Apple TV <-> Google TV
iTunes <-> Wireless Android Music Syncing
iAds <-> Google Ads / Admob
h.264 <-> WebM/VP8
iPhone OS <-> Android OS

Apple CEO Steve Jobs seemed to know this was coming and made his own jabs against Google at Apple’s town hall meeting in January.

On Google: We did not enter the search business, Jobs said. They entered the phone business. Make no mistake they want to kill the iPhone. We won’t let them, he says. Someone else asks something on a different topic, but there’s no getting Jobs off this rant. I want to go back to that other question first and say one more thing, he says. This don’t be evil mantra: “It’s bullshit.” Audience roars.

Google’s mantra is now “openness” in a refrain that might have been lifted from Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer.

“I agree that no single company can create all the hardware and software. Openness is central because it’s the foundation of choice.” – Steve Ballmer

Microsoft has always been about creating the platform and distributing it to as many customers as possible through their hardware partners. Microsoft, of course, made money through the sale of each software license. Google is eyeing the same basic plan but their plan revolves around monetizing ads on the platform. Beyond internet search, Google hopes to infiltrate mobile phones and television as well.

In all this conflict, the other PC manufacturers seem to be bystanders, perhaps hoping that a Google win will trickle down to their hardware sales. One company, however, seems to be thinking differently and trying to branch out on their own. Apple’s ownership of hardware and software has been one of their greatest strengths.

Of all the companies out there, HP actually stepped up and purchased Palm and their WebOS. And all indications seem to suggest that HP is reworking their product line to incorporate WebOS into their handhelds but also their tablets. Palm’s Jon Rubinstein told Slashgear that the Pre’s OS would be suitable for tablets “and beyond”:

With the iPad fresh to the market, and talk of a Google-branded rival running Android, we also asked about Rubinstein’s opinion on the burgeoning tablet segment. While Palm are focusing on smartphones right now, he did tell us that webOS was designed to be a “mobile device OS” rather than solely a smartphone platform, suited to a broad scale of devices up to tablets and even larger.

HP is even working on their branding. In one instance, they are following in Apple’s footsteps. HP has managed to switch Sex In the City from Apple to HP.

You see, Carrie Bradshaw, who has spent so many hours penning so much angst to so many troubled souls, has decided she can no longer do that on a Mac. The new “Sex and the City” movie, tantalizingly named “Sex and the City 2,” will see the newly married Mrs. Big stroking her fingers along the keys of something made by HP and powered–oh, yes–by Windows.

The move may seem silly, but Apple has been a staple on the television series throughout and just goes to show where HP is trying to position itself in the market.

Apple’s role, however, remains the same as always — as a staunch proponent of vertical integration and a tightly controlled user experience. Apple, however, lost the previous round when it was against Microsoft, but Apple has also never had such a strong lead before.

What’s been keeping me busy has been two relatively new sites and also maintaining MacRumors.com. My two new projects have been TouchArcade.com (cofounded with Blake) and AppShopper.com. Both are iPhone/iPod Touch related sites dealing with the many new apps that are coming out.

For anyone who is serious about their websites, you’ll find that you quickly become a stat addict. Traffic stats, referral stats, income stats… they all become the most interesting things in the world. It’s easy to waste yourself away just examining your stats. If you’ve ever sold items on eBay, it’s a bit of the same feeling.

A bit over a year ago I decided to post public numbers about my MacRumors stats. Historically, I’d been very secretive about my traffic numbers. For no particular reason except that most people are secretive about them. I changed my mind at one point, in part due to the example of Gawker’s network of sites. For whatever reason, Nick Denton has always been very transparent about his traffic numbers. In the end, I decided it can only help a site like MacRumors, which tends to get more traffic than respect. In the long run, I think the numbers have helped, in that they’ve been quoted in a number of places including my New York Times article.

So, getting into the new sites, both have been doing remarkable well — in fact, better than I had really hoped so early on.

Here’s TouchArcade.com’s running monthly pageviews:

Going up is always good. This monthly graph gives you a running 30 day total — so the last point on the graph gives you the last 30 days. The page-views per day gives you a better look at this moment in time:

By this graph, it looks like we could approach 3 million pageviews/month in the near future, if the trends hold true.

Now AppShopper’s monthly trend:

It seems less interesting until you realize that we’re talking about 7 million page views/month already. A more interesting graph I think is from when I first “launched” AppShopper back in September (graph is in pageviews/day):

The site went from very little traffic to 100,000-130,000 daily pageviews in an instant. What’s striking about that graph is not that there was a big spike — any major exposure is going to get you a spike — but the “stickiness” of the site is remarkable. Usually there’s a substantial drop off after people hit a site in a big spike like that, but AppShopper retained a remarkable percentage of those people after the first visit. (There was recently a Black Friday spike that wasn’t nearly as sticky, but still showing a solid residual traffic).

Obviously, “stickiness” is one of those factors that will determine the rate of your success or failure. If you are gaining more users than you are losing each day, your traffic is going to grow. Meanwhile, “non-sticky” sites are going to have to keep finding new users, and it will be harder to keep them around.

SAI just happened to be the vehicle in this very prominent example, and I can defend some of their actions. Mostly, I believe that this is a constructive conversation, and I hope SAI’s Henry Blodget realizes that.

Blodget wrote a response as to why they linked to the rumor. I don’t want to nitpick, but thought I’d write a brief followup.

So first note: I am perhaps more “defensive” in my publishing of news than most publications. The reason is that the percentage of intentionally fake stories is very high in the Mac rumor world. This means that if I take a given rumor submission, the chance of it being fake is greater than it being true.

In Defense of Publishing

In SAI’s defense, there is a point at which a story has too much momentum to ignore, regardless of its content. The exact point at which that happens, however, is up for debate.

The Steve Jobs story was climbing the ranks of Digg and already being talked about on Twitter. While I don’t think it would have made Digg’s front page, it may have only been a matter of time before the story was reported somewhere. Though, I suspect that it could have been originally reported as a debunking, or with more skepticism.

In the Future

I disagree with Blodget’s claim that they wouldn’t do anything differently in the future. So will SAI really publish another rumor from iReport of the same magnitude and say “it could be true or false. we’re working on verifying it”? If so, I can have an iReport story ready for you in a few minutes.

Clearly, if another major but unverified story is published on iReport (or similar site), people will report on it far more skeptically. This degree of skepticism is perhaps that little bit that makes the difference.

So, I chose to ignore it, since we get fake rumor submissions daily.

Digg users also figured out that this was likely fake, and despite the concentrated efforts, the story was kept from appearing on the front page due to a corresponding number of Digg users burying the story. This is how it’s supposed to work. Most digg users are apparently knowledgeable enough to know that a post on a site like iReport is as legitimate as a random forum post… which is to say not that much.

But here’s where it got real. As best I can tell, Alley Insider — a site that I like and has a relatively large readership — posted the story as possibly true. Here’s an excerpt from their original report before they corrected it:

Apple’s Steve Jobs Rushed To ER After Heart Attack, Says CNN Citizen Journalist

“Citizen journalism” gets its first real test. A story of major consequence that, thus far, no one else has reported.

CNN’s iReport:

Steve Jobs was rushed to the ER just a few hours ago after suffering a major heart attack. I have an insider who tells me that paramedics were called after Steve claimed to be suffering from severe chest pains and shortness of breath. My source has opted to remain anonymous, but he is quite reliable. I haven’t seen anything about this anywhere else yet, and as of right now, I have no further information, so I thought this would be a good place to start. If anyone else has more information, please share it.

We’re making calls, but as yet we have no idea whether it’s true. Confirmation/denial the moment we get it.

Meanwhile, very interesting that this report appears on CNN’s site. If it proves correct, CNN will look great. If it is wrong, CNN’s credibility will likely be significantly damaged–and we wouldn’t be surprised if this caused them to pull back from “citizen journalism.”

From here it seems the story kept growing, and Apple PR even issued a denial. The story’s been picked up by numerous sites as a failure of citizen journalism.

It’s nothing of the sort.

Citizen journalism (which is a stupid term) works as it always has. People post random crap — much of which could be fake or made up — but you know this when you read a site like that. You know that digg submissions that make outrageous claims are likely self serving posts. You do not take these reports at face value.

But, if you run a prominent and influential site, the moment you publish something, you are giving it some credibility. You have filtered it from the mass of information on the internet as something worthy to post. You may not believe it, but just by posting it, you add credibility to it.

If you want to blame someone for dropping Apple’s stock price today, you can point fingers at the individuals on 4chan or the person that originally submitted it, but the real reason it gained traction is the reporting of it on mainstream blog sites.

I don’t expect everyone to adopt my personal approach to publishing, but those are my thoughts on today’s events.

That’s it. If you have a site that attracts a lot of visitors, you will be able to make money. On the internet, traffic equals power, which subsequently equals money.

Depending on the topic of your site, however, it may be easier and harder to generate that money. But even a seemingly ridiculous site such as HotorNot.com has a revenue of $5-$10 million a year (with the bulk of it being profit). If you aren’t familiar with the site, the premise is simple: rate other users on how “hot” they are on a scale of 1 to 10. That’s it. You vote, and get sent to the next photo. When I first saw it, I thought it was amusing but saw no way they could make money from it. As it turns out, they managed to turn it into a casual dating site with a simple subscription service that allowed you to make connections. This simple $6/month revenue stream added up to a revenue stream of up to $10 million a year,

Now, generating revenue might not be enough if your expenses are high. One notable site that has never made a profit is YouTube. To be fair, I don’t think generating a steady profit was part of the original game plan. As a venture capital funded site, millions of dollars were invested in the infrastructure, employees and bandwidth to create what became a “killer app” for the Internet. In the end, the founders and investors did make an enormous profit on the site through its sale to Google for $1.6 billion dollars. Why did Google pay $1.6 billion to buy a site that has never made a profit? Because Google understands more than anyone the value of traffic, and truly believes that traffic = power = money.

As the founder of a well trafficked site, and with plans to establish other sites, the concept of building traffic is always on my mind. I have ideas of how other sites established their user base, but here are a few reasons MacRumors has grown to be as popular as it has:

- Good domain – I was fortunate to be able to pick up “MacRumors.com” as an expired domain in 2000. It’s a generic keyword-rich domain which perfectly encapsulates the topic of the site. It’s easy to remember, and well ranked in searches related to rumors.

- Addictive Content – it’s no coincidence that I started a web site surrounding rumors about Apple and the Mac. I was already an addict. I scoured messageboards and news sites around the web for hints about future Apple products. I don’t expect everyone to understand how this particular topic is as addictive as it is… but clearly it’s not just me.

- Little Competition – We weren’t the first rumor site on the scene. But what was interesting was that there used to be a clear divide between rumor sites and news sites in the Mac web. “News sites” would not report on rumors. They purposefully ignored the entire subcommunity. That seems ridiculous now, as the lines have since blurred, with even mainstream media covering Apple rumors. But I’d say that gave us a 4 year head start over other Mac sites. They weren’t willing to cater to the rumor-audience, so MacRumors was one of only a few rumor destinations for those intervening years.

During those 20 or so years, one thing has remained pretty constant… Apple has had very little interest in encouraging game development on their platforms. I can’t find any original references, but there’s an underlying belief that Steve Jobs hates games. Whether or not that’s true… that’s how Apple has acted over the years. Even to my then teenage mind, it seemed crazy that Apple would actively discourage such a popular use of their computers.

All that may have changed with the introduction of the iPhone and iPod Touch SDK. At the launch event, Apple invited Electronic Arts and SEGA to demonstrate their latest games running on the iPhone and iPod Touch… could it be that Apple has finally changed their attitude?

It seems so… but even without Apple’s blessing, I believe the iPhone and iPod Touch will become a huge gaming platform. The potential market is just too large and the desire for casual gaming on your mobile phone is just too great. By the end of 2008, Apple expects to have seeded at least 10 million iPhones to the world.

Everyone finds themselves in situations where they are just killing time and all they have is their mobile phone. Text messaging, browsing the web, and playing the latest iPhone game are the activities that people will increasingly turn to.

Based on this belief, Blake Patterson and I have launched a new site catering to those interested in gaming on the iPhone and iPod Touch.

We’ve been filling out content and formatting over the past few weeks. News stories will obviously pick up after the official launch of the iPhone SDK in June, so we have just been ramping it up in the meanwhile. I can’t be certain what the future holds, but I believe this site addresses a very loyal and expanding topic of interest.

Over the past year, Digitime’s accuracy has been remarkably good with respect to Apple related rumors, and I now pay close attention to their reports. All the following reports turned out to be true:

Leopard Delayed
LED Apple Notebooks
Wifi/Flash iPod
13.3″ Screens for upcoming Apple Laptop (ended up being the Air)
September iPods

So, good job Digitimes…

Here’s one I found yesterday:

Why Apple’s secretive approach is so effective – some researchers studied the effects of pre-announcing and not pre-announcing products and how that affected consumer spending.

It’s this pre-release hype makes people much more careful about what they buy. If you tell them that something is coming at some point in the future, they will evaluate everything that’s out there very carefully. But if you just drop something into their laps, all they’ll think about is the brand. And if they like that, ker-ching!

To sum up:

Pre-release announcement = more cautious buying habits
Immediate release = impulse buying

The article presumes that Apple takes advantage of this psychological tendency. The problem lies in the exact definition of “immediate release”. The research article isn’t published yet, so we have to rely on a press release.

If you define “immediate release” as actually available in stores (to see and touch), then Apple’s brand new products rarely fall in this category. Apple TV, Apple TV 2.0, iPhone, MacBook Air all had week to month lead times before they were available. The iPhone, itself, was 6 months from release, and no pre-orders were possible.

So how does this help prove the author’s point? I don’t think it does at all.

Now if you redefine “immediate release” to “can preorder immediately”, then an argument can be made for the MacBook Air. Apple announced the Air, and you could impulsively buy it, without doing research. Ok sure…

But what about Apple TV? The original one (codenamed iTV) was pre-announced months in advance, even before it adopted the “Apple TV” name. So, this would argue that Apple suffered (not benefited) from this pre-announce strategy.

What about the iPhone? Apple pre-announced the iPhone on January 9, 2007. No pre-orders were available and it wasn’t available until June 2007.

It was a nice theory, with some actual research to back it up, but in the end Apple’s “secretive approach” seems to have no correlation with this research.

Now, to be fair to those users, changing the look and feel of a site that they’ve grown accustomed to is certainly a disorienting experience.

Macworld is about to undergo a major site redesign and has already seen a bit of criticism based on the beta site. The other scary part of their move is a change in forum software from UBB.threads to Jive. I suspect the outcry from that move alone could drown out any criticisms of their site design. Hopefully, they’ve spent time to make the forums “feel” the same as it did under UBB.threads. Good luck!

The fear of a site-redesign has what kept MacRumors in its current form for the past 4 years. But lately I’ve decided that its time to look into a site redesign and we’re starting to look for the right designer to do it.

The ad was first published by MacBidouille with the lead in that “an anonymous reader sent us this image”.

That’s red flag #1.

We also received this image at MacRumors before it was published. The anonymous submission linked to a rapidshare file sharing link with no backstory. Just a link to an image that purportedly depicts an ad from T-Mobile.

What’s the likelihood that this is legitimate? Almost zero, I’d guess.

I’m not one to try to pick apart the technicalities of the ad – why this word or that word wasn’t translated correctly. Instead, just looking at the scenario points to the fact that anonymous uncorroborated submissions that are sent to a number of sites simultaneously are rarely true. Instead, they typically represent someone trying to get some attention.

Anonymous uncorroborated submissions with links to an image have an even worse track record.

Update: With the release of the UK iPhone with EDGE and 8GB, this rumor has essentially been proven wrong. Apple’s unlikely to release a 16GB/3G iPhone in Germany only.