The author then goes on to hold up as a model for the future RealNetworks’ Rhapsody service, which RealNetworks CEO Rob Glaser calls “the jukebox in the sky.” It sounds like a great deal: $10 a month for all the streaming music you can listen to. The catch is that you don’t get to own any of it; everything resides on the Rhapsody servers, you’re just checking it out for a few minutes.

Let’s put aside the fact that RealNetworks’ products turned into clunky, adware-laden pieces of crap several years ago with the release of their RealOne player. Let’s also put aside the fact that the company has lost so much ground in recent years to Apple’s iTunes and Microsoft’s Windows Media that they hardly have the clout to revolutionize the music business anymore.

The real (Real) question is this: Do people want a jukebox in the sky?

Kirkpatrick points to the coming ubiquity of wireless broadband networking. Within the next ten years or so, we’ll all be using 3G or WiMax or some as-yet-unchristened technology to access information anytime, anywhere. You won’t need to bring your music with you on little metallic discs — or little plastic iPods — because it will all be available for the taking on the big jukebox in the sky. Why pay to “own” music at all when downloading it is effortless? Just download what you want, when you want.

But here’s the problem with that scenario. Broadband access isn’t the only technology that’s growing by leaps and bounds. Disk storage is exploding too, and getting cheaper by the day.

As I write this, I’m looking at a last-generation iPod sitting on my desk with 30 GB of storage. Not quite enough to store my whole music collection yet — I rip my MP3′s at a full 320 Kbps, as God intended them to be ripped — but the newer 80 GB iPods might do the trick. Within a few years, we’ll be carrying 500 GB iPods. Seagate and Hitachi have 1 terabyte hard drives coming out this year. Flash memory is getting so cheap that you can find piles of thumb drives sitting next to the check-out counter at computer stores.

Guess how much data the entire printed Library of Congress contains? 10 terabytes. Yes, that’s it, 10 terabytes. Assuming we continue along this exponential trend of increased storage, you’ll be blowing your nose with 10-terabyte Kleenex soon enough. What does that mean? That means you’ll be able to carry your entire music, video, and book collection around in your pocket in 20 years. Let’s take it even further: in 40 or 50 years, you’ll be able to carry around every book ever written and every piece of music ever recorded around with you. Give it another 10 years for video.

So would you rather carry your digital media with you in your pocket, or would you rather carry your radio receiver with you and access your media on the great jukebox in the sky?

You’re going to want to carry it in your pocket.

Why? For starters, the great jukebox in the sky is a centralized system. This means that it’s easier for authoritarian elements to control. Courts rule that Negativland has infringed on U2′s copyrights by sampling their music? Easy enough to remedy — the court will just instruct Rhapsody to yank the Negativland tracks out of the jukebox. The surviving Beatles decide that the original George Martin-produced Let It Be album is an abomination and henceforth only Let It Be… Naked shall be heard? No problem — just overwrite the old tracks with the new ones.

Also, let’s not overlook the fact that a centralized system is easier for malicious hackers and pranksters to attack. And it’s much more vulnerable to the kinds of clerical errors that often plague large databases. The Gracenote/CDDB database is full of typos and just plain false information that’s damn near impossible to fix, and it only contains meta information. Imagine the chaos that would ensue when the jukebox in the sky’s files get corrupted. What if they post the wrong mix, or switch tracks by mistake? Good luck getting that fixed.

But probably the most damning factor is what I call the Greasemonkey factor. People want their own individualized, personalized filters on reality, and the tools to create them are becoming easier and cheaper all the time. This is as true of music as it is of anything else. People want to do what bassist Steve McDonald did to the White Stripes’ White Blood Cells album — they want to add their own instrumentation. They want to mix it their way. They want to mash up the Circle Jerks with Tijuana Brass and 50 Cent, and then use it as a soundtrack for the Star Wars Kid’s lightsaber battle. Theoretically there’s nothing preventing you from doing this to music from the jukebox in the sky — you could create Greasemonkey filters that work on streaming music just as easily as they work on locally stored music. But what are the copyright holders going to think of that? Are they going to make the jukebox in the sky Greasemonkey-proof? Are they going to require that you ask their permission every time you want to goof around with your friends in Apple GarageBand?

For me, the clincher of the argument is something I don’t think everyone would agree with: people like owning things. Especially if it’s just as easy, cheap, and convenient to own as it is to rent. Have you stopped buying DVDs now that they’re available on Netflix? Have you stopped buying books because they’re available at the library? Did you sell your Toyota when Zipcar came to town? If you’re like most people, the answers to these questions are no, no, and no.

We can argue about whether the world would be a better place if we didn’t have such an acquisitive mindset. We can argue about whether all cultures on this planet would ultimately share this mindset given an atmosphere of abundance and indulgence like America’s. Right now I side with the philosophy that says people are acquisitive by nature. And opening a big jukebox in the sky isn’t going to change that.

So in short: I’m sorry, but in the long run, RealNetworks’ jukebox in the sky just isn’t going to fly.

MySpace is far and away the most popular of these types of services. According to Alexa, MySpace ranks only below Yahoo and Google in terms of popularity on the web. If you’re curious, you can view my page at http://www.myspace.com/davidlouisedelman.

Here’s the problem: MySpace is an abomination. Nothing works. The things that do work are poorly designed and shoddily implemented. Here’s just a small sampling of problems I’ve been having:

• Member search doesn’t work. Try searching for members using multiple criteria, and watch the search go splat. (Then again, Yahoo’s member search has been broken for years and nobody seems eager to fix it.)
• Importing contacts doesn’t work. I tried importing my online address books from Yahoo, GMail, and AIM. MySpace said it sent out a dozen or so invites. It didn’t, and I had to redo the whole thing by hand.
• Instant messaging doesn’t didn’t work. I tried sending a friend a message just to see what it would do, only to receive a very unprofessional-looking error message stating that the instant messaging was out of commission.
• Cross-posting from WordPress doesn’t work. I have managed to get this working with LiveJournal (http://david-l-edelman.livejournal.com if you’re curious) using a nice little plugin I found on the web. There used to be one of these for MySpace, but the plugin developer gave up because MySpace kept mucking with the API.
• Reporting spam doesn’t work. This morning I received friend requests from kinkymonica, flirtymonica, and luvymonica. How do you report these friend requests as the porn spam they so obviously are? You can’t.
• Approving your friends doesn’t work. I’m currently staring at my “approve/deny your friends” queue, which states that I’m looking at “Listing 1-6 of 6.” Only about an inch away, however, there’s another column that says “1 of 1.” And below, there’s nothing listed. Do I have five phantom friends? (Actually, that would explain a lot of things…)

To add to the functional problems, the site is full of the worst kind of design heresy. Boxes float around the page with seemingly no rhyme or reason. The default icons look like rejects from your old Windows 3.1 installation. Navigation seems to float around the screen in illogical places, to the point where the only button I can rely on is the browser’s Back button. Things get even worse when users start mucking with their MySpace designs and adding polls and plug-ins and garish animated GIFs. You get stuck with endless pages that take forever to load and are impossible to read.

The worst sin of all is that MySpace plays multimedia files without asking you first. My first reaction to any page that starts blaring music or video at me is to immediately click the Back button and run like hell. In order to turn off the music at MySpace, you need to quickly scan the screen for the multimedia player — which is in a different place on each page — and click the Stop or Pause button. But even then, your preference doesn’t stick, so if you go to a different site and come back later, the music starts blaring again. (Only this time it starts playing faster because the page is in your browser cache.)

Recently MySpace attempted to ameliorate this by adding a preference you can set to turn off the automatic music. Surprise: it doesn’t always work.

The question that I have is that why hasn’t MySpace made full use of open standards, the most successful example of social networking on the web to date? Take a look at the source code for your MySpace page, and it’s a mess. No DTD at the top, style sheet links embedded in the middle of the body, tables mixed with DIVs mixed with IFRAMEs willy-nilly.

And I’m not just talking about open standards determined by some committee in Switzerland, but web design standards that have won the long, hard Darwinian slog in the marketplace. Navigational sidebars. Underlined links. Fluid layouts that don’t break on different screen resolutions. Different colors for visited links.

The popularity of MySpace is enough for me to reevaluate all of the design credos I hold so dear. If such a horrible website as this can become a cultural phenomenon and literally change the way American teenagers live their lives, then what hope is there for web standards?

My only consolation is that the Firefox AdBlock extension works just fine on MySpace. Not only that, but Userscripts.org has a bevvy of useful Greasemonkey scripts to turn bad MySpace pages into — well, less bad MySpace pages.