The Rebertian Times

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past few days, you’ve probably heard about Apple‘s latest announcement (apologies for linking to CNET; I couldn’t find a better treatment of the story and didn’t want to waste time), which includes, among other things, iTunes version 8. iTunes 8 comes with a new feature called “Genius”, which is basically a smart playlist generator (or a less good version of Last.fm or Pandora, depending on how you look at it). First, it takes an inventory of your music library and (supposedly anonymously according to the setup screen) uploads this to Apple. Then you pick a song, click the “Genius” button, and Genius autogenerates a playlist from your library of songs that should go well together, presumably basing its selections on users who have similar musical tastes/libraries.

The feature works okay, at least on the few tests I did, though again, I would think Pandora or Last.fm ought to be better at this as they’ve been at it longer, but Genius may ultimately end up being better by being more mainstream and thus getting more data. However, the more interesting thing to me is pondering what Apple is doing with all this data they’re gathering. I’m betting that in addition to using it to generate purchase recommendations (i.e. the Genius Sidebar) ala Amazon.com or Netflix (iTunes Prize anyone?), they’re going to do some statistical analysis on the data and sell it for big bucks, thus becoming a Billboard of sorts for digital music. The iTunes Music Store already provides them with similar data which they probably already sell, but now they’ve found a rather ingenious (no pun intended) way to get people to willingly fork over data about the rest of their music that was acquired elsewhere (e.g. filesharing, CD ripping). Thus, the recommendation and playlist generation services are but a fascade to hide Genius’ true purpose. Nice use of bait-and-switch Apple! (Ok, it’s not really bait-and-switch, but I can’t think of the correct word at the moment). I can already hear the share price rising.

Another component of the announcement was a new iPod touch (or in technical lingo, the “2nd Generation” iPod touch (anyone else reminded of TNG? Really, no one? Bugger.)), which explains why they were giving them away this summer to college students buying Macs (such as myself). I half expected this when I took advantage of the offer, but it still annoys me that my gadget is now outdated. I still had to pay the tax on it as Apple is located in California, so it wasn’t completely gratis for me. Oh well. It’s hard to complain too loudly about something so very cool and useful that’s essentially free. I just hope they continue to support Gen 1 for a good while longer.

And on that note, I recommend “Things” if anyone’s in the market for an iTouch/iPhone todo-list App. Its interface is very good (excepting the anomaly of the “Inbox”, but just ignore it and you’ll be fine), it’s only $10, which is much cheaper than the Omni Group alternative last time I checked, and it’ll eventually add support for syncing to its desktop counterpart (which I don’t care about in the least, but hey, whatever floats your boat.) A friend of mine also has good things to say about “Todo” by Appigo, if you don’t like Things for some reason (I personally haven’t tried Todo). Either one is miles better than using the built-in Notes App, which is not very well suited to To-dos. You can’t even reorder the items in Notes without editing them! Epic Fail.

P.S. Yes, I realize this isn’t a proper first blog post where the author introduces themself, but I tend to procrastinate and wanted to get this out while it was still fresh in my head. I’ll do a proper intro post Real Soon (TM).

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Tags: apple, itunes