist fresh, I expect it will change my life for the better. We’re also planning a semi-private Turntable.fm hang for later this week, so if anyone feels like joining in, just holler.

Big-name investors like O’Donnell and Union Square Venture’s Fred Wilson use the service regularly. But on the site’s leaderboard the top three users, not counting Hashable employees, are a CEO of a small dating site, a relatively unknown investor and an NYU senior and Dogpatch Lab’s intern named Trevor Owens. Which begs the question, how exactly does the site quantify social capital?

Check out the rest of the story over at the NY Observer

I argued that Facebook should resist the temptation to build its own phone. That’s an expensive and difficult process that would take it far outside its expertise in software. But an integration with Skype is another story. Integrating Skype would allow Facebook to capture a percentage of mobile voice calls without delving into hardware at all.

When I bought my new Android phone it automatically synced with my Gmail and Facebook accounts in order to add people to my contact list. Of my roughly 200 contacts, more than one third are simply Facebook friends for whom I have no cell phone number. There have been numerous occasions when I was frustrated with the realization that I couldn’t call these folks. The integration with Skype could change all that.

Imagine a dense urban center ten years from now where WiFi is a constant in homes, offices and public transportation. Facebook and Skype could potentially power a mobile device with no contract and no carrier, powered only by your social network and voice/video over internet calling.

Read the rest of this story over at BNET

Yesterday Facebook introduced a new paradigm, a way of understanding the entire Web that is based around the social, not the search.

Google’s triumph was to design a search engine that used the network of connections between different websites to decide what results were relevant. Facebook’s new Open Graph system does the same thing, but instead of using links between sites to measure relevance, it looks at social networks for the connections between people, places and things.

For a full rundown of how the Open Graph system works, check out my post from yesterday. In brief, this new approach allows users to experience the entire Web through the prism of their Facebook profile. If I like a certain book or movie on an outside partner, I can click a button to share that preference on Facebook. If my Facebook page knows that I like Korean food, an outside partner like Yelp can tailor my experience to reflect that. “It means the Web can become a series of personally and semantically meaningful connections,” says CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

“The 10 blue links paradigm, popularized by Google, appears to be reaching its limits,” writes Om Malik in a post on why Google should fear the social web. In an Open Graph world, users will turn to their social connections to figure out where to shop, what to watch and when to travel. All this is already happening of course, and Google has even entered into the social game. But Facebook’s size and the depth of its partnerships give it a huge advantage in this arena. In place of search, says Zuckerberg, “The open graph puts people at the center of the web.”

Check out my full post over at BNET

The company proved it can’t sort out the good content from the bad, even with three years and hundreds of expensive lawyers.  And while Viacom has been fiddling in court, YouTube has grown into a mature, legally sound business.

The filing subtly reveals this. Viacom isn’t pursuing litigation related to any clips after May 2008. Maybe deciphering which videos infringe copyright is so tough they’ve just given up pursuing new claims. But legal scholars believe it’s more likely that even Viacom is satisfied with YouTube in its current incarnation.

Viacom should quit crying over spilled milk. They’re spending a lot of money to win a judgment against an incarnation of YouTube that no longer exists. The smart move for Viacom, and companies like them, would be to strengthen and expand the partnerships they now have with sites like YouTube to develop software that identifies copyrighted content. The faster this is accomplished, the sooner everyone can get out of court and go back to making money.

Check out my full story over at BNET – http://blogs.bnet.com/business-news/?p=621

The car maker understands this, which is why its worked long and hard to make this issue a mechanical problem. The company recently bragged that it saved over $100 million in 2007 by negotiating a recall of “defective” floor mats rather than thoroughly investigating electronic problems.  Now the ghost in the machine has resurfaced, and those savings are coming back to haunt them.

Read the full post over at BNET

Full post over at BNET -

What makes this story work is the tension between staying faithful to the original text and pleasing the gaming community. The game’s developers went out of their way to talk about how they kept many elements of the poem intact, while simultaneously reassuring gamers that they had ditched all the sissy stuff.

The gaming community was actually offended by the marketing campaign for this title. I think it would have been a lot braver, and commercially savvy, to create a game that used Dante’s fear and fragility instead of ditching it for an a stock action hero.

Still I applaud the developers for trying something this ambitious and for bringing attention to such a great work of classic literature.