itunes

If you followed Steve Jobs' latest keynote (the one where he dropped iPhone price by $200 and pissed lots of folks off), you may remember that he announced iTunes Store would have ringtones, soon. Not only it would just have ringtones that users would be able to edit/create them themselves.

Well, looks like it is here:

Apple is undoubtedly a leading innovator in the industry (if you wonder which one -- both), and so is Google; so expectations from the announced integration of AppleTV and YouTube are very high. Whatever may your (or my) feelings be about YouTube, it is certainly a defining phenomena in Web 2.0, and bringing YouTube to the living rooms of the millions of households is no small deal.

On a more obscure front, Apple also announced iTunes Plus - new DRM-free, higher quality audio format offered through the iTunes store. Unfortunately, so far, the selection of music in iTunes Plus is rather limited. Considering the level of paranoia in the recording industry, whether iTunes Plus can take off remains an open question.

The dominant question popping up in a pragmatist's mind, observing the Web 2.0, is: how come people get so much free time in an increasingly hyper world? With the amount of blogging going on, either half of the literate population is procrastinating or the sales of Red Bull has to be booming.

Either way, even a child knows, these days, that it's all about content. If you got content - you got audience, with which comes influence, network effects, possibly money and vast amounts of bloated ego.

The thing about content is - presentation is every bit as important as the substance. Therefore, it is no surprise that the boom of Web 2.0 was inevitably followed by the revolution in the user-interface aesthetics.

The rarely addressed, yet important feature of the user-interface design is - scalability. If scalability for a software system means its ability to take brutally high user traffic without major changes to the source code, scalability for a user-interface means the ability to display vast amounts of content with the same crispiness which it handles just a handful of entries with.