Wednesday, June 29, 2005Care of Dave Winer
Robin at Podnova has an excellent summary of podcasting by Apple. Let's hope Microsoft and Real, and everyone else gives us a way to get our old subscription lists in, and our new subscription lists out.
- Today iTunes 4.9 was released. In our previous post we already strongly recommended sticking to your existing client, but why is that? and what do we think about Apple entering the podcasting market?
After our previous post (right after release) we spend some time playing with the newly added podcasting part in their software.- The good thing is that Apple has the power to popularize podcasting, think about the amount of people they reach with the software they deliver. People who never heard about podcasting, but just visit the iTunes Music Store, now see Podcasting in their iTunes. This could be a big step forward for the podcasting community!
- However, we don't think it's a good thing for existing listeners to change your favourite podcatcher for iTunes. We even hope the new people who just got in touch with podcasting via iTunes will swap their iTunes for other podcatchers.
Why? There's a number of reasons:
- they own their directory, and it's closed for third parties
- existing ipodder.org directory maintainers are completely cut out (they did, and do, a lot of great work)
- no support for bit-torrent
- which implies that you have to sign up with their hosting services to 'help you out'
- AFAIK there is no support for OPML (import or export) or dynamic OPML for web-interoperabillity.
- iPod only, no other mp3 players are supported
- The RSS namespace definition of Apple is prefix by a trademark which could be a signal that they want to own the market (see also Dave Winer's RSS)
- Concluding you might say that the main reasons we strongly recommend sticking to your favourite podcatcher are one, the tendency to own the market (for now I'm not even going into their DRM and lock-in strategies which make me shiver, brrr.). And the second one is that their implementation isn't one that tells us that they understand podcasting. They'd better delivered on scheduled release date and do a proper job.
And please, don't get us wrong, we do work on Mac's, pc's, Unix and Linux boxes. It's about delivering something good for a fresh community.
- Wil Wheaton Strikes Back
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Wil Wheaton has once again participated in a Slashdot group interview. As usual, Wil is witty and humorous throughout, a truly enjoyable read.
- 7:33:36 AM
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