The Right Way

In our previous article, we wrote about the strong demand for peer to peer file sharing, and one of the technologies which may finally reconcile legitimate supply with that demand is cloud computing (centralized content). By licensing access to media content rather than distributing the content on physical media or in data files, content providers can provide very convenient access to what they have and really cut down on distribution costs. Everybody wins, right?

Well, not quite yet. Lala.com showed (and maybe still shows) great promise as the perfect combination of social networking, digital music, and software as a service. In theory, users can host all of their music online where it’s available at any computer with internet access. Backups aren’t needed because Lala stores all of the songs on its servers, and Lala allows its users to transfer their existing music collection to their Lala account. When Lala doesn’t already have a particular song in its database, it allows users to upload the MP3 from their computer.

And while that all sounds great, Lala’s implementation and service have been lackluster at best. We know the future lies in cloud computing, and when Chrome OS and similar platforms hit the market, we expect the demand for Software as a Service (SaaS) applications like this to skyrocket. So we’ve been trying Lala – which is ostensibly the best solution yet in its category – for the past few months to give an honest evaluation. So here’s what we think…

Availability. We haven’t noticed that much downtime with the Lala website or the servers which stream the music, but even while the rest of the site and content is working fine, many of the songs which we uploaded (songs which were not in their database) are no longer playable. This is the single biggest problem we have with Lala – they have little respect for the music of an individual user, and they clearly prioritize the music that they already have in their database.

The Player. The web interface for viewing a user’s music library and playing songs is miles above any other web-based player we’ve seen. The fact that the interface is minimal and simplistic turns out to be a plus because playing music shouldn’t be complicated, and we didn’t end up missing any of the advanced features that Winamp or Rhythmbox might have offered. There is certainly room to improve though, and we would have liked better, more convenient search functionality. Editing tags for songs in our library was a breeze, and it’s much easier and faster editing “web songs” than it is for MP3s on a hard drive.

Reliability. Lala’s player uses Adobe Flash and overall works well, but it has some serious bugs. After having the browser open for a long while (maybe a day or so), the player stops playing sound. It continues to buffer songs, but it just never starts playing. Oddly enough, we saw this error happen very consistently on both Windows and Ubuntu in both Firefox and Chrome. We were only able to pinpoint the problem because Chrome allows us to unload the flash plugin in its Task Manager (a subsequent refresh would reload it and allow the player to start working).

Support. Naturally after encountering all of these problems we tried to contact support. Lala asks its users to fill out a form on their site and wait for their support staff to respond. Well, we haven’t heard anything yet – no emails, no ticket numbers, nada. This is hardly the kind of service that would inspire anyone to trust them with their entire music collection.

Price. In this area, we have nothing but great things to say about the Lala experience. Buying the right to listen to a song on Lala costs only 10 cents. The prices for downloading full MP3s are also very reasonable, but buying an entire album of web songs only costs a little more than a dollar. This is really the way music buying should be, and this is what we loved about Lala’s offering.

The Future for Lala. Overall, Lala is a great idea that just hasn’t fully materialized yet. There had previously been a lot of speculation about an iPhone app and whether the authoritarians over at Apple would approve it, but earlier this month Apple acquired Lala for $85 million (according to the WSJ). It’s still unclear how Lala will fit into the larger Apple picture, and it’s likely that Lala may be absorbed by – or at least merged with – iTunes.

The one good thing about this acquisition is that Apple must now honor the purchases made by Lala’s users. If Lala had gone under, then its users would have lost the money they invested in their online collection. And who knows, Google was rumored to have been bidding for Lala, and they may still be looking to create their own music streaming service. Unlike their multitude of other products which have nothing to do with their business model, organizing the world’s music (alongside targeted ads of course) sounds like a good fit.

With over 24% of the global market share, there is no doubt that Mozilla Firefox is the leading alternative to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. No small part of its success and the most important design goal behind Firefox was its minimal feature-set and strong support for extensibility. The intent was to eliminate the “bloat” found in other browsers at the time and allow the Mozilla community to add new features. In this article, we’ll talk about our favorite add-ons.

LastPass. This is an absolute must for anyone with more than a few website user accounts. LastPass can encrypt and store your account information on their servers, and you only have to enter one password (hence the name) to log on with LastPass and gain access to your collection of user accounts. It can then automatically enter your usernames and passwords when you visit a page with a login form.

We think you’ll probably want to change some of the default settings. LastPass should remember your email address, but not your password. This means you’ll need to log into LastPass every time you open Firefox, but it’s the best tradeoff between security and convenience. You’ll likely also want to turn off some of the LastPass notifications (“Save Site” is the most essential). We also recommend against using the “AutoLogon” feature as you won’t always want to log on when a login form is displayed.

Xmarks. This extension both backs up your bookmarks and synchronizes them with your user accounts on other computers. It’s great for syncing your home and work computers and for restoring your bookmarks when moving to a new user profile. Xmarks also offers to store your passwords, but it’s a relatively new feature which isn’t as good as LastPass.

Lazarus. Something that has always plagued web browsers is the loss of text entries due to a session timeout or other problem. Until Firefox incorporates some kind of recovery option, Lazarus is an extension every Firefox user should have. You no longer have to worry whether the website you’re using is saving draft copies of your work.

Web of Trust. Referred to as WOT, this extension allows its community to avoid visiting untrustworthy websites. It’s almost surprising that this service has become popular as a browser add-on and not as an offering from Google or Yahoo, but nevertheless WOT is very useful. Now you can readily tell which links are spam when you search for anti-virus products.

It’s worth pointing out that WOT is meant to help you avoid malware-ridden, fraudulent, and inappropriate sites. It isn’t meant for rating the organization behind the website, but you can sometimes get that information from the “scorecard” on mywot.com from users’ comments.

Summing Up. These four extensions are the best out there now, but there are certainly some very interesting developments coming in Firefox 4. Cloud computing is looming large in the future, and Mozilla’s Weave and Prism projects will likely cause a huge shift in our expectations of modern web browsers.

Google has put a lot of effort into promoting Software as a Service (SaaS) – which usually means an application provided by an internet website. This is opposed to the traditional method of distributing compiled software for users to install locally on their computers or servers. My favorite example of SaaS is Google Apps, a collection of integrated applications and services hosted by Google for use by small businesses.

Many people (even professionals) are uncomfortable with SaaS because copies of the software can’t be downloaded or saved and there’s usually a monthly or yearly cost. So in this post I want to explain the benefits of SaaS and why it’s better.

No Installation. With SaaS, there’s nothing to install on your computer. Having to install software doesn’t necessarily take a lot of time, but what if you need to have an application loaded on every computer on your network? That time adds up quickly and becomes expensive.

Server-Side Processing. Your computer no longer has to do all the processing locally, and most of the actual work is done by the server (or ‘cloud’) hosting the application. This means you can use much less powerful hardware. This is the whole reason netbooks are becoming so popular and inexpensive.

Developer Incentive. What incentive do you give a developer after you’ve paid $100 for version 1 of their software? Well, it’s not the kind you’d like. You’ve given them a pressing reason to release version 2 instead of fixing the problems in version 1. And it’s not even a matter of trusting your vendor – any company is naturally going to do what’s profitable even if they’re honest.

With SaaS, you get instant patches and updates, and version numbers aren’t nearly as relevant. The developer now has a huge incentive to improve the software because you could switch to a competitor’s service at any time.

No Upfront Cost. If you needed an application loaded on 20 computers, and a site license costs you $30 per seat, then you’d have to pay $600 upfront before you could even use the software. With SaaS, you usually pay by the month, and the only thing you might have to initially pay for is the cost of the first month of use.

Data Backups. With locally installed applications, you have to make sure you back up your data. But if your data is stored on a server hosting the application, then the service provider will be doing the backups for you. Most providers will have an enterprise-grade SAN which ensures your data is always accessible even if some disks fail.

Of course, it’s always good practice to export your data, but with SaaS, it isn’t nearly as critical. Most vendors are very good at allowing exports in common formats, but you should definitely make sure your vendor supports this.

Cross-Platform Compatibility. One of the best things about internet-based applications is that they work on any operating system that can browse the web. You don’t have to worry that your application may not work after you upgrade your computer to a newer operating system. It’s also very easy for SaaS vendors to create mobile versions of their applications by simply modifying the application’s appearance for mobile screen sizes.

Collaboration. An immediate benefit of switching to internet-based applications is that many users can access the same data at the same time. SaaS vendors usually do a very good job at synchronizing data from different users, but this is something you’ll definitely want to test out. For example, Google Docs & Spreadsheets says that it supports this kind of collaboration, but in practice I’ve seen delays of about four minutes.

Simultaneous Use. Internet-based applications universally authenticate users with user accounts and passwords. However, many of them allow multiple simultaneous logins. Of course you’ll want to make sure this is supported with your vendor, but many of them allow several different people to log in with the same account at the same time. This means you don’t have to buy separate accounts (or licenses) for each user.

Centralized Management. Another thing that’s easy for SaaS vendors to implement is convenient access to account management information and statistics. It’s much more difficult to gather information about locally installed applications, and in most cases where it’s possible, it requires an expensive server application.

Access from Anywhere. Last but not least, you can access your SaaS application from anywhere on the internet. You don’t have to worry about allowing access to servers inside your network (which could cause security issues), and your applications are always available.