This post can sing better than Justin Beiber (43 likes)

The music industry works on a very simple premise. Artists produce albums we like, and so we buy their music to support them. If that doesn’t make sense to you, maybe this picture will:

How the music industry is supposed to work, forever.

Without our cash, the Black Eyed Peas would never be able to get the party started, and Justin Beiber’s only fan would be his mom. Even though the latter would be a dream come true, it’s important to respect this simple demand and supply equation. Without it there would pretty much be no music. Indie bands will never get a chance to make the big time if music companies don’t have money to find and advertise them. In short, people need to be paid for the jobs that they do. Luckily this idea has been respected for years without any real problems. There was a little hitch when Kazaa came out but the industry put a stop to that. Limewire had its moments, but a majority of users didn’t really understand how to use it. With the coming of YouTube, however, things changed.

Lets say, back in the day, you wanted to listen to a smash hit Akon song. Almost instinctively you went to Google and searched for the lyrics. In this case it may have been the fabulous line, “smack that get on the floor smack that let me see you move some more”. Within seconds, you are pointed to a video of the song with scrolling lyrics. Excitedly, you play it on repeat for days, and even share the link with all your friends. Through YouTube you discover his other classic, “Mr. Lonely” and really begin to appreciate is vibe. You even go the extent of calling yourself a true Akon fan, and promise to buy the album when it comes out. Unfortunately for the star rapper, you end up listening to the rest of the songs in a YouTube playlist.In this system Akon gets minimal profits. A single fan uploaded the song onto YouTube and thirty four million people watched it online. In that process, Akon received not a single dime. Even though his fans made Akon popular, their preferred channel of listening led to him making lesser money than he otherwise would have. It really isn’t their fault though. Why should the pay for something they can get for free? Obviously this made the music companies mad. They forced Google them to shut down the operation. “Content not available due to copywrite claim” started popping up everywhere, and people were saddened and angered.

Like always, however, the brightest minds in Mountain View came up with a solution. They wore their suits and marched down to LA, visiting the offices of Sony Music, Warner Brothers and the rest. “Why don’t we work together”, they said. Thus a product called Vevo was created. It would ensure that fans would get to listen to music for free, and the companies would get their monthly paychecks. Basically, every musician would have his or her own Vevo page (inside Youtube) , as well as a dedicated page on Vevo.com (which no one really uses). Through this, the studio would upload the latest singles and interviews, in 1080p. Not only that, Vevo often finds and helps obscure artists gain popularity, through their suggestion feature, The system used advertisements placed before, besides and on videos to generate revenue. Vevo, unsurprisingly, is a thundering success. While it may have its problems (its not accessible beyond the US) its been consistently providing a high quality music experience. In fact, if you look at the top 10 most viewed videos on YouTube, 80% of them are songs on artist Vevo pages.

I’d love to say that the story ends here. It would be great if Vevo was the perfect solution to a complex problem, but that’s not the case. The Internet community is never satisfied. Raise your hand (don’t actually people will think you are strange sitting at the computer and raising your hand) if you’ve seen something like this before:

Comments like these, and the green thumbs around them, really frustrate me. I always thumb them down because I don’t understand what these people want. Firstly, they are completely against Torrenting (illegally downloading) music, because it breaks the law and they believe immoral. At the same time they want to listen to music for free but then complain terrible when they have to sit through a 30 second advert once every five songs. This hatred for Vevo means that sooner or later Google will have to do something about it, and possibly even shut it down. This is sad because, even with it flaws, Vevo has given us a way to listen to our tunes for free and support our artists.

I don’t know very many people who support Vevo or the advert system. Most of my friends complain about the Hulu revenue system too, which is very similar. What I find most peculiar is that we never really complain when we hear adverts on the radio, or watch them on TV. This leads back to a larger and more interesting question: Why are certain things okay in real life but not in our virtual world? I’m going to go ponder it while listening to the Black Keys new album on YouTube, but not before watching the cute Mac & Cheese advert that comes before it.

It’s not a game, it’s an adventure.

8 Bit sunsets are the best kind

As a little kid, I was often asked what I wanted to be when I grew up.  Other ten year olds wanted to be astronauts, doctors, or racecar drivers. To the dismay of my parents, I wanted to be a professional gamer. Luckily enough for them, I decided to not go down that career path. This wasn’t because I’m not good enough. In fact, I take great pride in my robot slaying and sword wielding capabilities. It’s just after a while almost all games bored me. Everything followed the same endless cycle: do a task, get rewarded, do a harder task, get rewarded and repeat until you’ve been playing non-stop for three days. Online gameplay did sometimes add an extra dimension, but for some reason I never really got into it. Gameplay was too static, graphics were too shiny, and nothing really clicked. That was until I found out about Minecraft.

This is the minecraft you.

To try and explain the beauty of Minecraft to someone who has never played it is extremely difficult, but I will try anyway. Imagine this: you’re stuck on an island with no food, shelter and no one to keep you company. So what’s the first thing you do? Collect wood by punching trees. It takes a while to get even a little bit of wood, but lets be realistic, your arms aren’t very good at gathering resources.

Once you have some wood your wood, you can start crafting. You do this by putting materials together in special patterns to create axes, shovels or even little crafting tables, which gives you more space for larger shapes. Within ten minutes you’ve started collecting rock and building stronger tools. Stuff starts really picking up pace by this point. You find coal, put it on a stick and pow! You have fire.

You put some sand in a furnace, and voila, you have glass. You make a sword and kill some pigs for their pork, which you cook and eat. You are the boss of this island. You feel like nothing can stop you from discovering, building, and just exploring. However, darkness falls, and then you find out that you are not really alone.

The first time I played Minecraft, the zombies and skeletons killed me in the first night. The second time around, I was better prepared. I quickly built myself a little bachelor pad (with a glass wall

How to make a pickaxe

facing the bay, and a woolen sofa).  This time however, I wandered too far away while exploring and got eaten again. I also discovered that the map was infinite and randomly generated; there will always be some place you haven’t explored.

After about a month of playing, I’ve gotten a hang of the game. Even then, I’ve barely scratched the surface.  A quick YouTube search and shows the extent of what has been done with it. One user built a massive life size replica of the Starship Enterprise (nerds, got to love them) . Another group discovered a special type of ore (Redstone) that allows you to build electric circuits, and is using it to create a working computer in the game. People have already built music players, calculators and models of the world.

What’s even more amazing about Minecraft is that one guy built it. He is continuously updating and adding to it, but at the same time does not tell his fans what he’s adding. Supposedly the newest version has cake, but I don’t know how to go about making some. Just the other day, someone discovered that when you build a gate out of Obsidian (a black color metal found deep underground), it fills with plasma and acts as a portal to completely new and extremely dangerous world.

This is what awesome looks like

Minecraft is now expanding to the multiplayer world. People have started building things together as communities, fighting bosses in the underworld, and hosting worldwide building competitions. There is still a long way for me to go before I try my hand at competing, but I don’t think I’m going to stop playing soon and the community is very helpful. In fact as soon as this blog post is uploaded, I am going to mine some diamond ore so I can use it to try and build a submarine. I really have no idea where Minecraft will take me, but unlike other games, the only limit is my imagination.

Oh, and interesting story. The name for my blog, explodingsoap, is derived from Minecraft. I’m not going to give anything away, but lets just say that you can make easily craft TNT and explodingsheep was already taken.

I don’t even know.

After six hours of playing Call of Duty, we were tired of playing Xbox. At four in the morning my two best friends flopped onto a couch while I opened up my laptop . Tired and bored, we decided that it was time to visit chatroulette.com.

A Russian high school student launched Chatroulette in the November of 2009. A simple product, built in just two days, generated a user base of over 50,000 in a month. The idea was very straight forward: two random people from across the world would be able to see, talk and chat with each other and perhaps even become friends. All across the world, people were connecting with complete strangers. People were sharing secrets, telling jokes,  crying to each other, and even playing games (The Chatroulette game). One anonymous musician named Merton took YouTube by storm by freestyling about each person he met (You can watch Merton’s video here, its truly awesome ). This pet project created in a basement had been taken over by the Internet, and its growth was stunning. Investors were scrambling to buy it up and offered millions of dollars to the 17 year old. Unfortunately for him, at this point, it all started going wrong. Someone told the creeps about it.

Back to me and my best friends. We thought we were going to enter a world where we would be spoken to in French and might even meet a celebrity who was casually surfing the Internet. We thought wrong. I spent most of the time screaming loudly while one friend rapidly pressed the next button and another ran to the bathroom to wash his eyes out. By the time we had discovered it, Chatroulette had become a place people to live out their wildest fantasies. It seemed as if most men thought the website to be their own personal strip show. A lot of the videos just wanted to see our non-existant “boobs”. All in all, we were pretty disappointed and we promised that we would never visit the site again. I’m guessing that people everywhere made promises like ours, because the number of users has been dropping for a while.

The problem with sites like Chatroulette (such as Omegle , a text based version) is anonymity. Even though I can see the person I’m talking to, I don’t know who he or she is. This gives an individual the license to do anything and be anyone. Once you’re behind a mask, you think you can do anything and never get caught. In fact, anonymity or creating a fake identity was one of the reasons Friendster went down in the first place. MySpace and Hi5 were both condemned because multitudes of fake accounts were being to view pictures young teenage girl. Why does this happen? To be honest, it’s really simple. We are all exhibitionists at heart. We all have a dark side, and the Internet version of a masquerade ball is the perfect place to let it all out.

Does this mean that there can never be a friendly community made up of people who hide their identities? I certainly hope not. Often we are more comfortable talking about certain aspects of our life with complete strangers. Its one of the reasons we go to see councilors; we need a fresh outside perspective. The Internet is supposed to be an alternate reality where we go to learn new things. A society where you will be not be judged no matter what questions you ask. Twitter and Yahoo Answers, to a certain extent, provide such an open space. However, Twitter still requires a level of identity verification that make people uncomfortable and Yahoo Answers is dying out due to the large number of hilarious yet false questions and answers being posted. Perhaps this market is still untapped in the cyber world. A community of anonymous people helping each other out. Maybe the first guy who decided to take is pants off on Chatroulette will be the one to create it. Like I always say, it’s the Internet, anything can happen.

(P.S Chatroulette is a much safer place today. Its also a lot less exciting. If you want to explore what it used to be like, you can always search for the most popular videos on youtube)

Because mommy said so.

This winter break my mom told me she wanted to join the Internet.  Like you, reader, I was baffled and asked her to explain.  She told me that everyone she knows is “connected” and she wanted in. So we picked a laptop which my brother uses for important things like Farmville and got down to work.

After about an hour of teaching her the difference between single and double clicking (should have bought a Mac) it was time for her to create a Facebook account. My mom was enthusiastic about filling all her information in, so the process took a while. It was interesting to note that the page adverts popping up were immediately relevant based around her interests. After her first call on Skype, she was exhausted, happy and thought she was done. At this point I reminded her that she needed to open a Gmail account so she can instantly communicate with her peers. She then looked up from the laptop screen with an exasperated expression on her face, and asked, “Isn’t that’s what Facebook is for?”

The point my mother raises is an interesting one. Facebook is currently rolling out a revamped version of their messages feature, which will include email id’s for each user. It could effectively replace Gmail’s email system, as it offers an easy alternative for those who want to keep their communication in a single digital mailbox. Furthermore integration with Skype means you can now call your friends straight from their profile or your news feed. Even Ping, Apples music-social network, was going to use Facebook Connect, but the deal supposedly fell out. One can easily imagine a document management system, or a file-sharing program similar to Dropbox, built on the API. If the Internet continues connecting with Zuckerberg’s product, it wont be long before Facebook can be used to nearly anything. Pay using your Facebook account, work through your Facebook account, even find love through your Facebook account. For late adopters like my mother and the next generation of teenagers, Facebook can become a one-stop shop for the entire Internet experience.

For it to do this Facebook has to start thinking seriously about search. While Google very obviously has the advantage here, Facebook, is catching up.  The reason for this is two fold. Firstly, as Lifehacker reports (http://tinyurl.com/6brq8xz), the quality in Google’s search results has visibly been dropping. Secondly, it is innate human nature to listen to our friends and family. We are more likely to trust the opinion of the people we know than random people forums on the internet. When I wanted to buy textbooks for this semester, I first Googled a combination of “cheap textbooks online” and “textbooks for cheap” before finally giving up and posting a plea for help through Facebook. Within ten minutes I got more useful links than four pages of links on Google could ever offer. My friends, some juniors and seniors have a  personal connection and experience in the situations I’ve been through. In the end, using Facebook’s hidden “search”, I ended up saving 230$ (bigwords.com is a great site, if anyone is still looking). If Facebook builds on this concept of searching through your network, they can gain an upper hand. Though the situation is still very much David vs Goliath, Facebook has over 500 million active friends on its side.

So what does this mean for the Facebook and its competitors? For one, Facebook can expect its revenue from advertising to continue increasing at an unbelievable rate. This is helped by the way advertisements are custom tailored and personalized based on profile and wall information.  While this may be seen as an infringement of privacy, it does significantly increase the quality of an advert. In fact my mom called me recently to tell me she signed up for a movie service she found in the sidebar. Its odd to think that she found a useful advert after using the site for just a week, and I can’t remember if I have ever clicked on any sponsored link on Google’s home page.

While Google is still the major muscle in the field of data, 2011 looks like it will be all about the people. We want our internet experience to be an augmented version of our real world interactions. Facebook has the potential to create an environment where this is possible. I think that Google should really be worried about that, and while my mom does not realize it, she does too.