When I joined Google+ last week, I was quickly disappointed that it followed the same model as every social networking site I’ve ever been on, going back to SixDegrees.com in 1997. Every one of these sites makes the same fatal flaw: the owners assume that this is the only web site you and your friends will ever use. This goes against the spirit of the Internet. When one router goes down, you can send your data through another. If your e-mail provider doesn’t meet your needs, you can switch to another or even start your own. When one news web site gets overloaded, you can visit another one.

To me, social networking is the next step after e-mail and mass syndication. E-mail’s major benefit is that anyone running a server that can send it is allowed to send it. Anyone running a server that can receive e-mail is allowed, but not obligated, to receive it. Design decisions made in the 1970s define no security, encryption, or even acknowledgement of delivery for e-mail; you can add those to a message, but there’s no requirement that anyone must use them. Syndicating content over the web started in the 1990s with standards such as RSS that are also simple by design: web sites like this one expose a feed so that you can read articles using various programs and services.

E-mail and syndication share a common benefit: I can use them in any way I want without getting permission from the content owner. I can transact any business by e-mail (using encryption, ideally) and I can read five newspapers or 5,000 by plugging the feeds into a reader. Even Twitter and Facebook originally exposed RSS feeds of friends’ updates, meaning that I could read through interleaved streams from all these services. Both services have since given up on interoperability in favor of forcing more users to use first-party apps or web sites. My phone has four social network applications installed, each of which works with one and only one service.

Depending on one service to express a person’s identity is also a very dangerous idea. A colleague of mine, involved in the Arab Spring movements that have been all-too-closely linked to these closed social networks, had his Facebook account revoked early this year. With one action and no explanation it was like he had never been a Facebook user in the first place. A political movement should be its own social network that can be linked to, but not controlled by, a mainstream network like Facebook. That idea runs counter to the larger networks’ business model of sticking as many eyeballs as possible on one web site. Any users, whether human or automated, can have their access revoked if their actions run counter to a system administrators’ expectations. If you want to start a revolution, don’t centralize it on one service outside your control.

This colleague became very keen on the Diaspora Project, a set of technologies that will let people and groups set up their own servers and maintain control of their own data. I’m a big fan of this as well. I see the future of socialization moving away from self-contained sites such as Facebook and Google+ and towards a more distributed model. It wasn’t long ago when on-line content moved away from centralized networks like AOL and CompuServe and toward a model where anyone could set up their own web site. Some web sites became more popular than others, of course, but the cost of starting one’s own site has never been lower than it is today.

I foresee a future where I can use any photo sharing site, text publishing service, video sharing service, and commerce software package, relying on a federated ID system that might include, but not wholly depend on, the big players in social networking today. Just as AOL is remembered today for bringing a legion of non-geek users onto the Internet a generation ago, so too will Facebook be remembered for introducing the concept of socialization to the open web.

The open model of socialization won’t make money on its own. That’s OK. It will instead let companies that sell goods and services allow customers, acting on their own, to selectively release personal data and make transactions flow more freely. I should be able to carry around a list of authorization keys that signify my relationships with other people and entities, encrypted in such a way that only I may use them for specific purposes. For example, my friend could grant me access to his Amazon wish list by generating an access token and sending it to me securely. Of course there will be a need to back these tokens up, as with all personal data, but ultimately control of my relationship tokens should rest with me. Sites like Twitter, Facebook, and Flickr already use API keys to let third-party applications use my data, but this is more to protect the larger web sites than to protect me since those sites can also revoke an application’s API key at any time for any reason.

Historically, open technologies have won except where economies of scale make it cheaper for a large closed competitor to do business with consumers. The web was a win-win over closed networks like AOL, and may prevail over closed app stores for selling access to content, since content providers don’t pay any royalties to a third party to serve content and customers don’t have to establish a third-party billing account to access said content. Game consoles are a notable exception: closed-platform consoles sell for a loss and make up the difference on software sales, whereas open platforms like the PC require a lot more cash up front to play the same games. Despite instant messaging being a common feature of closed services, and despite the open Jabber protocol having been adopted by Google and Facebook for their IM services, mobile phones’ text messaging has eclipsed Internet-based IM as the worldwide way to exchange short messages — and customers often pay hundreds of dollars a year for the privilege!

The next few years are going to be very chaotic for social networking as the market — that is, you and me — decides whether to warehouse our information on closed systems or in our own pockets. I sincerely hope that an open protocol like IMAP, SMTP, and HTTP today emerges as the standard for granting other people and companies access to selected parts of our digital lives.

Disclaimer: I work for Amazon.com. These statements represent only my own opinion and do not reflect the opinions of my employer.

I’ve been very excited about video streaming technologies in the past. I was part of the beta for Joost, a peer-to-peer video streaming venture by the creators of Skype, which I said “looks amazing” at the time. Despite the Joost client’s slick user interface and social features, the service never attracted enough compelling content. (I can only watch so many World’s Strongest Man and Stella reruns.) Joost eventually abandoned their peer-to-peer client in favor of a simple Flash web site and silently slipped into obscurity.

Since 2007 a variety of TV-on-your-PC options have come around: Hulu, Boxee, Netflix streaming, and YouTube have all been seen as successes in getting video watchers to cross over to the Internet. So far, though, there is no compelling cocktail to blend new-media with old. In short, there is no successful TV-on-your-PC-on-your-TV experience.

I still have the same media PC I bought four years ago, a hatbox-sized Sony VGX-TP1 now running Windows 7. I plugged it into my A/V receiver and dedicated it to media consumption. I mostly run Windows Media Center to record and play back TV shows, but since it has a full operating system, I can view videos from any source. So far I haven’t found many reasons to lug out the keyboard and navigate around the web on a screen 10 feet away. There’s virtually no development going on for applications for media PCs: everything is either designed to run in a web browser or on a portable device. Windows Media Center is supposedly extendable with a plugin system, but what plugins exist are hobbyists’ weekend projects, supported by a threadbare network of what Microsoft euphemistically calls “enthusiasts.”

My Xbox 360, also made by Microsoft, goes further in enabling the 10-foot interface: besides the games it plays, it can also stream content from Netflix, Last.fm, ESPN, and Hulu Plus. Its interface, alas, isn’t simple enough: I boot into an ad-filled dashboard that requires scrolling in both directions to reveal icons for these services. Even with my fancy Harmony One universal remote, there’s no way for me to automate turning my system on and switching to a particular video service. There’s also no way to consume content for other services since only Microsoft can release dashboard updates for my console. (A company called PlayOn makes a server that enables other forms of media streaming to the Xbox 360, but I found it to be a kludgey, expensive, inelegant hack.)

There are several other devices that stream Internet video as a secondary function, like the PlayStation 3 and the Wii, and as a primary function, like the Roku and Apple TV boxes. All of these are limited by arrangements that must exist between the device makers and content providers. Major League Baseball streams its video to the PlayStation 3 but not to the Xbox 360. Amazon’s Instant Video service works on the Roku devices but not on Apple TV. The only device I own that can stream everything on-line is my media PC, but navigating file trees and web sites requires me to squint at tiny text 10 feet away.

Boxee and Google TV have tried to offer more open, extensible platforms for streaming video. In exchange for their efforts, they’ve been served cease and desist notices from many of the more traditional content providers. ABC, NBC, CBS, and other networks blocked Google TV’s web browser from accessing their video sites even though that browser is functionally identical to one running on my media PC. Boxee, whose software runs on a PC or on a dedicated set-top box, has experienced disputes with Netflix that jeopardized Netflix’s streaming functionality for Boxee’s users.

Two kinds of standards need to coalesce before Internet video can be considered mainstream: one for finding content and one for playing it back with minimal effort.

Google TV’s efforts have been centered around search. Typing a title or actor can bring up content stored on your cable box or on the Internet. That’s a good start. A comprehensive solution would also include subscription services linked to the device, each of which would expose a simple catalog, unencrypted and designed to be indexed on one device or by any search engine. These standards already exist but few providers expose such indexes to their customers in such a programmatic way. My DVR’s guide shows all the channels in a single grid. Why should I have to memorize which services and which apps provide the shows I want to watch?

Playing back content needs to be as easy as powering a device on and seeing a list of options. For example, if I finished half of a movie last night, my device should immediately offer to resume where I left off. If I watched yesterday’s Yankees game, I should see an option on the home screen to watch today’s. Roku and Apple TV famously center their attention around video playback, but their applications don’t work with each other. I should be able to customize my video experience as flexibly as I can customize the desktop on my PC, the bookmarks in my web browser, and the speed dial on my telephone. Most single-purpose devices have common languages for referring to content and activities, but streaming video is still too abstract a concept to be a pushbutton operation.

When I call for “standards,” I don’t want one company to control all of my media. I know that iTunes videos will play on Apple TV, iPhone, iPad, and iTunes software on my PCs, but iTunes won’t work with other devices such as my Xbox 360. Replacing one media juggernaut (Comcast) with another serves no purpose.

So far I’ve been reading and enjoying Jaron Lanier’s You Are Not a Gadget, a “pro-human” polemic about recent movements in technology. Lanier discusses MIDI, originally developed for keyboards but shoehorned into styles of music that have more nuances than “key up” and “key down,” as an example of an overly simplistic standard that we’re now stuck with. Lack of standards drives innovation as there’s an arms race for dominance of a new category, but it can also stifle adoption as customers fear spending money on a product which might be useless in a short time. (Exhibit A: The HD DVD player gathering dust under my TV.)

I’m really optimistic about the digital future of media, and not just because one category of it pays my rent. There’s something magical about thinking of any song, TV show, movie, book, or video game and being able to consume it in minutes. The lack of standards for video represents a real limitation: given the choice of buying a DVD for $10 or a restricted digital copy for the same price, I’ll choose the DVD every time until I can know that the next device I buy can play that digital copy. Here’s hoping for a more accessible future.

After two months of delays, the hatbox-shaped Sony VAIO VGX-TP1 PC is finally shipping. Mine arrived last week, and I took a few photos of the various components as I unboxed them.

Just like the initial photos showed, this is a computer with very austere looks in an unusual squat cylinder case. The TP1 has been compared to a roll of toilet paper, a Roomba, a wheel of cheese, and a hatbox. I think it looks like a good device to take the place of my huge, crash-prone, overpriced cable box.

The “TV-side PC” box first reveals a forest of individually-wrapped cables and adapters. I feared a rat’s nest behind the TP1, but in the end I connected only three cables to the computer: a power cord, an HDMI cable for both video and audio, and an Ethernet cable. (If you can live with the 24 Mbps or so that 802.11g will reliably provide, then you need only connect two cables. A provided external antenna extends the range further.)

I first connected the TP1 to my TV through my receiver, as I had done with my cable box. No signal showed up at first, so I bypassed the receiver and went straight to the TV. This turned out to be a problem with my receiver: to effect a good handshake, I had to turn on first the TV, then the receiver, then the PC. (Thanks to shinksma of the AVS Forum for setting me straight.) Once powered up, I went through Windows Vista’s simple out-of-the-box set-up procedure, which ended with the first of many pitches for third-party services.

Sony has developed a horrible reputation for selling out their customers, and I understand completely. The 24 vendor-sponsored offers out of the box included the new DRM-infected Napster, the disastrous Norton Internet Security, and at least a half dozen pitches for various AOL services. Four feature-length movies are preloaded onto the hard drive but each must be unlocked for $10 to become viewable. Most bizarrely, there was a trial version of QuickBooks preloaded on the TP1′s hard drive. Who’s going to run QuickBooks on a “TV-side PC”? Many of these offers had uninstallers, but some — including the 4 GB of locked movies — required me to dig through the hard drive to delete folders manually. I thought Apple was bad for shoveling 2 GB worth of GarageBand files onto my PowerBook, but Sony has surpassed them by far in the annoyance department.

Once I was able to clear out all the tray trash Sony gave me, it was time to start loading some of my own. First up: Joost, which runs incredibly well on the TP1′s Core 2 Duo processor with 2 GB of RAM to play around in. I’ve watched several programs on Joost and, unlike on my $300 Dell, the video never skips a frame. Next up: iTunes and Amazon Unbox to get my instant gratification from purchased, heavily restricted video files. Not every program performs as well as I’d hoped on a 1280×720 display with the font size turned up. For example, several iTunes dialog boxes have text that overflows their nonstandard title bars and some dialog boxes extend vertically off the screen. I was also disappointed to find that many of the TV shows that I ripped off DVDs, imported to iTunes on my PowerBook, and titled accordingly, are now “movies” with names like 1-1, 1-2, and so forth. All my purchased content’s metadata looks perfect, of course.

Sony offers two methods to talk to the TP1. The keyboard includes a touchpad in an assembly that is very reminiscent of my PowerBook’s keyboard right down to the lack of dedicated Page Up and Page Down buttons. It’s convenient to have both keyboard and mouse close at hand instead of juggling two devices on a couch or coffee table. Once paired, the keyboard-and-mouse assembly stays faithful to the TP1: I haven’t had to pair it with the computer again. Sony also included a surprisingly cheap-looking remote control. The remote looks boxy and has small, squarish buttons that don’t even come close to telling me what the computer can do. Some of the buttons are overly generic (an “i” button and a left-arrow button do not pull up information or go back, respectively) while critical buttons like pause are small and indistinct. The remote is not backlit and its functions don’t appear to be customizable as far as I’ve seen so far. Since one of the special keys on the keyboard opens Windows Media Center, I have stayed away from the cheap Sony remote so far.

Speaking of Media Center (MCE), I haven’t really dug into what Microsoft’s 10-foot interface can offer. Living close to a city center should let me pick up some over-the-air digital signals, so I think I’ll go antenna shopping soon. I installed MCE Tunes to get a remote-control-suitable interface for my iTunes videos, but it invokes QuickTime in such a clunky way that I’ve switched back to just using iTunes with the keyboard and touchpad for now. Another plugin, called My Movies, offers a friendly catalog and an interface to rip DVDs to a hard drive, but it too is horribly inelegant: each disc requires that I go through a wizard repeatedly, and I can’t rip a disc using the remote interface while doing anything else. I have better things to do than watch a progress bar increase very, very slowly.

Given how much of my media is already ripped in iPod format, I have some regrets about not getting an Apple TV or a (badly aging) Mac mini. I do like how Joost and Last.fm will run on my TP1, and with Unbox installed I can rent a movie from work knowing that it’ll be downloaded by the time I get home. There is an active hobbyist community working on MCE plugins and associated software, though there isn’t the same polish associated with MCE software that I’ve come to appreciate about the top tier of the Mac software community. Even though many programs are styled as MCE plugins, they all have subtly different looks and feels. I’ll keep plugging away at the TP1 trying to make the most of its otherwise solid hardware.

More than half of my spending last month came from the Xbox Live Marketplace’s 720p movie rental service. For 480 Microsoft Points, about $6.53 with tax, I can download a large video file for a movie. I have 14 days to watch it, and from the first time I hit play I have 24 hours to finish the movie before it becomes unwatchable. My DSL at home is fast, but even at 7 Mbps it takes at least two hours to download a movie in its entirety. I’ve been downloading movies intending to watch them the next day — not exactly real-time, but they work okay.

I also tried out a kiosk that was recently installed in my local supermarket. It’s run by a company called The New Release, and it’s basically a DVD vending machine. You swipe a credit card and choose from about 100 movies; it vends a disc and charges you $1.00 per day plus tax. After 14 days the machine charges you $21 more to purchase the disc, and you own the disc outright. This works great on paper if you want to see a recent hit for much cheaper than on the Xbox, and without the need to finish a movie within 24 hours of starting it. Unfortunately for me, my rental disc was scratched. At least The New Release staffs their call center on Sunday nights, so they reversed the charge and I deposited the disc in their special hidden bin for defective discs.

Downloading will only work better as fiber-to-the-home connections like Verizon FiOS spread 10, 20, and even 50-megabit lines to residential customers. In the meantime, disc services serve a middling need at best. Netflix takes at least a day to get a disc to customers, more if you order one on the weekend (when you actually have time to watch movies). The New Release and other kiosks can only have so many movies on hand at a time. Wouldn’t it be great if I could get a movie on disc from a kiosk on demand — pay $10 or so, go shopping for groceries as the kiosk downloads the movie, and pick up the completed disc on the way out? I don’t know how the economics or technology would work with regard to renting, which is what I really want, though.

My Sony TP1 still shows a ship date from Amazon of June 11. Sony’s own shop suggests May 23 as the ship date. Meanwhile my Xbox still works as well as it ever has.

I just got an Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) account. With EC2 and Simple Storage Service (S3), I think I can convert my DVDs into iPod-video-sized files much more quickly than my desktop and laptop could do. Here’s one person’s experience with doing the conversion using FFmpeg. He estimates that it costs well under a dollar to convert several video clips, and that the process can be parallelized. This would be really cool to have, and I have plenty of time. My media box doesn’t even ship until June 11.

With my iTunes purchase and a single Xbox episode, I spent only $12.35 on video this month. Compared to a cable price of $70 per month, my year-to-date expenses of $107.96 represent a savings of $102.04. Once The Office comes back from hiatus, I’ll probably end up paying more. Also tempting is MLB.TV’s premium option: for $120 for the season I get video of all games that looks pretty good in 700 kbps — nowhere near high definition, but on par with digital cable.

Joost 0.9

I installed Joost 0.8 and was satisfied with the video quality, but the content wasn’t there. I can only watch Rocky and Bullwinkle and World’s Strongest Man so many times before they get monotonous. The more recent version, Joost 0.9, just hit beta testers today, and its selection has definitely improved. There are now selections from Comedy Central, MTV, VH-1, and other recognizable networks. It looks like Joost is getting some good video choices as it picks up steam. I can’t wait for what they have at their 1.0 release.

I also have a few Joost invite tokens. If you want to try Joost out, let me know.

Media Boxes

The more I look at media box options, the more I like the Sony TP1. Amazon even has it available for pre-order. My friend Dave has a Vista Media Center box running both to his TV and to his desktop monitor, with a wireless keyboard and mouse for either usage pattern. He built it himself, and I’m sure I could set up a similar arrangement since my computer is so close to the TV already, but I don’t think it’ll be necessary to even have a Windows desktop. Once I transition off Quicken for Windows and onto GNUcash on my PowerBook, I won’t need my $300 Dell any more. That way I’ll stick with my mantra of “never buy something without getting rid of something too.”

In February I spent $33.67 on video expenses. Compared to my usual cable bill of $70, that’s more than a 50% savings. So far this year I’ve spent $95.61 on video, a 31% savings over cable. My 24 season pass is still in effect and I bought another season pass: $15 for all 13 eleven-minute episodes of Frisky Dingo, a hilariously irreverent series from the same Adult Swim team that produced Sealab 2021.

Xbox Video Marketplace

Also this month, I decided to try the Xbox 360′s video marketplace for the first time. After buying some Xbox Live points directly through the console, I decided to try downloading A Scanner Darkly. The standard-def version (480p) was a little over 1 GB in size. After about 10% of the video had downloaded I was told that I could start watching the video while the rest continued to download in the background. A Scanner Darkly is produced in an abstractly-colored rotoscoped style so even the best quality rip wouldn’t be “life-like,” but the playback was as smooth and as sharp as a DVD would be. About 40 minutes in, during a particularly tense scene, the video cut out entirely; turns out there wasn’t any video left in the buffer, so I was told to wait while more video downloaded.

I waited about 20 minutes for another few percent of the movie to download. I then hit “play” again, which started the movie from the beginning. I hit the fast-forward button to go back to the 40-minute mark, but I saw a message to the effect of “Feature not available until download is complete.” Unwilling to watch the first forty minutes of the film again (and unwilling to chance another drop-out) I popped in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, an original Xbox game. The download promptly stopped cold as the game booted. Although Xbox 360 games may be played while movies download in the background, original Xbox games may not. I instead flipped the input over to the PlayStation 2, played some Okami, and a couple of hours later my download had finished. Since I had started watching A Scanner Darkly, I had just 22 hours left to finish it before the license would expire. (When the license expires, the file is not deleted automatically; instead it just sits there, taking up a nice chunk of my hard drive’s space, until I manually get rid of it.)

For movies, the Xbox video marketplace is disappointing. I didn’t expect there to be any DVD-style extras like commentary tracks, but there aren’t even chapter markings. When I was finally able to fast-forward through the movie, the “next chapter” button just skipped past about 40 seconds of the movie. The fastest way to get to my expected scene was to mash the same button sixty times. Even with a numeric keypad on the Xbox’s remote, there is no convenient “jump to time” feature like the one found on my old ReplayTV DVR (and on no DVR I’ve used since then).

I later decided to try the marketplace’s TV download functionality. Like other Windows Media-based stores like Amazon Unbox, the TV download selection is relegated to a subset of what iTunes offers. (So much for freedom of choice.) The “NBC” category offers only Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, not The Office nor any other shows. After a little browsing on the remote, I downloaded the pilot episode of the surreal Comedy Central series Stella. Watching this episode after it had downloaded completely was completely trouble-free. The paucity of original shows, and the fact that I can only watch these shows on my own Xbox, makes the video marketplace pretty unappealing.

P2PTV

This past month I’ve also started playing around with peer-to-peer television (P2PTV) services. TVU Networks, based in China, offers a no-frills client that connects to dozens of channels. The American channels include the San Francisco affiliates of CBS and Fox (but not NBC), Fox News Channel (but not CNN or MSNBC), and some general-interest Canadian cable networks. The quality is very good and as long as you’re watching a popular channel, the video starts quickly. This is all questionably legal, and even though the channels are transmitted “peer-to-peer” there is clearly only one source. The networks just need to find the guy with a TV capture card who’s publishing the video and they can cut a channel off at the head.

I just got a Joost invite; more about that in a bit.

I’m still using my aging PowerBook as a video device. All the good media boxes have yet to hit the market.

Most of my expense this month was for a season pass of 24, which at $48.94 gives me a discount of about $3 versus buying the episodes individually.  I’m surprised and disappointed that I have to manually download the next new episode when I’m at home.  The “automatic” portion of the season pass simply sends me e-mail urging me to download the next episode.  I would prefer if the episode were already downloaded by the time I got home.

Although January’s Macworld Expo showcased the new Apple TV set-top box, I was really hoping for a revised Mac mini.  I would rather have an actual computer with a remote control interface than a stripped-down box that must synchronize with something else.  While I wait for next-generation media boxes to hit the market, I’m still using my three-year-old PowerBook G4 to stream media from my Dell desktop.  iTunes’ streaming works, but I’ve had a few cases where switching away from iTunes causes playback to stop entirely.  I must then restart playback and manually fast-forward (at a rate of about 10:1) to the point where I left off.  That iTunes can’t remember its place on streaming video has been an annoyance.

My other TV selections were chiefly from The Office (US version), which is still great in its third season, and from Heroes, which I’m beginning to find tiring and tedious.  All the real action will only take place during sweeps months, so I might as well skip Heroes until something interesting will happen.

Useful site of the month: Comedy Central’s video player, called “Motherload,” streams a lot of the original programming including every segment from The Daily Show and The Colbert Report.  I don’t have to drop $2 or wade through all the other segments to watch, for example, an interesting interview.  There are some 15-second commercial spots but those are perfectly fine with me.

(Note: All prices in this article include taxes.)

The folks who brought Voice over IP to the masses with Skype are at it again, making Joost the punchy new name for their multicast Internet video system. (The old name, the Venice Project, was even less evocative of what the program did.)

Check out this video clip, which provides as good a demo as YouTube quality can allow. Its in-video UI features the alpha-blended play bar familiar to iTunes 7 users, but with a whole swath of other tools including a live chat room for real-time commentary from the peanut gallery. The high-resolution screen shots show many screens which look unusually busy, though all the widgets disappear when you’re not using them.  Finding new content is a matter of scrolling through a spiffy-looking program guide.  Video quality, bandwidth permitting, will probably fall somewhere between standard-definition digital cable and a DVD.

Joost is available in a private beta for Windows only. If a good Mac version comes out, I think Joost could sell tons of Core 2 Duo Mac minis (once Apple uses the latest chip in their mini line, of course). With luck the Joost project will keep in lockstep with the Windows version — unlike Skype, whose Mac client is always a full version behind its Windows counterpart. An encouraging sign is that Joost’s developers use Mac laptops.

One more gotcha: bandwidth. My ISP won’t be able to bust me for illegal P2P trading, but they will come after me for bandwidth usage for Joost. While watching TV, Joost uses both upstream and downstream bandwidth. If legal P2P becomes common, I really fear that ISPs will try to packet-shape it to death.

I was more disappointed by what wasn’t discussed at the keynote. The Mac mini is still saddled with a Core Duo while every other Apple desktop and laptop line has moved on to the Core 2 Duo. No Apple device besides the Apple TV supports HDMI out. Apple withheld some details on Mac OS X 10.5 “Leopard” at the initial unveiling because, they said with tongue in cheek, they didn’t want Microsoft poaching features for Windows Vista. Vista comes out for consumers this month, and nothing at all was said about Leopard today at the keynote. The official Leopard page still cites a release date of “spring 2007″ which technically could mean a Leopard release in June.

Even Sony looks better than Apple in the media box market right now. Their Sony VAIO TP1 comes out in March, runs Vista, supports HDMI (but not Blu-Ray, surprisingly) and looks pretty slick as Sony computers tend to do. The only downside: the price, $1,600.