When one service dies, another rises up in its place. It’s the circle of life for music on the internet.

That I can recount at least a rough history of music on the internet shows my age. My own experiences started with downloading .wav and even .midi files. I remember when mp3s hit the “mainstream” – by early 1998 (a lifetime ago in internet time) it was crucial in the leak of “Given to Fly.” Full albums then became widely available through FTP, regulated through upload/download ratios.

P2P revolutionized things of course, with the simple setup offered by Napster, which hit in the last year of high school and was widely adopted by the time I got to university.

When Napster [effectively] died, I moved onto Audiogalaxy, which was a godsend for finding rare tracks. Unfortunately the service went under fairly quickly (once it gained popularity it also gained the eye of the RIAA).

When the Gnutella network held rule, Morpheus took up some space on my hard drive, then Kazaa before it succumb to the money offered by adware/spyware vendors. eDonkey 2000 takes the cake for the most ridiculous name of the bunch, though it provided the most functionality of any program I’ve ever used, combining the Gnutella network with Overnet and torrent capabilities, so it did have something going for it.

Torrents eventually replaced everything else. Azureus Vuze was my primary software, but even that happens to be gone from my system these days.

Others that came and went? Ares, iMesh, WinMX, Soulseek and even LimeWire. There are probably one or two others that I simply can’t remember.

Nowadays it’s all about the web services. I’ve never been a fan of MySpace, nor imeem, nor iLike. I never got around to trying Pandora. My website of choice thus far has been Last.fm. The “scrobbling” feature is fantastic, as are the statistics derived from it. The automatically generated recommendations have proven useful for my discovery of new artists and songs. Unfortunately they’ll be charging users for radio access from now on, so I’ll have to look elsewhere for my new music fix.

Signs are looking good that my new favourite toy will be The Sixty One (www.thesixtyone.com), which provides me with internet radio and still scrobbles.

This world needs an open-source album information database that would include high-resolution album art. Something like what CDDB once was before it was commercially hijacked.

Why do I think this? Despite having “Only update missing information” checked off in my Zune software settings, all of my album art is being replaced, often with mismatches, often with washed out images, or incorrect versions, etc.

As Apple hits with another round of anti-Vista advertising, I’d like to state my pro-Microsoft stance on things, if for no other reason than to help dispel the notion that all twenty-somethings who dabble in graphic design and enjoy music use Macs. I just recently upgraded to Vista and am loving it so far. It’s not a revolutionary step, but it is nicely evolutionary. Things are simpler, things are better-looking, things are more functional. Is there a learning curve? Yes, but it’s almost negligible. As far as I can tell, none of the complaints that have been paraded around hold any weight. Even my own complaints aren’t standing up anymore with day-to-day use (Could the UI use some tweaking? Sure, but things are somehow better on my desktop – e.g., the “Sleep” function actually works).

[Disclosure: I also have to plead ignorance, having not used a Mac since high school. I've not seen a reason to switch.]

The main problem others have with Microsoft as far as I can tell is that they’re at the top. They’ve got a virtual stranglehold on computer users and this engenders resentment that far exceeds any commentary on the quality of their products. Likewise, the same thing is probably happening/will probably happen with Apple and iPods.

On that note, Microsoft’s competitor to the iPod [leaving the iPhone (and iPod touch) out of the equation for the moment], the Zune, is in my opinion a superior device. Despite Apple’s best intentions, the iPod interface seems foreign to me. Scrolling around in circles such that I can scroll down a list makes absolutely no sense as far as I’m concerned. So count me among the biggest fans of the Zune pad. Similarily, iTunes sucks. Re-importing all of my music? No thanks. And again, the interface is horrible. Sure, as a store it works. As software to manage my music collection? Not a chance.

Hauntingly enough, I actually had a dream last night about the next generation of the Zune. Taking most of its cues from the styling the current generation, the next model will have a slightly curved face and back, and will appear in four initial colours: piano black, white, red and titanium. Bringing in some ideas from their acquisition of Danger, a new model would be added to the lineup: a Zune Sidekick. Basically a Sidekick with a Zune pad and Zune as the audio software running on a customized version of WinMo.

So that’s my stance. I’m a bit of a geek sometimes. Just had to get it out.

It’s strange to say, but for once it looks like Microsoft has beaten Google to the punch. ReadWriteWeb has a nice breakdown of the feature sets of Google Docs and Microsoft Office Live and for my needs the Microsoft product comes out on top. They aren’t necessarily competing products, but rather oddly, each fills a gap in the other’s offerings. While both are ostensibly collaboration tools, they are fundamentally different in that Google Docs serves more as an online document editor and Office Live is, at its core, just an online dropbox for your documents.

As a student, I lean toward the Live service, not for sharing with others, but because I’m constantly moving between my desktop, my laptop, computers at school, etc. and it’s nice to have a central repository for my projects (basically as what I presume GDrive could have offered; note the date on the linked article). I don’t enjoy the many clicks it would take to constantly be uploading files to a website (or sending attachments to my GMail) in order to have a single up-to-date copy in one place and one place only, and so I appreciate the ease of which it looks to be done through Office Live – there’s a plugin to download at the moment, but this will likely be incorporated into future versions of the actual Office suite.

Google Docs is great in that you don’t need any separate software and your documents are always with you (assuming you’re online), but formatting still leaves quite a bit to be desired (I imagine they’re working on this) for anything more than basic documents.

Competition in the marketplace should lead to innovation, or at least imitation; these products will undoubtedly be moving closer to each other in terms of functionality, resulting in what should be two great online document editing/management systems instead of two merely decent ones.

Something I’m looking forward to sometime over the next few months is the release of Cairo, a replacement for the Windows Vista shell (user interface).

The interface in Vista is flawed and this project actually looks to be doing something about it. I’ve generally been warm to Microsoft products over the years, but I’ve been using Vista for almost a year now on my laptop and agree with the need for tweaks to the interface. I don’t use Vista for day-to-day use, but still frequently enough to be annoyed by certain things.

All that Microsoft seemed to do with Vista was make things shiny and transparent… and unnecessarily complicated. There are 15 different options for shutting down your computer (you can thank 43 people(!) for that; any designer will tell you that less is more when it comes to both project management and usability), and just try to explain to your mother how ‘Sleep’ and ‘Hibernate’ are different.

Cairo cleans things up and actually adds functionality – their new Start menu (with categories – see the screenshot above) is years more useful than what Vista currently offers. It stays out of the way, not cluttering up a screen like desktop shortcuts or the OSX dock, but essentially emulates stacks and menu folders.