A funny thing happened on the way to the iPhone 3g line on Sunday. I changed my mind.
Flashback to a few weeks ago, when the debate was lively about whether or not the upgrade was worth it - especially for me, a first-generation iPhone owner. And, for those of you at home, the debate went something like this:
- 3G network - nice, of course. EDGE can certainly be pokey. But, if there a killer app that requires all of this mobile speed (say mobile SlingPlayer?) - no, not yet. Besides, if I didn’t know the difference, would I really miss it ((and is it worth $120 a year more?). Verdict: Nice to have. Maybe worth upgrading.
- Third Party Apps - well, of course this was an advantage. It made the iPhone something on par with the rest of the smartphone world. A REAL phone. But, I could get this for free. Verdict: vote for keeping first-gen.
- Exchange support - see previous paragraph. Mine for free. Verdict: keep it.
- GPS - sure, another nice to have. But without a killer app here, negliable gain. The cellphone triangulation on the first-generation is good enough for occassional use. Verdict: keep it.
- Storage - max 16gb? WTF? Honestly I’d love to have 32gb or more. The fact that there wasn’t even an option? Epic fail.
If you’re keeping track, that’s 3 votes for keeping it and 1 maybe.
Now for the environmental factors. Many many reports of 3g network issues. Hardware or software aside? That made the last maybe a no. And a responding one at that. Software stability? Not great. Wait in a 3-4 hour line for this? No thanks.
Let me know when they get all of these things figured out, and I’ll hop on. Until then, me and little miss first-gen will be happy together.
And, oh yeah, this whole post was written on my first-gen iPhone using the Wordpress app and listening to music the whole time. Didn’t crash once.
Let me start with a confession. My brother was (and still is) a Genesis fan. And with that followed a progression to Phil Collins and his enormously successful solo material. And, I, being not exposed to much music in my lifetime that wasn’t doo wop (sorry dad), followed his lead, and found myself inspired by Phil’s many faces.
He was an amazing drummer (which was my first inspiration to someday want to play drums - for now, it’s just Rock Band on easy, but SOMEDAY…), and a talented song writer who knew how to capture a mood at a great time to sell records. He was a great performer who could get a crowd behind him during a live performance.
One of these collaborations was with the Phenix Horns. Previously known for being Earth, Wind and Fire’s brass section (known as the EMF Horns for the early part of their run), they also collaborated with a number of artists, including Phil Collins starting in 1980. They developed a kinship with Phil, being everything from backing horns, to vocals, to being comic foils to Collins’ on-stage routines.
So, when Phil Collins embarked on his Serious Hits…Live tour in 1990, which was meant to take some of his more pop heavy songs and hits, and give them a little bit more of a jazz edge, The Phenix Horns provided the ideal brass section for the exercise. After all, they’d played on just about all of his solo tours since 1982. I remember my brother’s excitement about seeing the tour in 1990 and when the Live CD came out, it was clear that the songs that featured the horns, stole the record and the live performance.
Phil Collins’ “Hand in Hand”, featuring the Phenix Horns in 1986
Sidebar for a second - the inspiration for this post found me when in Costco, with the bridge of “Hand In Hand”, a nearly instrumental classic Phil Collins song that was made whole by the additional of the brass section, started to run through my head. And, the song, whether performed in 1986, or 1990, or beyond, had that sort of magic quality that I think most pop music lacks. The horns busted through walls and left an impression on me as something special… 15+ years later. In between the oversized boxes of 100-calories snacks and 3 packs of wheat bread, I turned to my iPhone and typed in “Phil Collins Phenix Horns”. First result, was the Phenix Horns Wikipedia page, which references their story.
The Serious Hits…Live tour was a worldwide sensation, and Phil Collins offered the Phenix Horns 0.5% of the royalties from the sale of the CD, which too sold nearly 8 million copies worldwide. These were after all his friends, a talented team he collaborated on for many of his biggest hits, and it was great gesture to see. After all, they hadn’t received any previous royalties on any of the millions of CDs they’d contributed to. It just seemed like the right thing to do.
But, fortunes started to turn for the Horns after this. Harry Kim, remained in Collins’ employ in his touring band. Saxophonist Don Myrick left the Horns after 1990, only to be shot dead on his doorstep after years of struggles with drug addiction in 1993. The other two members of the Horns who had not played with Collins since the royalties started to kick in, Rahmlee Davis (trumpet) and Louis Satterfield (trombone), had fallen on tougher times and were relying on these royalty residuals for day-to-day living.
Collins, again, worth in the neighborhood of $600 millions countersued the Horns for $780,000 in back royalties. And he won. Collins was not seeing to have the duo prepay the money, but now had the court’s backing that he would pay them no more royalties going forward.
The Phenix Horns disbanded in 1996. Davis, resumed a solo career as a performer as a session musician. Satterfield died in 2004. Collins went on tour until 2006, to reunite with Genesis for a 40th Anniversary World Tour, and continues to work on Broadway and occasionally making live performances as well.
Funny how a story like this can show quite another face than those you were accustomed to.
Many of you have read my Dear John letter to Twitter of just two days ago, and let me start off by offering secure thanks and appreciation for all of your comments, all of the suggestions, direct messages and showing of love and support. It was by far the most read blog post I’ve ever written, and the fact that you found my words of interest, entertaining and insightful really means a lot to me. It was my pleasure to share that with you, and hope that you find future missives to be interesting.
So, I’m back on Twitter, which should serve as no real surprise to anyone. My heart is probably is always going to be where the people I love are, and since the fact majority of them are on Twitter (critical mass is a hard argument to deflect).
But, the most invigorating thing about this, was for the first real time, Twitter did active Crisis Management. From the moment the issue was discovered, the communication plan was different. Between @twitter, which had been far more active that I’ve ever seen it. Repeatedupdates on the Twitter Status blog, active attempts by @ev, @biz, and @jack to keep followers abreast, and the fact that the entire Twitter team went above and beyond to diagnose and fix the problem, speaks volumes about the importance of the follower loss, and the dedication to the platform and it’s continued growth. It’s as if they came up against the end game, and said, no way, and everyone was all in it together. This Twitter system failure had the aire of “no, if we don’t fix this, it’s really over”. The immediacy was clear. And this was what was different. Faced with the very real possibility of complete and total EPIC FAIL, the team snapped into action, and did the best they good to weather the storm.
Allow me to draw a parallel from personal experience. Flash back for a moment to the winter of 2007, most specifically February 14, and during notably what was dubbed the “St. Valentine’s Day Massacre”, when, all hell broke loose for a little airline called JetBlue Airways. You may have heard about it. The upfront story through the media was the volume of stranded passengers, some honeymooners, some trying to get to funerals, reunions, vacations, you name it. And you know, it was a great story to tell, because, in fact, these too were people who were wronged by those who should have been “right”. JetBlue just didn’t do this sort of thing. The failure and perfect storm of issues that happened are not deniable. (and neither were the reasons behind some of them, a great story for another time) But, the story that was never told, was that of the many, many efforts that went on behind the scenes at JetBlue corporate (most of the entire corporate office worked the back areas of JFK for 24 or even 48 hours straight), and the Corporate Communications and Marketing teams who immediately realized the value in putting ourselves in front of the problem, trying our best their accept the blame, and as a result save the airline. And this video was born (along with my deeper obsession with social media):
That night, as Morgan Johnston spent until 2am to get YouTube to accept the video (I think on the seventh attempt it took) and I tried to figure out how to spread the word, figure out if we were violating any sort of YouTube terms of service, and put it out there, really not knowing what would happen. This was doing our part to save the airline. David was front and center, and spoke for all of us trying to make things right. And, in my very humble opinion, it worked. Customers were largely forgiving, and while David stepped aside as CEO later that year, he had bigger plans in mind anyway
The parallels of these experiences were clear - trying to fix the problem involved a lot of communication, a lot of experience, hard work, a great deal of luck, crazy amounts of passion, and hope the our customers would in fact forgive us. And the last part was the biggest variable. And when the first five lined up, for JetBlue, the last one, the most intangible fortunately, fell into place.
So, I think I’m going to ask Twitter to be my friend again, and hope that we can be closer than ever. Because I’m pulling for the majority to forgive, because, who knows what the future may hold?
I just wanted to say something’s that have been on my mind for a while, and you know, well, we’re both really busy a lot, and we just haven’t had a time to talk lately, so, let me just come out and say it.
I miss you. You’re just not the same anymore. And, worst of all, now, you’ve taken all of my friends with you.
I miss the way things were back in the halcyon days, before everyone and their mother (literally) was on Twitter. Before the failwhale was even conceived. In the days when a few of us got together and put JetBlue on Twitter as a “daring” social experiment (how we got it to live in the early days is beyond me, but, I’m sure glad it did). In the days when my tweets were horribly uninteresting and pretty much dumb. You were just that “thing” that people looked at me funny when I mentioned you. I stopped trying to explain you. People just didn’t “get” you anyway. You were that girl that was brilliantly persuasive, wonderfully intelligent, and not afraid to open up her heart to me. Those were the times. Just after SXSW ‘07. Before Lacygate. It was just, me and you, and well, a few thousand other people too
Now, you’ve always been good to me. Introduced me to a whole wide array of amazing, smart, talented, passionate, giving people. Both here in New York, and Boston, but from places all around the country. You’ve helped me to believe in people again. For years, I wasn’t sure I would belong anywhere. I found a place on Twitter. I belonged here with you. And that was great. You built this lifeline, you shortened the distance between countries, cultures and people. Twitter was the backchannel for technology folks. And then came the second circle of PR folks, and finally, the ordinary people looking to make those sort of connections between them. Out of all of them, I’ve made some great friends. And know I’ll keep them for a lifetime.
And, sure, there have been tough times between us. I’ve listened to both sides in the harrassment argument. The countless stories about you being “dead“, and washed up. But I still believed in the greater good, the “collective good”, that Twitter was a microcosm of the good things in life - that the good so vastly outweighed the bad, that it was worth the system outages. Because, I knew you’d be there for me.
You helped me build trusting, lasting lifelines with 300 people. For someone surprised when his follower count hit 92, this was quite an achievement. To know, and share with these people was an amazing experience.
I was there, fighting through the failwhales, to stay, but I too strayed away, because, so much of life is the “being there” when you need someone. And, rejoice as I did when you married the one that you really loved, you still seemed like the girl that got away. And you wanted to be friends. And I was ok with that.
But, of course, as is life, unfortunately, you’ve led me to bad people as well. The perverbial jumping of the shark was starting. But, I still believed. A solution was coming. So, to keep the good people in and the bad people out, I turned myself into a more private person.
But, now, for some inexplicable reason, and being a person of the Internet for as long as I have, both a “netizen” (yeah, I’m dusting that one off) and a professional, and with the caveat that I certainly understand the interaction and intersection technology of living and working in a cloud of T1 lines, databases, operational data stores, PHP, AJAX and the people who are talented enough to use it, you took it all way. My followers went from 250+ to 21. The people I followed fell off by a similar amount. And what sucks is that these people who took it upon themselves to follow me, and found my tweets to be insightful, interesting, or just a little nuts; these people who’s opinions I valued, and to whom I was grateful to have an audience, were gone. These were real people. Not numbers to me.
You made me invisible. Persona non grata. Since the only other lifeline to the outside world is Twitter Search (Summize), and it doesn’t index private Tweets, I ceased to be. Without explanation to anyone.
So, now I’m left with a private page that prompts people to request to join, makes me look like I’ve left them all forever, when in actuality, I haven’t. I just trusted the wrong person. In this case, it’s not me, it really is you. I was being your friend. Now I’m left with more questions than answers. Most notably, now what?
Whether it was a database query got awry, a stored procedure failure, a middleware problem, hell, even an errant = sign somewhere (I’ve done that one a bunch), the net result, is a equivalent nuclear bomb of human capital going away. Just like that. And, sure, this is probably exaggerating the point several times over, but, I’m not alone. The trust factor here is key. If there’s ever a chance for you to be successful in your life, to make real money, this trust will be ironclad. Uptime agreements. Guaranteed sponsorships. Third-party licensing agreements. And, violating this trust will lead to bigger issues than a few pissed off people.
When you become the string that wraps around to bind vast distances, ages, sexes, religions, beliefs, hopes, dreams, happiness and sadness, and you snap - it’s more than just a database failing. It’s worse than the telephone going dead, because, in an instant, you’ve removed me from these people’s lives. And they from mine. You are the telephone. You are the cellphone. In your defense against Ariel Waldman, you claimed you were merely a “communication utility“. But that responsibility is great - it works both ways. Like it or not, you’re a guest at the dinner table, at the bar, at the party where people are, but also at the board room, the conference where no one knows each other, the silly karaoke night. You are that string that binds together the people who “have no idea” to those who “know what’s going on” You bring these people together in life and work and fun. And if calling yourself a “communication utility” that saves you legal hot water, than great, but in the end, it seems, just maybe you’re not living up to this end of the bargain.
Nevermind the arguments about you being free, and incorrect expectations - in the end, you’ve done so much good for so many people, that people want to depend on you. They want to believe that you can make it happen again. And, more often than not, you do.
So, I think, for a little while at least, I’m going to seeotherpeople. Because, in the end, no one will have the same effect on me as you did. But, I hate being alone again. Especially after I wasn’t. I was less alone than ever before. And I don’t know if I can ever get that trust back again. But I’m also a patient man, and try my best to see both sides of any story. I want to believe in you again.
You’ve been great to me. Hope to come back around again soon and see you happy, healthy, and strong.
