Aviary Review

Aviary promises to be a suite of online design tools. Currently only two of these tools are available, Phoenix and Peacock. Aviary is currently in invite only beta, but I was able to nab and invite to go in and play.



Phoenix is Aviary's bitmap image editor. It's an extremely versatile tool, and a great example of what is possible with online applications. It's certainly not on par with Adobe's Photoshop, but it's not aimed at the same market. Phoenix is definitely more consumer focused than Photoshop, which is aimed at the professional market.

Phoenix is currently in Alpha. That means it's not ready for production use just yet. Still, it's a very promising program with a lot of features already active. You have your standard filters like blur, and also layer based editing (which I've always thought was essential to any bitmap graphics editor). There are even "Layer Filters" which are much like Photoshop's Layer styles.



I also played around with Aviary Peacock, which they call a "Computer algorithm-based pattern generator". Basically what that means in practical purposes is that it is a program for generating patterns based on a system of Generators, Effects and Controllers. It is extremely easy to create complex patters by chaining together these various tools. The program allows you to do so with a visual layout, with "pipes" leading from one to the other, and eventually to the final image.



While I currently have no use for such a pattern generator, I immediately saw it's usefulness to both web designers and 3d artists as a way to generate backgrounds and textures.

In the future, Aviary promises even more tools, including an Audio Editor, a Vector Image Editor, and a Desktop Publishing Layout Tool. (The full list of tools is here.) In my opinion, Aviary has a bright future ahead of it, as long as they figure out a way to monetize the software. Charging a nominal fee for access wouldn't be out of line, and given the power of the tools, the ability to store the data created on Aviary's servers (for access anywhere and on any machine), and the fact that there's no software for the user to update or maintain on their local machine (other than Adobe Flash Player), I think Aviary will be a winner.

Microhoo, or YAOL?

Just yesterday I would have said that the only way Yahoo was going to survive the next five years would be to let Microsoft acquire them. Like Yahoo's CEO, I'm not fond of Microsoft, but sometimes, you have to make a deal with the devil if you want to survive (and then you fight like hell to keep your soul and stay on the side of the angels.) There have been talks of an AOL and Yahoo merger to prevent the Microsoft acquisition of Yahoo, but I never really took that seriously.

Until this morning, that is. It was announced the AOL purchased Bebo, a large social network. This is just one of many acquisition that AOL has made in the past year. They also announced a few weeks ago that they were opening up their Instant Messenging protocol so that third party developers could create applications that use the network (not that they weren't doing that already. Pidgin, Trillian, Digsby and Adium all connect to the AIM network.)

AOL apparently has big plans. Integration of AIM with Bebo will make for a very enticing social networking platform. What better way to leverage that then to use Yahoo's search, Buzz, and advertising to support the new AOL Bebo. Yahoo provides a way to monetize the new combined service, plus it would add Yahoo Messenger and Yahoo Mail to the mix.

It's an enticing idea. AOL would be a competitor again. So would Yahoo. Whether AOL would outright acquire Yahoo or do the sort of half merger that Yahoo was discussing with News Corp. is unclear. I would expect though, that AOL would acquire Yahoo simply because they'd want control over the mail and IM services.

The combined AOL/Yahoo would of course, be no match for Google in search advertising, especially with the approval of the Google/Doubleclick deal. But, with Bebo in the mix, it would certainly give Facebook and Myspace a run for their money.

Take that News Corp.

On Intellectual Property

This post is entirely a response to Molly Wood's excellent Blog, The Culture of Ownership. For those who haven't checked it out yet, you should. Molly's opinions(well, even she'll admit they're rants) on the shenanigans of corporations and even whole nations are often hilarious, and always on point.

With that in mind, I thought it would behoove me to have a statement about how I feel about copyright. Keep in mind that while in the past I have made a portion of my income from Intellectual Property (articles for magazines mostly), I have never depended on it for my entire livelihood, so take what I have to say with a grain of salt.

And so, the statement: While intellectual property law at one time served a useful purpose (that is, protecting the ability of artists, writers, musicians, inventors, etc to create work and protect it from misuse) it has been warped to provide protection to the massive corporate infrastructure. Furthermore, the invention of the internet and the technology surrounding that has made most Intellectual Property law as it is currently written useless.

So why do we hold on to it. Mostly it has to do with comparative advantage, at least in the USA. The US has a huge comparative advantage when it comes to intellectual property. In fact, intellectual property makes up a huge portion of our GDP. When a congressman starts looking at the figures, he or she rapidly realizes that they need to protect Intellectual Property at all costs.

Trent Reznor's experiment with "Ghosts I-IV" should be a heads up to everyone(that means you RIAA), though, that intellectual property can still make huge amounts of money without the antiquated copyright system (Reznor released all four volumes under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share-Alike License rather than a traditional copyright). Granted, it's not like Reznor was an unknown artist. His previous label had pumped a lot of money into promoting him and so this is not exactly a model for new artists. However, it could be. The day is rapidly approaching when sites like Myspace, Hi5, and Youtube could push relatively unknown artists to stardom. Even better would be sites that are devoted to music, mixing together previously unknown artists with well known artists they are similar to. (Are you listening Last.FM and Pandora?) Such sites could even sell these artists songs using a Micropayment system.

And as to enforcing copyright: It's become impossible. Every measure taken to prevent it has been easily bypassed. Encrypt the media, and someone figures out how to decrypt it. Put DRM on downloaded music, and the receiver simply burns it to CD and rerips it in Non-DRMed MP3 or OGG format. When all else fails, they can convert to analog and copy the analog signal.

The latest talk about fighting copyright infringement is packet shaping and metering bandwidth. Traffic shaping is easily beaten by encrypting peer to peer traffic. If an ISP can't read the packet, they can't tell that it contains intellectual property. And all bandwidth metering does is prevent small time crooks from downloading illegal content. Sure, it'll stop junior from downloading from bit torrent once his parents get the first metered internet bill, but it certainly won't prevent people who make a living from distributing illegal copies from downloading. They have the money to afford it, and now you've given them more open bandwidth to do it with, since most other peer to peer traffic will be gone.