Saturday, April 28, 2007

iVersary

Today is the fourth anniversary of iTunes… Wow. Four years and over 2.5 billion song and video downloads. Things could really change now, with the push for DRM-free music. Fortunately, Steve Jobs is onboard with that idea and is also refuting the idea of an iTunes subscription service, similar to Rhapsody, Y! Music Unlimited (Yahoo!’s service), and Napster. Now if he could just put wi-fi into his next iPod, like the Sansa Connect

How ever did we get our music back in the old days? Oh yeah, the old NAPSTER. *sigh* I miss the early days… and then the mad rush to get whatever you could before they shut Napster down. Not that I did that.

Shame, now it’s a shell of a music-subscription service. Shawn Fanning deserves credit as the pioneer of the electronic transfer service. As naïve as he was, he deserves a spot in the programming and computing hall of fame. Now he’s working on programming a new social network for online gaming called Rupture, which will take World of Warcraft player info and create a personalized site for each character. His 2002 startup, Snocap, was an end-to-end music distribution company that would allow content providers to oversee their own distribution and create online stores anywhere HTML code could be edited. Hmm… Yeeeeaaaah. From the creator of the most widely-known peer-to-peer file-sharing client in the world to… hmmmmm. Clearly, it’s not 1999 anymore…

But what about Fanning on the cover of Time magazine? That was cool.

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