This post continues my Microsoft Zune review, courtesy of the Matchstick and Chatthreads viral marketing campaign. The first part of my review dealt with the installation process and Zune jukebox software. This installment will finish up the software review. Previous posts in this series can be found at:

• Jons Zune Review Part 1
• iTunes to Zune Playlist Converter

Oh, and if you’re reading this and feel so inclined, give the good people at Chatthreads something to do by clicking on the image below and submitting your comments about the Zune.

The Software (Continued)

The Device View

Status

This simple screen shows the current status of your Zune device, and allows you to control the sync operation. There’s really nothing else to say about it, except that just about everything on the page is a link that takes you to a more in depth analysis of that aspect of the operation.
When installing, I chose to manually sync items to my Zune, simply because I have well over 8GB of music that I care to listen to. I started by dragging an album from the artists view in the music section down to the handy-dandy Zune icon. The entire album took about a minute to add. The main device page shows what is currently syncing to the device, what you’ve recently added to the device, and the completion percentage of the operation.

Every time that you drag some object (be it an album, a playlist, or a video, etc) to the device, a record called a sync group is created. These groups can be viewed in the device settings menu within the jukebox software, and allow you to easily see what you’ve added to the device, when you added it, and remove the entire group with a single button click. As you can see, I’ve added a few albums and a playlist to my device.

From this page, you can also manually create a sync group, which is similar to creating an autoplaylist that syncs directly to your Zune. Again, it would be nice if this feature were a little more developed, but for something simple like adding a bunch of Classic Rock tracks to my device, it’s more than adequate.

The main failing point of sync groups is also one of the bigger failing points of the autoplaylist feature. There is no option when creating either to limit the list by size. Meanwhile I have an 8GB Zune, and well over 60GB of music in my library, which makes adding any playlist to the Zune a guessing game. Nowhere in the software is the size of a playlist shown, until you try and put a list that is too big onto the Zune, at which point it complains and refuses to sync until you shave down the size of the list. A nice addition would be emulating iTunes, where the software syncs as much of the selected playlist as possible, and then tells the user which songs didn’t fit.

Even more exasperating is that the software gives the option to automatically re-encode audio files that are over a certain bit rate threshold to a lower bit rate when syncing to the Zune. This is a fantastic feature, as it allowed me to put roughly 150% more songs on the device for a small loss in quality. Again however, nowhere in the software does it list the size of the playlist before and after the conversion, making filling the Zune an even bigger game of chance when this feature is turned on.

Music, Playlists, Videos, Pictures, and Podcasts

Each of these sections acts exactly as its counterpart in the collection view of the software, with few exceptions. These are obvious things, like not being able to create a new playlist directly on the device in the playlists view.

Friends

To be honest, I haven’t quite figured out this part of the software yet. Jake and I, while reviewing on our own, haven’t had much time to use the two devices together. I would imagine that this section of the view will come alive once we do.

The Social View

The social view in the Zune jukebox software provides a direct link to the Zune Social from inside the software. It contains three sub views – friends, me, and inbox. The friends tab is the default, and shows a listing of all your registered friends. In this case, since my Zune id is linked to my Xbox Live id, it shows my friends from Xbox Live, only one of whom (Jake aka ev98) actually owns a Zune.

Friends

Clicking on the Zune tag of one of your friends takes you to an in-software summary of their Zune use. It shows their Zune card, all of the songs that they’ve recently listened to, and a list of their friends. Some of the songs in the listing are tagged with a button that says more info that takes you to a webpage containing album and artist details for that song. Below, you can see Jake’s Zune page and all the Slanty-Haired music that he listens to:

These online pages are where the Zune Social really excels. They remind me of the golden days of the Yahoo Launchcast service, a customizable online radio that played songs based on your ratings of album, artist, and genre. It had a huge index of songs, and much like the Zune Social, offered artist and album info for most every available song.

A typical album page on the Zune Social contains a large cover art picture, a listing of the songs on that album, complete with playable samples and the option to purchase either individual songs or the entire album, and a listing of other albums by that artist. The page also has a place for a professional album review, and a number of listener views, and highlights a Zune user who is the top listener to that particular artist. Each of these page elements hotlinks to another page of the site, giving it a Wikipedia-like quality, that allows an unsuspecting user to simply browse for hours on end.

Similar pages, although without option to purchase, can be accessed from directly in player by clicking on the artist name instead of the more info button. These in-player versions of the pages are separated into categories that give artist information (including top-played songs, every album ever released, and a listing of your friends who listen to the artist), a full length biography complete with pictures, a listing of all Zune users who listen to the artist, and a list of all related artists in the Zune Social library. All of this make the service a prime tool for discovering great new music, which really, is what music should be all about.

Here you can see the Zune Page for Eminem

The Bio page for Eminem

And Finally, a list of artists related to Eminem. This feature makes finding new music that you might like very easy

Me

This page in the software is very similar to a friend’s page, simply showing your Zune card, your plays, and a listing of your friends. Following the hotlink from the page to the Zune.net profile website allows you to customize your Zune card, and post it to Facebook as an application.

Customizing the appearance of the Zune card was a simple matter, although for some reason, the word ‘Zune’ is not allowed to appear in your status message – its banned like a swear word. So instead of ‘is reviewing the Zune,’ I had to settle for the status message ‘is reviewing the Zoon.’ Below, you can see my Zune page. Note the lack of Slanty-haired four-pieces in comparison to Jake’s page.

Inbox

Another aspect of the social that I haven’t quite figured out yet – this appears to be some sort of in-service email client. I’ll write about it later on once I’ve used it a little bit more.

The Disc View

As expected, shows the disc currently in the CD-Rom drive of your computer. In my case, it happens to be Guns ‘n Roses Appetite for Destruction. The view gives album art, a list of songs, and the option to import them into your library. The player can rip CDs in WMA CBR, WMA VBR, WMA Lossless, or MP3.

Outro

That concludes Part 2 of my Microsoft Zune Review. To recap, this part concluded the Zune Jukebox Software portion of the review, and touched ever so lightly on the Zune Social.

Stay tuned for my review of the Zune hardware device, as well as my impressions regarding the Zune Social.

Thanks for Reading,

Jon

Introduction:

Regular readers of this weblog will already know that some time ago, Jake was contacted by the Matchstick marketing company and asked to review a Microsoft Zune, seeing as he’s all important and stuff on the internets. He received his device and has since written three parts of his overall review, available here, here and here.

As part of the marketing offer, Jake was also given the opportunity to refer a friend into the program. I submitted an application, and received my review package a couple weeks ago. What follows here is the first part of my Microsoft Zune review, courtesy of Matchstick and Chatthreads.

Unpacking

The Zune arrived in a beautiful manila envelope, complete with super-lucky-deluxe-bubble-wrap on the inside that contained the slim, trendy looking box and some Matchstick documentation. The Zune box itself is pretty looking, a sure eye-catcher when placed beside an iPod box.

Oddly enough however, the sticker on the bottom of the box read “For Distribution in US only. Security Device Enclosed.” This immediately started me wondering – if this is a review program for a Canadian launch, shouldn’t I be reviewing the Canadian version of the product in question? Perhaps the two products are one and the same, but even so, a mistake like this could serve to alienate touchy Canadian consumers.

The securely packed Zune popped out of its box easily enough, but although the plastic wrapping on the device claimed that pressing the play button would turn it on, the Zune appeared to have been shipped without charge.

Continuing to unpack the box, I noticed the words “Welcome to the Social” emblazoned across the inside. Microsoft seems to be attacking the iPod from the social network community angle, which admittedly, is something that the iPod is lacking. We’ll see how that measures up later on.

The well designed ‘Start’ pamphlet inside instructed me to hit up the setup page to download the Zune jukebox software. I noticed that the other side of the pamphlet was written in Spanish, instead of the French that we are accustomed to seeing here in Canada. It’s a small detail, but again, it seems odd to court early-adopting Canadians with such obviously American packaging instead of taking the time and effort to ship a truly Canadian-branded product.

The Software

Installing

I went to the download page to get the Zune jukebox software and sign up for the Zune Social. If the social is anywhere near as engaging as the Xbox Live service, I could easily imagine it as a true iPod killing feature.

Unfortunately, upon arriving at the page and attempting to register for the service, I received an error message telling me that the Zune Social is ‘Not Available in Your Region. But please continue to check back with us in case we just so happen to decide to get our shit together for our Canadian Launch that is coming up on June 13^th… Oh wait, that was one-and-a-half months ago. Huh.’ Guess we’re not killing any iPods today, folks.

Apparently Canada has been ip-banned from this service

Later on in the day, I complained about this error to Jake (who also happens to be my roommate). He claimed that he had no trouble whatsoever signing into the Social, but that instead of attempting to register, he simply signed in with his Windows Live account that was linked to his Xbox Live profile. Going back to the registration page, I tried this workaround, and was immediately granted entrance. Check me out here.

Now in case I haven’t said it enough times already, I’d just like to re-hash my frustrations with the Zune program – not an hour after opening the envelope, and before even trying out the device. The Canadian launch of this product appears to have been severely fumbled. The device I received was marked for US sale only, the device documentation was in English and Spanish, and the Zune Social IP-bans registration for Canadian citizens unless you already have a Windows Live account that may or may not have to be linked with an Xbox Live profile. Here’s to hoping that the jukebox software and the device itself are in better shape than the launch effort.

The Collection View

The Software is Pink

The install process went smoothly, and I was soon looking at the main window of the Zune jukebox. It’s a pretty, though unconventional user interface. Since I’m not all that comfortable with my overwhelming masculinity, I quickly found an option to change the default pink background to a trendy and edgy greenish one complete with paint splatters and blades or something called Everglade.

I told the software to monitor my music folder, which at last count contains roughly 8500 pieces of media. Initial import of that folder took roughly 10 minutes, which I consider more than reasonable for the size of the operation.

Plugging the Zune into the computer emitted no immediate response of any kind, but there was an ultra-faint charging symbol displayed on the screen of the device. Unfortunately, it seems that neither my machine nor the Zune jukebox software will recognize the device during this initial charging phase. In that case, I guess we’ll begin by reviewing the jukebox software.

The Main UI

Once the import was complete, I started playing a song and noted that it sounded pretty good, even though there is no equalizer feature within sight. While unconventional, the user interface is interesting. The standard viewport on start up looks like this (honestly, I have no idea how that Jewel album got in there. Seriously guys):

Jewel? Not in MY library!

The first thing we notice here are the two view selectors. In the upper left corner, we find music, playlists, videos, pictures, and podcasts. The default is music, which has three additional view categories to choose from, namely artists, genres, and songs. It is important to note that all are in lower case letters, in case you forgot that the boys down in Redmond are in fact, trendy and cool.

The default view is artists, which gives a handy listing of all artists, all albums (complete with cover art), and all songs in the three columns. The Genres category yields a listing of the genres in your library, albums by artist, and all songs. Songs gives a listing similar to iTunes that includes the title, artist, album, and genre of each song in your collection. According to that view, there is a song in my music collection entitled “!!!!!!!” Allegedly it’s by the Roots. Huh. The things you learn.

Anyway, in any of these views, clicking on some entry in one of the columns brings up all the associated tracks in the other columns, which is pretty cool and very straightforward. Overall, the three views give a wealth of great ways to organize and find your music.

Unfortunately, perhaps my favourite and most used feature in iTunes, the five-star rating system, seems to be mysteriously absent from the Zune player. Instead, it gives me a useless yet trendy heart, no heart, or broken heart ratings system that was surely conceived by a 5-year old on a bad sugar trip. The lack of resolution provided by this rating system is sure to cause me headaches.

Aside - This just in, after a solid 30-minute charge time, the Zune came alive and connected itself to the computer. It seems that I need new firmware, the description for which is (this time) actually repeated in French. The update restarts the Zune and takes all of 3 minutes to complete. /Aside

Playlists

Switching over to the playlists view, I am informed that I do not have any playlists. This surprises me, as I know for a fact that there are quite a few m3u files in the music folder that the software is monitoring – admittedly, I don’t use m3u’s, as I long ago surrendered myself to the double-edged sword that is iTunes and stopped manually managing my music - but I do know that they are there, and wonder why they weren’t imported as playlists.

In any case, I am faced with two types of playlists, which seem to be static and automatic. The first works as would be expected. You can name the playlist and then drag and drop items from the music view into it with ease. Once inside the list, items can be reordered at will.

Autoplaylists are a little different. They are akin to the smart playlist feature of iTunes, if by akin we really mean ‘gimped to all hell and back.’ Unlike iTunes, which allows you to select multiple different rules for most any piece of metadata related to a song and separate the rules by either an AND or an OR statement, Zune allows you to select only from album artist, rating, genre, date added, year published, composer, and song plays. Furthermore, all the relations that you enter are linked by an invisible ‘AND’ statement, meaning that the rules quickly become limited in scope.

Yeah, it works, but it could definetly be better

For instance, one could easily select all songs recorded by the Eagles, or all songs in the genre Rap, but it would be impossible to select all songs by the Eagles as well as all Rap songs, because the Eagles never recorded a rap song. That list would be empty and useless.

As an iTunes user, their smart playlist feature continually frustrated and annoyed me with its silly limitations, but the Zune version of the feature is far and away worse. I have a huge music collection that spans five decades and most every conceivable genre. In order to organize and find great songs in that proverbial haystack, I have become anal-retentive about ensuring that my meta-data is present and correct, and use smart playlists and star ratings indispensably. The fact that both a decent smart playlist system and any kind of granular ratings system are lacking from the Zune software are a huge turn off to me.

When testing other jukebox solutions that lack smart playlists, I have often grabbed the contents of one of my custom lists from iTunes and dragged them into a static playlist on the other player in order to at least have a list of songs that I feel like listening to while testing. Unfortunately, there is no drag and drop feature to the Zune player, nor is there an ‘import from software x’ feature, which could have been easily added, since iTunes can export its library as an xml file.

Aside – for anybody interested, I worked around this problem in true nerd fashion by hacking together a quick VB app that reads an xml file exported from iTunes and converts it to Zune-compatible zpl format (which is just a variant of the smil markup language). This program has allowed me to easily export all of my playlists from iTunes to the Zune player. If there is enough interest, I’ll put the app up for download. /Aside

These are small features that, while not immediately necessary, help to ease the transition between players, which is important if you’re trying to say, capture market share from a company that currently has over 80% of the worldwide player install base and the vast majority of mindshare amongst the general public. I feel that at this point, even if the Zune player had a better rating feature, I’d think twice about switching due to the simple fact that I’d have to wade through and re-rate over 8000 songs. That’s a lot of work and one huge deterrent.

Granted, if you’re just starting in the mp3 player field, have a music collection with less than 1000 songs, or aren`t as OCD about organizing your library, these missing features may not be a big deal. Perhaps I’m the outlying case here.

Videos

On install, I didn’t have any videos in my collection. Now as you may have gathered from reading Jakes weblog, our house is slightly different than most in the way that we manage our media. We keep a central server in our living room that holds all television and movie content in a central place. Being as we’re all movie lovers, we’ve ripped quite a few DVDs to that box for easy organization and viewing on the television, as well as network access from our other machines. It’s just the premiere way to share media among the members of a household, and prevents discs from being lost or damaged.

I decided to throw the Zune player a loop and try to add a folder full of video files from across the network, just to see how it would respond. After stalling for a minute or so, it started adding the files to the listing. Unfortunately, (and after some reading) I discovered that the Zune software only supports files encoded in WMV, MPEG4, and H.264 formats. As the vast majority of my content is encoded in XviD format, only a few were successfully imported. Watching local and network content in the player is easy and looks great, although the video player lacks a full-screen option.

It should be noted that there does not seem to be any option to add videos to playlists, or to make a separate type of playlist just for videos. However, if you select multiple video files and edit their information, you can assign them a TV Series tag, and enter a name and season number for that series. Then, when viewing videos by TV, they can be sorted into series.

Pictures

Adding pictures to the jukebox software is as simple as adding folders for the software to monitor. It automatically arranges them by the folder that they were found in, allowing you to keep your family vacation pictures and naughty adult pictures separate from one another.

Clicking on any picture in the collection starts a slideshow of all pictures in that folder. You can access and change your currently playing song from within the slideshow, although you are limited to the playlist or album that you are currently listening to. This is a really slick feature that far outpaces any comparable picture support in iTunes.

Podcasts

On import, the Zune software recognized all of the podcasts that I had downloaded from iTunes and sorted them into a separate section of the UI. They are arranged by Podcast title, and can be browsed easily, although you cannot put podcast files into playlists. On import, the software did not detect the URLs of any of my podcasts, although that is to be expected. The software does give the option to assign a URL to a podcast, allowing you to continue your subscription and pull up to date information from their website directly into the player. Overall, the podcast support seems to be very full-featured and quite a bit more advanced than that of iTunes.

Now Playing

Clicking the little bar-graph thing in the bottom right hand of the main window does not (as I had hoped) launch an equalizer, but rather, a now playing window that, while an interesting departure from the white and grey of iTunes, is almost as much of an eyesore as the myspace page of a 13 year old girl.

Help! My eyes ran away!

We can see my album covers randomly arranged in the background, with my currently playing song, playlist, and playback controls hovering above. I guess that this is the Zune’s answer to Coverflow. It’s awfully pretty, but probably not something that I would keep open on my display, strictly due to distraction value.

Search

This is a seriously cool and really easy to use feature of the jukebox software. If you select any list of song information within the interface and start typing, the software pops up a search box and automatically starts searching for the phrase that you’ve typed.

Go out and buy some Matt Good albums right now!

The search is fast and responsive, and not only finds the exact thing that you are looking for, but other possible hits around it that are related by some meta-data to the item in question.

Find Album Info

By far the best feature ever put into jukebox software. While in the artists view of the music section of the software, right-clicking on an album cover that is missing artwork and selecting ‘Find Album Info’ from the context menu launches a search for the missing album art and meta-tag information. The search almost always returns the requested album as the first hit, automatically replaces the artwork, and updates all of your existing meta-data with correct values.

Ah, One of the only good things to come out of the 80`s

The only issues that I encountered with the feature occurred when trying to match up double albums – the database that the software reads from seems to treat double albums as two separate entities instead of one whole record. Otherwise however, this feature is incredible and something that iTunes could take a cue from.

Outro

Well, that concludes Part 1 of my Microsoft Zune review. To recap, this part included the unpacking and install process, as well as the Collection view of the Zune jukebox software. This view is analogous to the whole of iTunes feature set, and almost as good.

Overall, my first impressions of the Zune software are that it is very well written, and would be a serious contender to iTunes if not for a few pesky missing features such as a decent ratings system and improved smart playlists. Unfortunately, I also feel that the Canadian launch of the product was somewhat bungled, and could have been better handled.

Stay tuned for upcoming parts of my review, including the device, social, and disc portions of the jukebox software, as well as a review of the device itself.

Thanks for reading,

Jon

Update by Jake: This post was giving Internet Explorer a case of the bricks. I’ve removed some of the extraneous tags to make things display properly.

While I may not go as in-depth as Anand might or post with the furious pace common to Gizmodo authors, I enjoy reviewing new technology purchases from a few different perspectives. As a Computer Science student, tech is interesting because it’s a practical application of concepts such as linked lists and binary trees and software architecture - and how most of those concepts get thrown out the window in order to ship on time.

From a business perspective, having firsthand experience with some of the same devices our clients use is helpful from a support angle. It also determines whether we’ll recommend them to end users. I’ve had great experiences with Asus mainboards, and every system I quote includes one - the (potentially) reduced cost of going with something else is not worth the extra aggravation it causes.

And then there’s the geek who talks about RAID-5 controllers just because they’re awesome.

Free Zune, And It’s Not A Pyramid Scam?

SmartCanucks is a regular visit from my feed reader, and they’d posted an article about qualifying for a free MP3 player. Unlike most “free stuff” contests and promotional offers online, everything from SmartCanucks will be applicable to Canadians in some form. Further intrigue ensued when commenters suggested it wasn’t the traditional $20 low-end Shuffle device, but a Microsoft Zune player.

I’d heard about the Zune launching in Canada recently and had played around with one in March for a few minutes, during at an Infusion Angels conference in the Accelerator Centre. It seemed to have a nice UI, but it’s hard to judge when you’re already being inundated with the distinctly Microsoft flavour of the building and presenter. (The XNA conference was very entertaining, for the record, and very encouraging for third party developers.)

After applying through the online survey, I received a call a few days later from Matchstick asking some followup questions. Most of them were repeated from the original survey, but I expect the representative was checking for consistency; one of the biggest problems in obtaining statistics is making sure the interviewees don’t contradict themselves. Some other questions were intended to get a baseline for my pre-existing opinions about Microsoft, and I was also asked if I’d review the product on my site or other social networking connections.

When the question period was finished, I was told that I qualified to receive an 8GB Zune package and that I’d get the option to send one to a friend or recommend another user.

Since I just received the device on the 24th, the next few weeks will be interesting as I properly put the Zune through its paces and try the wireless functionality, as well as provide some technical details on the software. To give it a fair shake, I’ll use it in real-life situations before making a judgement call. I’ll be reviewing the hardware, software and online social service in separate articles over the next month or so, giving people the chance to add their own comments.

Above is the only obligatory image of the unit. There are already dozens of “unboxing” posts online - if you’re into that sort of thing, check out these other sites:

• iamjay.ca: Unboxing the Zune
• random process: A Zune from Matchstick
• Bioscisweetie’s Insights: Meet My 8GB Zune! (Part 1)

The Marketing Effort

For now, it’s probably worthwhile to talk about how the Matchstick (and ChatThreads) process is tinged with just enough marketing effort.

Let’s get one thing straight, though: a large number of people participating in this type of marketing effort go to great lengths to whinge on a certain subject. Namely, is accepting merchandise as part of a promotion ethical? There are dozens of posts from Matchstick’s Nokia 6682 efforts to this effect, with the gamut of predictable, tired reactions ranging from “I got an awesome phone for free!” to “these spammers killed my dog.”

I’m sick of this debate. Disclosing where you got the product is a significant part of the review process, and established press organizations have done this for years. If you don’t disclose your connections, you’re an astroturfer - in other words, the same as the company behind AllIWantForXmasIsAPSP.

Furthermore, being solicited for marketing campaigns is part of maintaining a reasonably popular site. How many press releases do you think Engadget receives daily? I actively sought out this opportunity, so I can’t make the same claim - but those who can’t seem to work out the “ignore” function in their email client or respond with a polite “no” need to seriously reconsider operating a website.

For this promotion, Matchstick has partnered with a company in the States called ChatThreads. Their purpose is to collect word of mouth responses and correlate them with online activity, and they deliver a set of cards as well as seek feedback though their website. Each card has a Conversation ID that links the original campaign, authorized end user, and the collected personal information.

Before receiving the Zune, ChatThreads sent an email asking me to sign up for their site, containing some interesting requests:

As part of your participation you will be sharing your feedback and conversations about Zuneâ„¢ with ChatThreads, an independent word of mouth research company working with Matchstick.

Each time you have a conversation about Zuneâ„¢ tell us about it at ChatThreads.com/zune. The conversations you tell us about could be face-to-face, over the phone, or online.

If you’d like to see exactly what the end-user survey entails, hit up ChatThreads’ site and enter the Conversation ID 102 986 0195. You’re all my friends!

My initial reaction to the page was that I certainly did not agree to provide email addresses every time I mentioned Zune to people. Even documenting conversations wouldn’t really be a problem - but signing people up for an email message looking like this is not something I’d be thrilled to try repeatedly. At least the “Providing this information is optional.” message at the bottom is present.

Another oddity involves the terms of use adorning the ChatThreads sweepstakes. As a thanks for completing the ChatThreads survey, you can opt to have the company donate up to $5 to specific charities, or win up to $500 in Amazon gift certificates. Unfortunately, even as this entire marketing campaign is intended for Canadian residents, the sweepstakes terms restrict the potential winners to zero.

Eligibility. Open to legal residents of the United States (excluding Rhode Island, Puerto Rico and all other U.S. territories and possessions outside of the continental United States and where otherwise prohibited by law)

Conversely, ChatThreads’ past winners page indicates someone from Toronto as a previously successful winner. At the very least, this point should be updated or clarified before sending out what looks like more-expensive-than-average marketing collateral.

I’ll be forwarding this post to the Matchstick coordinators to get a definitive answer through ChatThreads, before promising contest entries to card recipients. Update July 4/08: See this post for ChatThreads’ response and the corrected sweepstakes rules.

Another interesting element in the pseudo-viral marketing strategy is the ability to recommend someone for a Zune device. The signup page for this process required a weblog URL, regular visitor count and number of friends on a social network:

These requirements really discouraged a technologically adept friend of mine. While he’s active in online social networking, he doesn’t currently host an independent blog. The solution was to have him link his Facebook profile page - the “I just got a free Zune! It’s awesome!” status messages through Facebook are perhaps even better publicity from a marketing perspective than a series of posts.

What’s Next?

I’m interested in how Matchstick continues to follow up on this effort. The welcome letter indicated that there were more email messages and additional promotion possibilities in the future. Hopefully this post gives a bit of firsthand insight into the background process.

What can other companies and future marketing campaigns learn from what Matchstick and Microsoft did?

The good:

• Don’t set terms and conditions other than what’s needed for your target market. I never felt pressured to say anything “good” about the product, which is a better way of getting feedback than three hundred faux-positive MySpace comments.
• Attract technology-focused individuals. They’re more likely to be the recommenders and drivers of product adoption.
• Make it easy for people to get involved. Don’t single out people arriving from high-traffic sources: these are the people you want talking about your product.

The not-as-good:

• Try not to spam anybody who’s already expressed a lack of interest. With a Microsoft product especially, there are serious detractors in the Google search results already and they’re not as concerned about being offered a Zune, as they are with being offered a Zune.It’s always challenging to manage email campaigns. When working for Maplesoft - I did my best to ensure the programs marketing folks didn’t blast people that had already unsubscribed. (I can’t vouch for what they’re doing now, but I hope my email utility still has a good home.)
• Get all your terms and conditions lined up, especially when using external agencies. If people start finding inconsistencies in the fine print then they might start to wonder exactly how professionally the program is managed.
• Don’t assume that everyone manages a weblog or website. This may have been a specific target of the campaign, but some people are just as effective when posting to Facebook or other social networks. Keep the regular user - who isn’t necessarily a content producer - in mind too!

Your thoughts will help shape the upcoming reviews. What are you interested in hearing about - the service? Integration with other utilities? Metadata tagging and support for network shares within the software? Speak your piece in the comments and I’ll get on it!

Update, July 4/08:

This post is the first in the Zune review series. I received the device for free as part of a Matchstick promotion. My goal is to provide a technically engaging and impartial review for people interested in MP3 players. Other posts include:

• ChatThreads follows up on the Zune feedback sweepstakes
• Zune hardware, community and software first impressions

I received an interesting marketing-type email from a Brian from Box.net today, promoting their Facebook application. Ordinarily, I’d ask “why would anyone have the nerve to drop me a message at 6:40 AM on a Friday, other than to tell me my download queue completed?” and “do you know what I usually have to say about Facebook applications, let alone annoying or idiot ones?”

I haven’t written a scathing Web 2.0 review since my Customerforce piece for an intern there; since then it looks like CustomerForce has gone under significant plastic-ification and drastically changed its focus to “social media enabler”. It’d be a perfect story for Uncov, but that’s a different piece for a different time.

I’ll slightly modify part of a comment from my original post on Customerforce, as a preface to how I review Web2 services.

If I can describe your complete business plan in a few lines of PHP and SQL, then it’s not a sound business plan at all. You can’t have a business plan that relies on “SELECT `movie` FROM `topmovies` ORDER BY `votes` LIMIT 5;”. Some sites rely on users contributing the best aggregated content, and then having other friends of these users voting on it. It’s too many steps for the average MySpace click-copy-paste profile whore. Never underestimate the stupidity of users; and never underestimate the concept of “less is more.”

So, does Box.net fall into this category? Short answer: no, but it’s certainly heavy on the Web 2.0 fluff that’s so common these days with anything reviewed by Robert Scoble. Interestingly enough, Scoble just reviewed (read: promoted) the service. Company-wide marketing blitz perhaps?

In any event, someone else will have to tell me what Robert said; I refuse to give into The Streaming Flash Video Service That Could, And Perhaps It Works From My Cellphone of the week when a download link (or even a YouTube video) would suffice. Protip, everyone: Choosing a non-standard place to dump your content does not make you a special and unique snowflake.

What Does It Do, Johnny?
Box.net is a cross between sites like RapidShare and products in the Google Docs suite. Essentially, it’s a file upload utility with granular access permissions. It also has several notable API hooks to connect to other Web 2.0 services, and connect your documents and media to them. They claim traffic of over one million file downloads per day. It sounds like a perfect recipe for a crafty frontend to Amazon’s S3 Storage, or perhaps outsourcing traffic to LimeLight Networks for content delivery.

LimeLight tends to be pricey for startups, and throwing around files online costs real cash money. You also have to have a certain amount of capital around to deal with the inevitable copyright lawsuits and DMCA lawyering that result when people don’t read the terms of service and upload their hastily-obtained copy of Harry Potter And The Order Of The Phoenix[2007]DvDrip[Eng]-aXXo so that “they can watch it at work.”

Something for Nothing: Trickier than Getting Free RealPlayer
Unlike most other Web 2.0 services, Box.net doesn’t rely on users being tricked into clicking on Google Ads. This is probably a good thing, because all the ads would probably key on competing services given the site’s ridiculous attempt at search engine optimization:

Box.net - Free Online File Storage, Internet File Sharing, Online Storage, Access Documents & Files Anywhere, Backup Data, Send Files
This is their title tag. Way to make it a great default bookmark name.

Going directly to their site, you’ve got a clear “signup” button:

This, as any savvy Web user knows, is a dangerous trap into somehow getting something you don’t want at all. All good sites make the interesting or free stuff hidden in a link inside a paragraph of dull gray text. I’ll save you the disappointment here, though, and spoil things: the narrator and Tyler Durden are the same person, and Box.net has no publically available free service. Your options are respectively 14-day trials for a 2GB/$25/year account; a 5GB/$80/year account; or a 15GB/$200/year account.

Wait - that’s not entirely correct and complete. There are at least two other types of accounts. Signing up for a trial of the 2GB account gave me a billing profile with a 1.0GB BASIC option. What if I’d wanted to try a Plus, Premium or Business account, and not the Cheapskate Special?

But hey! I can upgrade my account right now if I give them my credit card number, as I’m constantly and nauseatingly reminded as I flip through their interface. It’s inescapable. Uploading a file? Look at an advertisement for additional services. On the home page? Fully one quarter of the UI is dedicated to “give us some money, please.”

File Uploads Aren’t Bad
There’s a reasonably snappy interface for file uploads, which gives a progress bar and filesize information. The multi-file Java applet also suits the purpose well. It’s also reasonably easy to share (make public) files as hyperlinks, although directly pointing to them is restricted to premium accounts.

It also appears as if downloads go through an “index.php”-style redirector before being deployed to the browser, presumably for access control and database categorization. Sort of weak not being able to access the actual file directly, but that’s a minor point.

What I’d like to see: for video uploads, embed a YouTube-style FLV player on the Download page so that potential users can preview the file. Hell, even an EMBED tag, done tastefully, would let the end user’s browser try to stream the content.

Overall, I’m actually quite impressed with the file upload functionality.

Integration is Quite Good
I do actually endeavour to test services before panning them, so I uploaded several photos and tried the “Edit photos” application. If anything, this convinced me that before I pay Box.net $25 per year, I should pay Picnik the same amount for premium Web-based photo editing. Their Flash utility for managing photos is really well designed and could easily replace all of the low-end photo editing utilities currently on the market.

If the only negative “well, that’s weak” thing I can find is the above message on replacing an unsaved document, then I would vote these guys the next Google acquisition target.

Unfortunately, I can’t say the same about the integration of Zoho Writer. (It’s the “Create Document” option.) The new browser window suffers from the same FAIL as Ted mentioned on Uncov, and this wasn’t even the spreadsheet that can’t deal with 620KB of data. The following font is NOT Arial.

You Said There Were At Least Two Account Options =\
The Facebook application for Box.net offers yet another way to score some free storage, although in a creepy viral marketing “send invites” way. If you want an untethered free account from the start, this may be the way to go. You get 20MB, plus 20MB for each additional friend you invite to the application, probably up to an arbitrary limit (Update 12/29/07: up to 1GB, which would mean you’d have to invite 50 friends to get the full storage. Thanks, Fred.)

There’s also a way to score a year of a premium 2GB account, although it involves completing a “special offer” that will likely ruin your credit rating and sign you up for Video Professor.

It’s essentially a giant Flash blob when integrated though, and for someone running NoScript, the Facebook component looks like this:

Unfortunately, the revealed version is a horrible mélange of Arial, Times New Roman and imitation Zuckerberg styling. It seems to follow no design rules. Did nobody actually test the application on a Mac running Safari? The main box.net website works properly.

Social Interaction: Does It Spam?
More than zero friends on a Facebook developer test account were needed in order to test out the invitation feature and newsfeed functionality. I found that Facebook fails it too when creating a new account:

The invitation process is fairly informative, so you’ll probably only get invites from people who actually want to share files rather than spew Glitter Text all over your wall. Here’s what the invite looks like:

True to form, the promised storage upgrade works properly, but then fails all over itself when it comes to sharing folders with other users. Shared folder notifications take you completely out of the Facebook UI, instead of linking to the grammatically-incorrect “My Friend’s Files” page. There’s also a duplicate notification dropped each time you share a folder or file.

From a Technical Point: FTP Makes Sense
One of the more convoluted pages on the Box site deals with FTP. I assume it’s targeted at managers and monkey-suit type individuals who have heard that the protocol is “a good way to share files.” As far as I can tell, the only mention of the free 1GB account is on this page:

Box.net offers a free 1GB storage account that you may use for as long as you like. If you are interested in trying one of our pay accounts, you are welcome to try any of them free for 14 days.

FTP is a standard protocol for a reason, guys. I’d love nothing more than SFTP or SCP access to my Box.net account; that way I could upload files regardless of what platform or environment I’m using.

Summary: The Facebook App Fails It; The Main Site Doesn’t
I guess Brian’s intention with his email was to drum up traffic for the Box.net Facebook application. In short, it’s a failure: it looks ugly from the Times New Roman embedded font, seems to unnecessarily use Flash, and doesn’t support any of the external publishing/platform providers that make the main Box.net more worthwhile.

Would it be that hard to write a Facebook application using a canvas IFRAME and then apply a custom stylesheet based on the source? (Answer: No. I’ve written them.) It also sprays a disgusting SWF on your user profile, whereas a plaintext list of files with links would be much more effective and not require the initial “click to display” barrier.

Fixing it would be reasonably easy, though. Stick to HTML and JavaScript within Facebook. If not possible in Facebook’s implementation of FBJS, use an IFRAME; and maintain consistency across user interfaces. What’s with the 20MB initial cap on Facebook accounts, when the official site gives 1GB? And furthermore, why can’t I switch my accounts easily from my profile, receiving the login failure message above?

I feel for the Facebook developers that have to wade through the comments and reviews though. Idiots that want an “autoplay my MP3zzzz” option should be unceremoniously shot.

I probably wouldn’t block the application with malice, simply by virtue of testing it out, but it’ll have to be improved somewhat before I allow it access to my real Facebook profile.

Box.net, though, as a separate service, might just replace my tested method of creating new drafts from Gmail and attaching files. It’ll be much easier to drop files there for transferring, and with third party integration for services like Picnik, I expect additional interesting ways to work with files in the future.

I am either about to become one of the hardcore neckbeard-wielding Linux supporters, or do something drastic to Microsoft’s programmers. Why is it that an operating system like Vista, put together after five years of effort, is actually WORSE than its predecessor?

Just this week I’ve experienced the following issues with my legitimate, genuine MSDNAA Vista Business installation:

• Random nVidia kernel driver crashes. I don’t actually see the crashes themselves, only the tray tooltips that follow them indicating that “nvkdtm” or some similarly-named file has caused my display device to stop working. I could theoretically pin this on nVidia, but the drivers I’m using are WHQL certified.
• My user profile refuses to log in with my preferences. My desktop wallpaper, Start menu customizations, etc… are all gone, and I’m told to check the Event Log to find out what’s wrong. There is nothing useful in the Event Log.
• SMB file sharing just randomly crashed, interrupting a download and halting my music. I go to investigate this and Windows indicates that everything is fine. Except it’s not.
• Remote Desktop can take up to two minutes to log in, where XP would accomplish the same task in two seconds.
• Windows Explorer duplicates folders on the root of the drive. I have two entries of the same “Users” folder present when I look at the C drive.

This has all been just this week.

What am I doing then? I’m reinstalling XP Pro from the latest newsgroup build - the pirates build an ISO every month with the latest Windows Update fixes, giving a better installation source than my pre-SP1 media.

I’m also refusing to touch the OS with a ten foot pole until I can verify that all this crap has been fixed. It’s not like I’m running exotic hardware (Asus board, Intel Core 2 Duo chip, OCZ RAM, nVidia graphics) and I haven’t actually touched the box since two weeks ago - all it’s been used for is web browsing and SMB serving.

When the final release Ubuntu 7.04 comes out in a few more days, I will seriously consider it for regular use.

When I get a bit more cash, I will seriously consider a Mac Pro instead.

During my browsing of Something Awful’s coupons forum, I noticed an offer for a free “La Fonera” wireless router. The concept of this device is that it’s an 802.11b/g router with custom OpenWRT firmware, which creates two separate SSID’s:

• FON_(accesspoint), which is an open WLAN that allows anyone to connect
• MyPlace, a WPA or WPA2-encrypted WLAN that is “private use”

I figured it’d be a useful device to physically isolate my network from unknown PC’s, since the public WLAN doesn’t allow connection to other PC’s on the internal network by default.

Some pictures of the packaging and device follow, as well as my specific configuration changes:
Continue reading ‘La Fonera wireless router’ »

My new MacBook arrived yesterday, so I’ve been playing around with it since last night. It’s unbelievably snappy, likely due to the Core 2 Duo chip inside it. I also bumped the configuration up to 2GB of RAM when I ordered it, which is a good idea for pretty much any modern system.

I might have even gone to more, but the Intel chipset inside this system only supports 2GB. The MacBook Pro’s chipset will address 3GB, but to get that configuration you’d have to do 2×2GB sticks and lose 1GB. Anything over 3GB isn’t going to be accessible under a 32-bit operating system, and nobody I know wants to run a 64-bit OS on the desktop full time. OS X 10.5 will change this, because things will pretty much be transparent.

What’s more, the GMA950 card that I’ve previously panned for being slow and nearly worthless actually performs pretty well. I had both my 1680×1050 LCD monitor and the 1280×800 display on the MacBook running last night, and there was less GUI “lag” than my iMac had. (OS X, by nature of its accelerated graphics, tends to have a slower “immediate redraw” rate than WinXP when resizing windows.)

I’ve yet to try any games on it, but that’s not really what this system’s for. Primarily, I wanted something small and light, and the fact that it runs OS X natively is pretty damn cool.

Since I have quite the collection of music, I figure that a productive use of my time would be to review some of the albums in my playlist. While it’s not at all cool to admit, I’m a bit of a sucker for the occasional “emo” track. (For all the purists, not “emotional hardcore” by any means. Think “angst emo.”) There’s more information in my Facebook profile about particular groups I listen to. I find most genre classifications to be fluid and subjective, depending on the listener and their associated company.

Why the emo angst stuff, though? Sometimes I listen to these songs with an ironic sense of the actual lyrics. A well-adjusted person would find it hard not to laugh when confronted with a masterpiece from Hawthorne Heights:

Ohio Is For Lovers - Hawthorne Heights
So cut my wrists and black my eyes.
(Cut my wrists and black my eyes)
So I can fall asleep tonight, or die.
Because you kill me.

Honestly, you can’t take that sort of thing seriously. It has the syndrome of “did your dad yell at you because you didn’t mow the lawn?” as its primary element.

I can’t blame all of my particular musical tastes on irony (although a good percentage of rap or hip-hop in my collection is clearly for this purpose alone.) Sometimes you can’t listen to the lyrics at all, because if you do it ruins the particular melody of a decent-sounding song. So what if power chords in a 3 beat pattern are trite, cliche and overused? It all just blends together in the background if I’m working on something particular. For example, if I were to write out several lyrics of my current track:

But I can’t take this anymore
I think that nothing can fly
With this broken wing
There’s so much to hold on to now

At first glance, it’s a horribly depressing song. Nobody wants to hear about being prevented from flying. Pretty little birds fly, and we don’t want to lose those! A majestic eagle flies, representing all that is true and valiant and good! Many of our culture’s upbeat, positive songs involve flying! (Note: the particular track, “I Believe I Can Fly,” is positive only when you don’t consider R. Kelly’s criminal record and its associated connotations.) The song above is actually Story of the Year’s “Burning Years.” It’s got a fairly decent melody, but you cannot just concentrate on the lyrics or it’s really horribly depressing.

Speaking of Story of the Year, they have two significant albums on the market. Their 2003 release, “Page Avenue”, has the title track Until The Day I Die that’s possibly the best representation of their vocal and tonal style on the album. In 2005, “In The Wake Of Determination” continued in a similar vein with We Don’t Care Anymore. If you want to fanboy it up, the Wikipedia article is suitably biased towards them and their fans, whereas the talk page contains mostly genre debates.

(The particular fallacy of “In my opinion, as i think i have the right to decide - being a loyal fan and a supporter” is quite predominant.)