Dear AT&T,

I’ve been a loyal customer to you both personally and with my various employers since 2003. I bought both the original iPhone and the iPhone 3G almost immediately after their release and have never once felt a need to quibble about the premium I have (or my employer has) paid for the privilege. And, just to start off on a positive note, I’m not here to gripe about the upgrade cost from an iPhone 3G to a 3Gs, considering that the people who bought the 3G did so knowing full well they were signing a 2-year, not 1-year, contract.

But you’ve been treating me and all the rest of your iPhone subscribers worse and worse by inches—nickel-and-dime-ing us, underdelivering, and even just being a plain and simple jerk—ever since.

I can accept that you raised the cost of the data plan $10/mo. from the EDGE-only original iPhone to the HSDPA-enabled iPhone 3G. I get that you have to get the money to pay for throughput expansion somewhere. So, free pass on that one.

But really, what was up with giving us 200 SMS messages as part of the plan and then suddenly making that level of messaging a $5/mo. add-on? Text messaging at that level (less than 7/day) is an insanely low-bandwidth proposition. I move more data than that by loading a few media-rich web pages in Mobile Safari. Let me put it to you this way, even my friends who actually work in the sex industry don’t charge you additional money for previously agreed-upon services, they at least give you some little bit extra. So, not classy, Ma Bell.

And really, the less said about the speed and quality of your 3G rollout, the better. I get spotty 3G coverage at times even right here in the technological epicenter of the Earth, the San Francisco Bay Area.

Now tack on making us wait for sending MMS messages when there’s no technological reason whatsoever for doing so, and a probable gouge of an additional $30/mo. to tether (if your other tethering plans are anything to go by), and the picture that emerges is extremely ugly. Maybe that kind of premium for tethering might have made sense in the days of scarce bandwidth and phones that didn’t pull down as much data while browsing as a full-size computer, but now it’s just plain extortion.

It’s quite clear that you don’t care about your customers, your OEM partners, or anything but this quarter’s bottom line. What’s more, this attitude is what makes you the main obstacle to growing your iPhone business by even greater leaps and bounds. Not Apple, not the iPhone, but you. If you’d changed your tune, you’d have every iPhone-toting fanboy and fangirl singing your praises. You wouldn’t have people saying, “I so want an iPhone, but as long as I’m stuck with AT&T, no deal.”

And when the whole world is on LTE come 2011 or so, and there’s no technological reason for Apple to stay exclusive with you, you’re going to lose your biggest cash-cow.

Your network, your customer “service,” your willingness to leech your customers…they’re going to cost you a lot more in lost goodwill, lost customers, and lost sales than those measures will earn you you in new fees or savings for your corner-cutting. And when C-level Apple executives take the worldwide stage and damn you in all but name, you should take it as a sign that, at their earliest convenience, they’re going to hang you out to dry and you’re going to deserve every bit of it.

You’ve had all kinds of time to prep yourself for MMS and tethering on the iPhone, but you didn’t. You’ve had every opportunity to make your existing iPhone customers into raving fans for both you and Apple, but you didn’t take them.

So, “Mommy Dearest” Ma Bell, I’m still going to buy my iPhone 3Gs and say, “Thank you, Ma’am. May I have another?”…for now. But that’s only because Apple’s done its bit to keep me wanting more by evolving its handsets year after year despite last year’s model getting 90% of the new features along with each new OS. But unless you change your ways, the second you’re no longer Apple’s oh-so-exclusive partner and my contract is up, I am so gone, and I’ll do my damnedest to take my friends with me.

Care to prevent it? OK, here’s how:

• Don’t charge an extra premium for tethering on top of a $30/mo. data plan anymore. Just stop that!
• Roll out iPhone MMS ASAP. Think, “before July,” instead of, “later in the Summer.”
• Get your 4G LTE network deployed and bulletproof at least in all the major metros ahead of schedule.
• Get with the program that you’re going to need a network capable of video streaming for all and stop nixing app developer ingenuity out of pure network lameness. Nixing Skype on your cell-data network, I get. Nixing Sling is just plain lame.
• Give us back our 200 SMS messages gratis. If you wanna charge the heavy or “unlimited” users extra, fine, but don’t make me pay 20¢/msg. despite not being a heavy SMS user just because I know people who are.

Do these things and we’ll talk about my continuing to send you money any longer than I absolutely have to.

Your disgruntled customer,
—Sonya Hipper

My social media life is currently fractured and I don’t see that break being mended or bridged anytime terribly soon. I’ll explain what I mean by that in a minute. First, some background.

I’m currently on what feels to me like entirely too many social sites and yet, compared to many in this Brave New Digital World™, I’m a dilettante who barely has her toe in. Beside this WordPress blog you’re currently reading, I’m also active on Free-Association, Tribe, Facebook, and Twitter…and now a little on LiveJournal thanks to Live+Press. I have what many would consider to be a modest number of RSS feeds I track in NetNewsWire. I read MacSurfer each day. I haven’t even touched on social photo sites (Flickr, Picasa), social bookmarking sites (StumbleUpon, Technorati, NewsVine, Reddit…I have a Digg account I barely use), or life-streaming sites (FriendFeed, Tumblr, etc.). What kind of member of the digirati am I?

For years, my primary home was Tribe. The reason was simple: unlike the other big players of the time — Friendster, LiveJournal, and MySpace — Tribe had the best many-to-many social interaction I’d seen on any of the general-purpose social networking sites. Its discussion groups, or Tribes, had no equal in terms of either quality or quantity. I’d seen better feature-sets, but much like the iPhone compared to other smartphones in 2007, so was Tribe compared to other social networks in 2003 if what you were interested in was a community based on discussion and collective organizing. It was easy and it tied in very nicely with the other features of the site — events calendar, listings & reviews, profiles, blogs, image galleries, etc. Sure, the others had group discussions, but their focus was elsewhere. MySpace was always about self-promotion, Friendster about network-mapping, LJ about journaling. So, naturally, those sites were geared around those things while Tribe geared itself specifically around group discussions. And when Tribe went to shit under Jan Gullett and a bunch of us revolted to start Free-Association after finding nowhere else in late 2005 that suited our sensibilities, Tribe was our template.

But in the last three years, Tribe has stagnated. It never fully recovered from the Gullett regime and is basically on life support, despite Mark Pincus’ half-hearted protestations to the contrary. It’s become technologically insular, with few ways to get out, none to get data in, and no developer support among the other sites, services, and apps I use to enable me to do things like automatically have my blog posts re-published there.

And Free-Ass? Our lead developer, Scott, is one smart and talented man. But a) he’s got a demanding day job, and b) his whole experience of developing in PHP and for Joomla + Community Builder (along with other modules and home-grown hacks, our CMS code-base) has been for Free-Ass. He hadn’t been a coder for many years when he joined up. What he’s accomplished given that is nothing short of breathtaking, but he’s not a guru in the ways of RSS, the Facebook API, OpenSocial, and so on to enable him to bring us into the present either. We’re evaluating a change in code-base thanks to a new volunteer which might make interconnectedness with other services easier, but even so it’d take a while to implement on our budget, which wishes it even had a shoestring to call its own.

But by contrast, Facebook, the emerging juggernaut, is great for one-to-one and one-to-many communication. Its mini-feed proved to be revolutionary as a way to keep easy tabs on your friends, loved ones, and contacts, for example. And hey, I’ve rediscovered people on it or because of it that I hadn’t seen in nearly two decades in some cases. But it really sucks for many-to-many. Group discussions were clearly an afterthought…an adjunct to life-streams, announcements, and (shudder) “throwing sheep,” and nothing more. They’re practically unusable and even if you try, the signal-to-noise ration is miniscule. I can bring almost anything and everything from my digital life around the web (even odd bits from Tribe and Free-Ass thanks to the “glue” technology that is RSS), even if I can’t get much of anything out. It’s kind of like a Roach Motel™ in that way. A walled garden, to use the omnipresent metaphor.

Twitter (and its workalikes like Pownce), by its very nature precludes any kind of deep back-and-forth. It has two strengths: immediacy and brevity. And don’t get me wrong, what else does it need, especially when it plays so well with others? I can make my Facebook status my latest tweet or vice-versa and my blog automatically tweets post announcements for me. Digital nirvana in that respect!

Blogs and journaling sites — LJ is the 800-lb gorilla here — are great for writing whatever’s on your mind and have the most advanced content-handling features for those journal-style posts and response comments. But features like LJ’s Communities are lacking. Good luck figuring out how to find a Community you’d want to join on LJ from a standing start if you’re new to the site. Blogging engines like WordPress, TypePad, and Blogger are great at sharing content bi-directionally with a massive array or services, but you’re never going to develop the critical mass for anything worthy of the name “community” unless you’re already famous or utterly tireless like, say, Kos.

And Ning? I honestly can’t think of anything Ning does well. It’s the worst of all possible worlds…the Windows Mobile “smart”-phone of social networking. It does innumerable things, and all of them badly.

And that’s why I stay on Tribe and keep hope alive that Free-Ass will get growing again, because nothing else has really appeared to scratch that itch for group discussion and debate that I first acquired on the yam-based forums on ucscb, that was the Well’s raison d’etre, and which made me feel like I’d found an online home on Tribe back in 2003 or so. When someone comes up with a group-discussion-focused social networking site that really and truly works and plays well with other sites and data I/O standards — and I don’t mean this half-hearted OpenID/Facebook Connect crap, either, but real interoperability — I’ll be so there. In the meantime, that wonderful middle-ground between blogs/journals and messaging is laying fallow, I’m stuck with either tools that don’t work with my other tools or tools that aren’t very good, and that’s just sad.

Am I wrong? Comment and tell me! Believe me…I want to be wrong on this.

OK, so…I have posts brewing in my cranium about my recent viewing of Milk and another entry into my “The Best Bands You’ve (Probably) Never Heard Of” series, but I just wanted to take a moment here to give some props to some perspicacious peeps. (OK, white girl…enough of that unless you’re talking about marshmallow birds!)

I just wanted to thank all the people who’ve written the really neat WordPress plugins, like the über-sweet iWPhone Plugin+Theme from ContentRobot I mentioned in a previous post, that give my site some of its whiz-bang features that I find so useful and neat. Those of you reading this on LiveJournal need to head over to my real blog now so you can see what the hell it is I’m on about.

First, the “broadcasters.” I loves me some “wrote-once, publish everywhere” functionality, let me tell you! And thanks to the makers of Twitpress, Wordbook, and Live+Press, my posts are announced on Twitter and Facebook and re-posted on LiveJournal, respectively. So, to Tom Purnell (Twitpress), Robert Tsai (Wordbook), and Tania Morell (Live+Press…and BTW rock on, sista! ), thank you! You all rock…out loud.

One single geek named Robert Felty is responsible for 3 separate plugins — Collapsing Archives, Collapsing Categories, and Collapsing Links — which enable me to make my archives, categories, and links all collapse (imagine that!) nicely under their headings. Because of him, my sidebar is manageable and silky-smooth, without any split ends or frizzies! Rock on, Robert, and thanks very much indeed.

My blog is also deeply enriched by Google-y goodness thanks to some seriously geekly geeks. Ronald Heft, Jr. is responsible for Google Analyticator, which makes dealing with Google Analytics that much easier. I only have the alias, “linewbie,” to thank for wrangling Google AdSense with All in One Adsense and YPN. Arne Brachhold gives me the Google XML Sitemaps plugin, which ensures that a full sitemap of my blog site is submitted to Google (and some other search engines) periodically. Finally, thanks to Libin Pan and Michael Klein and Google AJAX Translation, my comments can be translated into a whole slew of languages. Unfortunately, that only works on the first 500 characters of blog posts for now, so I have that feature turned off…but I’m hoping to be able to use it for posts in their entirety soon, too! Thanks to all of you.

And, speaking of comments, it’s only thanks to Ronald Huereca that I have the seriously sweet WP Ajax Edit Comments plugin which makes commenting on my posts so swanky and smooth. You all should try it sometime. It isn’t painful, I promise.

The tag cloud in my sidebar is pretty gratuitous, but the effort that went into designing that particular piece of Flashified goodness wasn’t. So I give many, many thanks indeed to Roy Tanck for WP-Cumulus.

The good people at ShareThis make it easy for all of my readers (all four of you) to share my posts with an uncaring world on innumerable social bookmarking sites and via several other means as well. You guys and gals kick much booty! Now, if only my readers would actually use it and get me some deeply undeserved internet fame and more eyeballs to get me that mad AdSense money. (I could be a hundredaire by next quarter. Money…power…friends…influence!)

cformsII is one seriously big and bad-ass plugin of whose functionality I’m currently using only a shameful fraction to power my “contact me” page. But I’m glad it’s there and it’s so capable, ’cause I just know I’m going to find more uses for it sooner or later. My hat is off to you both, Nicki and Oliver at delicious:days.

And, finally (well, for now…), to all the fine people who keep WordPress blogs as spam-free as humanly and algorithmically possible, my deep, abiding, and eternal gratitude! Matt Mullenweg’s Akismet plug-in comes with every single copy of WordPress for a damned good reason, and Joe Tan’s TanTanNoodles Simple Spam Filter is no slouch either. May they both keep the trolls and errant Nigerians with cash-flow problems away from me for a long, long time.

To the American “Big 3″ and to all the rest of the auto manufacturers of the world,

I know you value your time, so I’m just going to get right on down to brass tacks. Anybody with even a lick of sense knows that the future of personal transportation is electric. It’s not natural gas, ethanol, hydrogen, biofuel, or anything else. Cars and trucks are going to go from gasoline to gas-electric hybrids to full-electrics. You should already know this. If you don’t, then Houston, we have a problem.

So, working from that assumption, I propose that there are a few changes you’re going to have to make to your business model and a few characteristics that you’re really going to need to engineer into the large, rechargeable batteries that are going to power these hybrids and electrics.

The first change is that you’re really going to have to stop looking at a 5- or even 10-year cycle of planned obsolescence. The simple fact of the matter is that people just can’t afford a new (or even new to them) car every 5 years along with the eternal financing payments. Let it go. I mean, you wouldn’t want cheap, high-quality, high-service public transit to ever become a reality in the United States, now would you? That’s just what that cycle would cause as more and more people find the costs of personal vehicle ownership excessively onerous, and I honestly can’t say that it would be a bad thing. But it should keep all of you awake nights.

No…instead, you should think about letting people think of their cars as 10-year, 20-year, or even lifetime investments. Since electric vehicles have far fewer moving parts than internal combustion-powered vehicles, they’re simply going to last longer. And, as battery technology improves, the swapping out of the main battery is going to be effectively like getting a whole new car for the consumer, but at a fraction of the cost. And there’s where you’re going to make your money…selling those batteries and parts, not to mention being able to offer people much longer-term financing that would slash the monthly cost of ownership for those who need it most.

You need to make those batteries easily accessed and cheaply serviced or replaced, too. It defeats the purpose if someone has to pay, say, $2,000 for a new battery, and then another $2,000 or more simply to have it installed. That’s just gouging your consumer and it’ll drive them away to the competing automaker(s) who get this part right.

Additionally, you all might want to consider creating one single standard for electric vehicle batteries. As of now, one of the technological hurdles that rechargeable battery technology, and therefor electric vehicles in general, face is recharge time. Even a “fast charge” is still a couple of hours. So, barring some major breakthrough in this area, an infrastructure of standardized, swappable batteries would also make for a way to keep the service station infrastructure alive and to enable EV drivers to take the kinds of long trips they’ve grown used to during the age of fossil fuels.

Do these things and both Americans and people all around the world will be able to rekindle the kind of love affair with the personal car or truck that so characterized the prosperity of post-WWII America, and all guilt-free. Don’t worry…those with the means and motivation will still buy new vehicles every few years to have the latest and greatest, but those without won’t feel as much like the have-nots they do now. And suddenly, the “used” market might not mean the end of a revenue stream for you from a particular vehicle.

Think about it. I’m giving this to you for free because I think it’s just the right thing to do.

Sincerely Yours,
-SonyaLynn

Addendum: I realize that the two ideas of selling batteries and a battery-swap-based service station infrastructure may sound mutually exclusive, but they don’t have to be. The idea of “refueling” with a battery swap assumes the lack of a breakthrough, such as are being experimented with now using the large-scale capacitors, which would allow for a charge time commensurate with current refueling times with gasoline. But even failing that development, a patented standard for batteries, ports, and quick-swapping mechanisms designed by one or more American automaker(s) would, almost by necessity, become a global standard that can be profitably licensed to foreign automakers, service station chains, and even third-party battery manufacturers. When you can still make some money off your competitors, that’s got to be a good thing. A joint venture between all of the “Big 3″ to design and sell standardized batteries, chargers, and “swappers” would become quite the cash-cow.