Netflix could add this feature, but they won’t. I would be happy to pay a few dollars to website/service that would help me pull out my data.

The important part is that this is not just about Netflix, but rather an issue with many websites.

Being an author myself (I published two books on technology), I know very well that only a tiny part of the money paid for the product goes to its creator. Most of the money is being consumed by the middle man (resellers) and the publishing house. e.g. in my case I was getting 10% of the net profit (not the book price!) made by the publisher. Which was about 2% of the book’s price and even less if it was sold at a discount.

Now imagine that instead of paying $20 for that CD or a book, you could just donate the royalty directly to the creator.  A $1 “donation” would be often more than the royalty the creator would receive from their publisher. Won’t you donate $1? or $3? or $5? It didn’t cost you anything to get the product after all. I’m sure most people would be very happy to do that.

The problem is that at the moment there is no way to accomplish that simple transaction. Yes, there are a few artists and creators out there who have a tip jar on their site, but most don’t. I want to have a new website that will act as a clearing house to accept token payments for authors, musicians, artists and other creators, and which then will send the funds directly to the artists. Of course that functionality could then be embedded into artists’ websites and forums to make it easier for fans to find a way to give back. Of course that clearing house could charge a small transaction fee to support itself, but it’ll be still a huge win for creators and their fans.

This will also change the face of the peer2peer networks, where the illegal downloading will become instead a more efficient way to distribute creative products, cutting out the middle man, while directly supporting the artists.

Any takers?

Update: Kevin Kelly wrote an interesting essay, called “Better Than Free“, where he presents 8 ways to make money from freely available goods. He suggests that it’s only a matter of time before everybody will have to embrace those, so become an early adopter…

Thank you for registering with example-service.com.

Please add registration@example-service.com to your whitelist page and make sure to check your bulk folder if you don’t receive the service activation email.

We have three potential problems here:

1. Some people don’t know how to add an email address to a whitelist.
2. One needs to copy-n-paste the email to be whitelisted, go to their email provider website, dig through the options to find the whitelisting screen and enter the email address.
3. If the customer’s email service doesn’t place the spam mail in the bulk folder, but deletes it, the customer will never see the service activation email. In most cases that would mean that they won’t be able to activate their account, nor they will be able to re-register with the same email address. This is a dead-end. It exists because the whitelisting happens too late. The customer needs to whitelist the email address first and only then have example-service.com send the activation email.

Since a majority of email users use a handful of email providers, clearly this is an opportunity for someone to provide a new service that solves this problem.

This new web service routes people to the appropriate page within their webmail system to add a whitelist entry for, say, an e-commerce site they are doing business with.

In other words, the process is:

1. Customer visits example-service.com and signs up for a service or or a mailing list.
2. Instead of telling Customer that he should add foo@example-service.com to his whitelist, now example-service.com says, “Just click this easy link and you’ll be taken to the appropriate page at your email provider/ISP” (and even prefill the form for the customer if they are logged in)
3. Customer clicks the link, which will accomplish the whitelisting process, e.g. something like:
   

   http://gmail.com/whitelist/add?a=*@example-service.com

   This could be potentially fully automated if the email provider has a provision (API) to accomplish that and if not they could probably add one if that improves their customers experience.

4. Now example-service.com can send an account activation email or start sending mailing list messages, and no emails are lost.

Mission accomplished. Customers don’t break their heads trying to figure out things that are a way beyond their technical knowledge, and web services get their customer support load reduced, since registration/activation or mail receival is no longer an issue.

Any takers?

Yes, one could pay the post office service to forward their address, but this is only a temporary solution and it doesn’t work for organizations that require you to keep your address updated not only for the mail purposes (e.g. health insurances, driver license, etc.).

It’s clear that a new service is needed. For each individual this service will provide two features:

• Maintain a list of organizations that need to be notified on address change.
• If the change can be done electronically it will perform this update on user’s behalf.

Of course it will have individual, family and combined accounts, as each member of a family should be able to maintain their own list.

This of course could be taken further and new more modern features could be bundled with it. e.g. did you have your old address published on the Internet (especially for small business owners) – wouldn’t it be nice to have someone track all the sites where you old address is listed and notify the site webmasters to update to your new address?

What do you think? What other features would you like to see in such service in the event of house moving?

First I acquired a site that was originally hosted by MelbourneIT, which is sold as yahoo hosting (i.e. Yahoo outsources the service to MelbourneIT). I did some research before starting the transfer, and learned that nether MelbourneIT nor Yahoo are helpful with the transfer and what one needs to do is just wait for the FOA (“Initial Authorization for Registrar Transfer”) request to expire and ICANN forcefully take over the domain and transferring it to the new registrar. In other words you need to get the authorization code for the domain name, and initiate the transfer and just wait for about a week.

Then I sold a website, whose domain was hosted with 1and1.com and the same story, the buyer initiated the transfer and nothing was happening (i.e. he was getting “awaiting approval” on his site). I cold 1and1 support and they told me that I don’t need to do anything, just wait a few days. After 3 days nothing was happening, so I called 1and1′s support again and the guy on the other side (sounded India), said I just approved the request. I asked him, why did I have to call to get the approval, but he couldn’t give me a reasonable answer. Their FAQ is horribly outdated and wrong and when I told support about that they told me, yes we know… so much for FAQ.

Frankly I don’t understand why in our era it should take a bunch of emails and phone calls and weeks to get the domain transfered. Granted I understand that the previous registrar doesn’t want to lose their business, but they are going to loose it anyway, holding onto a domain for another week won’t make any difference.

I think ICANN needs to set better regulations where a domain transfer is done with automatic mechanism, involving no support emails and calls.

The best experience so far I had with godaddy and namecheap where a domain was transfered within the registrar (domain push) – the whole process took a few minutes and no support mortals were involved

This particular airport is known for frequent flight delays and cancellations (locals even nicknamed their town: “Cancelegar”), yet no arrangements are made to accommodate delayed travelers, not even a free shuttle to a hotel. And of course there are no waiting facilities at the airport itself other than the usual hard benches.

Overnight storage or lockers weren’t there either…

And apparently this is a similar situation with many other airports around the world. You buy the ticket and you hope to make it to your destination, but if anything goes wrong on the airline side, you are on your own…

One things is not clear is whether this should be a responsibility of the airlines, or the municipalities on whose premises the airports are located. Or both…

Obviously Facebook wants you to login and use their tools to communicate with people (and meanwhile sell you something). But I don’t want another set of tools – I already have my favorite mail program that I’m most familiar with.

At the moment I simply refuse replying to any messages coming that way and tell my friends to not message me via Facebook. Want my response – email me directly.

And that’s too bad. Facebook and other social networks could become a transparent layer connecting people and let end users choose their medium of communication, rather than forcing everybody to use their website.

At the moment I stay off Facebook, until they wake up and realize that they could do much better than they do now.

It would be good to have an uber social net like a gmail InBox where, with a single sign-on, I could get all of my social network stuff.

If you are on linkedin, you also know that some folks use it for marketing purposes and they have tens of thousands of contacts. These folks tend to send connection invitation to every email address they can put their hands on. And I don’t accept those invitations (my network includes only people that I’ve communicated with or met in person).

The problem is that I can’t decline those invitations in “bulk mode”, instead I have to go through each invitation and click several times before the invitation gets killed. I’ve contacted the support group a few times about this issue, but they don’t do anything about it.

Hopefully if enough people join my request, they will improve that part of the service.

Update: Jan 2008: Great news – linkedin.com just implemented that feature! Thanks to everybody who voted on the proposal!