Yesterday a client came into our offline business to get a quote on some potential new business. We started talking and the conversation switched to eBay. His eyes lit up when he talked about his collection of yearbooks. He scours eBay looking for yearbooks from local schools and came across one recently from 1909 that had been part of an estate sale. There were less than 20 students that year 99 years ago and he checked around and only the Puyallup library had a copy of the yearbook.  It was fascinating watching his passion as he described the yearbook and what it meant to him.

He was excited to be the owner of likely one of only two yearbooks from that school in existence from 1909. Now some (many?) might think collecting yearbooks of strangers simply because they went to local schools is a waste of time and money, but not our client. It’s doubtful anybody who went to the Puyallup school in 1909 is still alive and anybody who worked at the school is gone.

Collectors and collections are what has made the auction site eBay strong. The cliche one person’s junk is another person’s treasure holds true. I had hoped when they bought Skype that eBay would find some way to use Skype to better connect collectors with collections. At least to my knowledge, this hasn’t panned out.

Bernard at ReadWriteWeb further opines on eBay’s strengths:

Selling off inventory from big companies (eBay’s diversification) may be a great business, but it was not what made eBay magical. Garage sales, antique shops, auctions….these all have a bit of magic and romance. It is about finding something unique and special.

Magic is a perfect description of how a collector like our client feels when they discover something they want to bid on at eBay. Bernard’s post goes on to compare eBay to the site Etsy.com where people buy and sell handmade goods and ponders if Etsy is the next eBay?

Etsy, you say?
Having only been to Etsy in passing a couple times, I decided to take a closer look this morning and register. Since my name wasn’t taken I used that which becomes a subdomain on etsy (tdavid.etsy.com). Nothing there yet so no sense in linking. The registration process was smooth with email confirmation before being able to login.

After logging in I started searching around and the first thing I noticed when clicking the category "Time Machine 2" was the Flash interface. I’m not a big fan of using Flash in archive results. I know Flash is supported in all the common browsers but what is wrong with HTML and graphics? I get it, you can’t hover over the "Auto Scroll" and see the listings smoothly scroll from right to left across the screen with HTML. That can be done with JavaScript. Fortunately the regular listings and search results are in HTML.

I’m not a very craft-oriented guy so my time at Etsy will be short-lived. Never say never though, maybe I’ll get more crafty as I get older. Not that I don’t appreciate people who can make things with their hands because I do, but I’d rather spend the time making things (writing fiction, non-fiction, coding, etc) with my mind. If you do enjoy making crafts then Etsy could be in your wheelhouse. Etsy has a cleaner design than eBay which seems cluttered these days (compare the screenshots above). Another plus? I didn’t see any advertising.

What eBay needs to do
To answer Bernard’s question, Etsy is too niche focused to be the next eBay. Craigslist, if it got a little more structure to prevent fraudulent transactions is a stronger competitor to eBay.

Ironically, focusing on their strongest niches is what eBay should be doing moving forward. They shouldn’t try to do things that appeal to the masses, they should drill down on their most active auction categories and provide even deeper support and interaction between buyers and sellers. And they need to stop tweaking the listing fees, that just pisses off the buyers and sellers.

Finally, they need to reinstate the system that kept buyers honest: allowing sellers to leave negative feedback on buyers. eBay might think they were helping to make the system a more friction-free buying experience, but if you aren’t the kind of customer a business wants to have, they will refuse to do business with you. On the internet how do we know good from bad with just a screen name and buying history? eBay made it harder to identify potentially dishonest customers by eliminating the ability for sellers to leave negative feedback.

We haven’t been huge eBayers in our household, either buyers or sellers, but I don’t think their auction feedback system was broken. Big companies which tweak things that work often make things worse. If I was the new eBay CEO, I’d put that feature back post haste. In a recent boycott, listings were down an estimated 12%. eBay’s official response was that the boycott "had no effect" which was stupid. They should have apologized to the sellers and reinstated the policy that had been there for many years and helped define the eBay auction system.

In short, eBay needs to be less corporate, go back to the basics that made them stronger and focus on collectors and collections. What do you think eBay should do? And do you use eBay any less now than you did a couple years ago?

We haven’t used Network Solutions for many years for domain searching. This morning I learned what the word frontrunning meant in Mashable’s coverage of a class action lawsuit aimed at Network Solutions and ICANN:

Frontrunning is the practice in which users would look up a domain name via the registration-site WHOIS, and would appear available, but every other internet registrar would show the names as unavailable, and registered to Network Solutions, thus forcing the user to purchase the domain from them.

If what this lawsuit alleges is true, this is a dirty anti-consumer tactic and punishment should be severe.

Remember, this is the same outfit that once upon a time was charging $35 a year for domain registration when others were half or less the price. I’m not going to use this post to recommend other domain registrars, but there are plenty of viable alternatives to Network Solutions. These days you can register a domain for $5-8 per year and some hosting companies offer free domain registration if you pay for hosting with them.

Been a little while since I’ve mentioned Chumby.

It still sits to the left of my computer monitor, nestled atop the printer, updating me through a dozen different widgets throughout the day on things like stock prices, my horoscope, what happened on this day in history and so on. To date it’s been used like a $179 billboard, rather than anything that useful or revolutionary.

This morning the New York Times has a piece which discusses the monetization scheme for Chumby (emphasis mine):

Businesses are free to distribute widgets that use information from their own sites, except if they want those widgets to display advertising or sell something. In that case, the only thing that is open is Chumby’s phone line. It expects to be paid a cut of all the money made over its system.

At first I didn’t see as many Public Service Announcements on Chumby, but I’ve noticed an increase. I realize the Chumby can be modified to function as a lighthttpd server which better suits my needs and would use 100% of my bandwidth. I’m thinking about doing that because I don’t really want or need to see commercials in between widgets. That’s too similar to the TV model of content, commercials, content. Anybody else reading using their Chumby this way and want to share your experiences in the comments below?

My original plans were to do some amount of Chumby widget development but since I don’t have and have little desire to pay $679 to buy the Flash IDE, I’ve kept on the fence. There are some open source alternatives to doing Flash development, but they looked a little time intensive. Is there an open source Chumby Flash lite IDE that somebody reading knows about and is using? I’d still like to get into developing some Chumby widgets, but if this calls for me buying the Flash IDE, it will probably be back-burnered.

Also, anybody running Silverlight applications on Chumby yet? I see some PHP 5.25 binaries were cooked up already.

My wife only asked for one thing on Valentine’s Day: TV.  I spent a little too much time on V-Day in the negotiation phase with the three primary TV providers: DirecTV, the satellite service who we’d been with years ago and enjoyed, Comcast cable who provides our internet and DishNetwork. The picture below gives up which one we went with and where I’ve been the last few days.

As far as pricing goes, all three with the programming we wanted were about the same. With Dish we could get the most channels in HD (1080i) through their HD Ultra plan including HDNet and HDNet movies, which I’ve been curious to check out. My wife wanted Showtime, which all three offered. Only cable offered Showtime On Demand which we were interested in.

I think what put Dish over the top was that we hadn’t been customers with them before and they agreed to waive the 24 month contract provision (I hate contracts!). They also were willing to come out the next day and complete the installation and setup. With the impending three day weekend,  this scored additional points. And true to their word, their friendly and helpful technician was at our door the next day nearly an hour earlier than the range of times they said he’d show up (noon-5). Nice.

We received their newest model HD DVR which allows for up to 350 hours of standard programming or 50 hours in HD.

Two not better than one dish
Something I did not like about the Dish install experience was the placement of not one, but two satellite dishes on our roof. The salesman never said we’d have to have two dishes or that this might even be a possibility. Although the installation was professional, it looks a bit cheesy on the corner of the front of our house. Almost like we are advertising to the neighborhood: hey look, we don’t have just one satellite, we have two, neener, neener.

Wrong programming package and pricing
Dish also screwed up the programming order and pricing they promised. The salesman promised us $74.99/month with no contract and fees, Showtime, local channels (yes, you have to pay more for those with satellite), HD DVR receiver, an additional standard receiver, the America 100 package and HD Ultra ($20/mo). Our first bill was supposed to be $104.99 on March 4. When I registered online with our account number I saw a bill over $200 and that they’d already charged us $49.99. They also didn’t list Showtime.

Off to customer support to call them while the install guy continued to work outside. We got it straightened out but I had to eat half the $49.99 "no contract" charge, despite the salesman assurance that we would not be charged anything until March 4. I was tempted to tell him to pack up his equipment and take the two dishes back with him, but decided to let this one go.

I removed the no TV counter from the home page since it no longer applies. Now tell me, friendly readers, what is all this great live TV programming we’ve been missing? What are your favorite shows? Our DVR is waiting to be programmed.

Update 11:50am PST: After posting this, I’ve received some questions elsewhere about why we went 605 days without it? I didn’t link to the original post when we dumped TV and reviewed Vongo, or the follow-up post after one year where we still didn’t have it. Here are both those posts so you can go back through the history:

June 20, 2007: No TV for our family of five for 1 year and counting
January 15, 2006: Review: Bye bye TV, hello Vongo

I was also asked why we went back after being away for so long? We got a month to month contract. We can be back for a couple months and leave again if the value isn’t there. Although it was my wife that was the primary reason we went back, I don’t think she wants to pay $75/month for something we don’t use enough. Time will tell on this one.

While we have TV again, I’d like to see all there is to offer and see if the value is there these days. With the writer’s strike over and the Mariners season about to kick off, I’m not complaining that we have TV again. None of this is to say we have it for a few months and then get rid of it again though.

3:41pm PST: Andrew asked in the comments below what the Dish satellite shape was like:

The price of postage will go up from 41 to 42 cents on May 12, but you can stave off the penny increase for a little longer if you buy Forever Stamps.

Foxbusiness.com:

"The Postal Service developed the Forever Stamp for consumers to ease the transition during price changes," said Postmaster General John Potter. "We encourage Americans to buy Forever Stamps now for 41 cents, because like the name suggests, they are good forever."

When will we see $1 or more to snail mail something? I did a little poking around and learned that the price of a stamp has doubled over the last 27 years (20 cents on November 1, 1981) and quadrupled over the last 33 years (10 cents on September 14, 1975). How much did postage cost some 50 years ago? On August 1, 1958 it cost 4 cents to mail a letter.

News of a postage increase is not good news for snail mail spammers, nor is it for businesses who mail documents and letters as a course of normal business. In our business offline we’ve tried to transition to email for as many correspondences as we can, but ink signatures are still required for many documents. 

The companies we deal with are getting better about allowing digital signature and maybe within the next 5-10 years we will be able to collect signatures digitally as the rule rather than the exception. We used to include a return envelope with postage paid by us, but that cost has risen to well over a $1 for each piece, making it much more cost-effective to include a self addressed stamped envelope.

If history repeats itself, could we see $1 postage stamps by 2035? Sooner? Later?

Why do people blow off appointments? In our offline business we literally waste hours every week preparing for appointments that never show. The percentage of appointments that do show is high, but there is still a significant amount of appointments that never show.

I realize unexpected things come up in life. Hey, we’ve all had to reschedule an appointment but when does your life become so important that you can’t even call for a scheduled appointment and say you won’t make it? Emergencies are acceptable reasons not to call. There are times when calling for a scheduled appointment is either difficult or impossible, I’m not really talking about these blown off appointments.

My work day started a little after 1am yesterday and I agreed to stay late in the office after normal closing time for a potential new customer. This put my work day at an abnormally long 17 hours yesterday. Not looking for or expecting somebody to cry for my long day, but I’m still annoyed today that this prospective customer never showed and never called. You think I’ll stay late for this same prospective customer again? Unless the excuse for why the appointment was a no show is really good, probably not.

We could have spent that wasted time on somebody else. Existing or possibly new customers who do care about our time as much as we care about theirs.

I’d like to think most readers of this blog are conscientious people so this paragraph probably doesn’t apply to you. The next appointment you might ever think of blowing off, here’s a tip: call and let them know. Almost everybody has cell phones or VoIP these days. Just call your appointment and say: I can’t make it. Don’t even have to explain why. This frees the people on the other side of the appointment to use their time in other ways and for other people. It’s the right thing to do.

The world would be a better place if more people thought how their decisions impacted others.

Last night we signed up (again) for the unlimited Hollywood Video DVD rental plan 3 DVDs out at a time which runs $19.99 for the first 30 days and $29.99/mo. thereafter, but I’m feeling buyer’s remorse after reading Netflix has expanded their streaming option.

With Monday’s change, virtually all Netflix subscribers will be able to stream as many movies and TV shows as they want from a library containing more than 6,000 titles. There will be no additional charge for the unlimited access.

So essentially we paid $3 more + gas and travel time to/from to be able to cycle through the Hollywood Video inventory of movies we haven’t seen. I’m certain the quality of the DVD streaming will be less than watching DVDs, but will it be worth the extra $$? We’ll be canceling at the end of the month and going back to Netflix to try the streaming option.

Netflix move looks intended as a spoiler to Apple’s expected announcement that they will be offering movie rentals for $3.99 a movie at their annual MacWorld event which kicks off today. This pricing is similar to the Xbox Live movie service which our family has enjoyed, renting over a dozen movies. Good quality and convenient. Getting in the car to go back and forth to the video store might be exercise of sorts, but it gets old. That’s why we only do the unlimited Hollywood Video in one month surges once a year or so.

Another downside of Netflix deal is selection. 6,000 titles available for streaming versus 90,000 DVDs. On Xbox Live the selection of movies is even smaller. No idea yet how many movies will be available from Apple. Selection and video streaming quality will ultimately decide how long we stay subscribed to Netflix.

From the photo at the top of this movie you can see our first three movie picks at Hollywood: Epic Movie, Ball’s Fury and Hot Rod. Epic Movie was one of the stupidest movies I’ve ever seen. Ball’s Fury was medicore, but had some funny parts. Will be watching Hot Rod later today but it won’t be difficult to be better than the other two.

The Zecco UI and account screens continue to be unclear. I didn’t see anywhere in the trade section where these $4.50 trade commissions are being applied which prompted this post. In the account activity area it shows “principal amount” and then the “net amount” shows $4.50 less, so this must be where we are supposed to see the commission fees reflected (?). If you know of a better place to track the commissions than this, please reply in the comments.

How to locate the commission fees in Zecco
STEP 1. inside the Trading area choose “Account Records” along the left column.
STEP 2. choose “all activity” beneath the section.
STEP 3. select the “From Date” and “To Date” and click on “go” button in the account table cell.
STEP 4. you should see something like the snipped screenshot pictured above.

Why not just have a commission column that shows the amount charged for each buy/sell? Maybe Zecco will add that going forward. That would make more sense.

Recognizing a stock loss
As you can also see above, I just took my first stock loss trade at Zecco by selling Zarlink (ZL) which I bought 60 shares back on July 20 at $1.69 and sold today at a dismal $0.64/share. To add insult to injury, I paid my first $4.50 commission for the trade bringing the grand total of the loss to $66.90. Like buying a video game that is played once and shelved. Like filling up somebody else’s tank of gas.

I lost money.

Why did I take this loss instead of waiting for it (hopefully) to bounce back? I’d waited nearly six months already for ZL to do something besides go down and there is a looming threat of them being delisted. I’d rather suck up the loss and move onto something else. I turned right around and bought 6 shares of Shortel (SHOR) paying a second Zecco $4.50 commission. I already own SHOR shares through Sharebuilder (and paid $15.95 commission there, ouch!), so this adds to my holdings, only at a different online broker.

The impact of commissions in 2008 versus 2007
We’ve known the Zecco free ride on trades for those with balances under $2,500 was going to end in 2008 so this doesn’t come as a surprise.

I added a “fees” section to our stock competition Google Finance shared spreadsheet to reflect these $4.50 commissions per trade throughout the year. Even with the ZL loss and $9 in commissions, overall my stock competition portfolio is still +2.96%. I sold seven stocks in 2007 at a profit (GMO, BQI, ATAR, RSTO, MCZ, SIRI and SAPE) and 0 stocks at a loss, but I could (and time will tell if I should) have taken the ZL loss in 2007.

Of those stocks sold, 2 of 7 are currently showing higher than the amount sold: GMO which is at $11.50 and was sold at $8.05 and BQI which is at $4.19 and was sold at $3.67. On a percentage basis (5 of 7 = 71.4%), I’m happy to have sold when I did. This is a real world example of the uncertainty in the market that everybody is trying to time; buy low, sell high.

The last six months on the market have been rocky, so I’m not disappointed with the performance. If $4.50 commissions would have to have been paid on all of the 2007 trades, I’d be looking at an overall portfolio loss, so this will continue adding an additional wrinkle in 2008.

I covered some of this in my 2007 stock competition recap post, but at the time hadn’t done the following:

1. paid any commissions to Zecco
2. taken any losses on trades

Now I can clear both those off the table. Let’s hope #2 doesn’t happen very often in 2008. As I’m about to publish this, SHOR has lost 27 cents from what I paid for it already (dropping from $6.17 to $5.90). Argh, isn’t the stock market fun?

AmazonMP3 may start seeing DRM-free tracks from Sony BMG at some point in 2008. Sony, a company with a checkered proprietary past is planning on dropping DRM on at least “some” of their library. The some with DRM-free tracks remains a big obstacle for all the music companies. Lots of library gaps. This could happen sooner than later too.

Sony BMG, a joint venture of Sony (SNE) and Bertelsmann, will make at least part of its collection available without so-called digital rights management, or DRM, software some time in the first quarter, according to people familiar with the matter.

From the sounds of this Sony is dipping toes in the water and not taking the full plunge, but we’ll have to wait and see how many artists and songs make it onto AmazonMP3 and iTunes.

Not sure about you, but I don’t want Sony to stop at DRM-free music. I’d like to see them get off the backs of the homebrew developers building games for the PSP. And what kind of content creation will be allowed, if any, on the upcoming Sony HOME service through the Playstation Network? Would be nice if they’d open that up as well and offer something similar to what Second Life offers.

Since Sony is the last of the four major music companies to agree to offer DRM-free tracks, the path has been cleared for a future of someday being able to legally purchase MP3 for all the music you enjoy. I’d say currently it’s maybe 30% of the music I like (rock and roll) is available legally for sale on MP3 at AmazonMP3. A lot of incomplete artist libraries at iTunes and AmazonMP3. Can’t blame the music companies for not offering every artist as there are still some holdouts like the Beatles (I thought the Beatles had promised to get their music out there digitally, what’s the hangup?).

It would be nice to see this number jump to 95%+ by 2010. How much of the music you enjoy is available via MP3?

Update 1/7/08 8:01am PST: In the second quarter Reuters is reporting that Napster is going to start offering MP3 files for sale. Talk about returning to roots.

I like Robert Scoble’s most recent fight with Facebook over data portability that led to his account being disabled but don’t like how he went about starting it.

Scraping without permission is wrong. Sorry, yes, even scraping your own data from a third party site.

We’ve rallied in the past against how some websites devalue our time, using us to make them money (digg) and trying to handcuff us to the door by limiting export options (Facebook). One thing I’ve come to appreciate with Twitter is their API which when it’s working gives any Twitter user the ability to export just about everything you do there. Even if you think Twitter is stupid, it’s hard to argue against an open API like that.

The problem many have with Facebook is how easy it is to get information in there and how difficult it is to export. Go there, interact with your friends, but be careful what you do when leaving. They also insist that you must use your legal name, but only seem to apply that to non-popular people. If you’re not a web celebrity and not using your legal name, expect your account to be dropped.

Back to Scoble who decided to demo an unauthorized script from Plaxo that scraped his Facebook contact’s name, email address and birthdays which is against the Facebook terms of service (TOS). Facebook discovered the script running and promptly suspended Scoble’s FB account.

As I pointed out to him on Twitter, Scoble has a history of violating the TOS of other websites/services. I was disappointed to see from the many different bloggers writing about this on Techmeme so few pointing to Scoble’s history of openly admitting TOS violations. Are memories this short or is data portability more important than basic respect of agreements you make? When you agree to a EULA or TOS, you are making an agreement for how you’ll conduct yourself. Scoble makes these agreements and uses and evangelizes the services and then decides when he doesn’t like something it’s ok to violate it on principle because the company is wrong.

ScanIam remembers:

It’s very remeniscient of the time he let his underage son play in 2nd Life even after being told that it was against the rules.

1) hissy fit
2) apology
3) profit.

Steven Hodson also remembers when Scoble brought his son Patrick into the adult grid of Second Life? Whether or not we agree/disagree having a separate grid for adults and teens is a good idea that’s the agreement. While generally I think Scoble is a likeable human character, complete with imperfections like all of us, this is one side of Scoble that I don’t care for at all. He openly violates agreements because he doesn’t agree with them. He seems very wishy washy with his word. Take how he kept his Plaxo NDA under wraps until he “was released” and yet he doesn’t hesitate violating TOS?

Dare Obasanjo completely agrees with Facebook:

So if Facebook allows you to extract information about your Facebook friends via their APIs, why would Robert Scoble need to run a screen scraping script? The fact is that the information returned by the Facebook API about a user contains no contact information (no email address, no IM screen names, no telephone numbers, no street address). Thus if you are trying to “grow virally” by spamming the Facebook friend list of one of your new users about the benefits of your brand new Web 2.0 site then you have to screen scrape Facebook.

Now let’s read the Facebook Terms:

By using the Service or the Site, you represent and warrant that you are 13 or older and in high school or college, or else that you are 18 or older, and that you agree to and to abide by all of the terms and conditions of this Agreement.

The ethical choice if Scoble disagrees with the TOS isn’t to openly violate and then use it as an opportunity to further promote himself and agenda even if that agenda is worthwhile. This is what Robin Hood did, right? He robbed from the rich (Facebook) and gave to the poor (the vast majority of Scoble’s gathered 4,999 contact names, emails and birthdays).

Nick Carr makes an excellent point about how Scoble may have thought this information was his, others may not feel the same way:

I have no doubt that Scoble didn’t mean any harm, but in what sense are names, email addresses, and birthdays not “personal information”? The important question isn’t what Scoble intended to do with the information. The important question is this: Will others who use such scraping scripts necessarily have benign intentions? And the answer is: No.

What Scoble did by allowing his teenage son into the adult grid of Second Life was neither professional or polite. He knew there was a teen grid and yet he intentionally allowed his son to use the adult grid and promoted this fact. He admitted he knew this was against the rules but he did it anyway.

And here he’s doing it all over again with this Facebook drama. Yes, he’s right that data portability is important, but he’s wrong to use sites/services where he openly disagrees with the TOS. And then when the company takes action against him, use it as a platform for self-promotion.

Scoble pointed me to opensocialweb.org as a response to if he approached Facebook directly before violating their TOS. The Open Social Web lays out the following principles:

Sites supporting these rights shall:

* Allow their users to syndicate their own profile data, their friends list, and the data that’s shared with them via the service, using a persistent URL or API token and open data formats;
* Allow their users to syndicate their own stream of activity outside the site;
* Allow their users to link from their profile pages to external identifiers in a public way; and
* Allow their users to discover who else they know is also on their site, using the same external identifiers made available for lookup within the service.

These are noble guidelines and I agree with them all. However, because Facebook apparently doesn’t agree with these and has a TOS defining this as a violation the choice is clear: use the service and live with it or leave. Scoble decided he wanted to leave, but the caveat is he wanted to leave with the information he had already agreed to leave with them.

Wishy washy.

Don’t worry about Scoble’s squeaky wheel, it will get grease
Mark my words, Facebook will back down and reinstate his account not because he didn’t violate the TOS and deserve having his account suspended. Not because FB actually believes and supports data portability, but because it’s Robert Scoble going on CNBC and running off at the mouth about it.

Scoble gets my support for the fight for data portability, but he gets two thumbs way down for the tactics he’s employed.

Update 2:02pm PST: Predictably Facebook has already caved and reactivated Scoble’s account. They say it’s part of the normal appeals process and since Robert as agreed not to use a script like this again, that’s why they are reactivating his account.

2:34pm PST: Scoble held an impromptu live video with chat show/blogger press conference where he answered questions from the crowd using Mogulus. Good demo for their video and chat service actually.

I asked Scoble if he respected TOS and he responded by asking if I drive 55? Strange analogy considering I know he doesn’t drive by cops giving them the middle finger while speeding, but whatever.