Internet Marketing and Social Media Consultants

About a month ago, Comcast announced that it was going to confine its users to 250GB a month in bandwidth usage before implementing overage charges. Now, they’re testing a new method that will throttle heavy users during peak hours regardless of what users are utilizing the bandwidth for.

Comcast has come under fire for “delaying,” as they call it, P2P traffic during peak hours. “Delaying” is Comcast’s legalese word for “blocking,” and the FCC decided that it needed to get involved earlier this year. “Comcast blocking BitTorrent is the canary in the coal mine for corporations that seek to take over the Internet,” said Free Press‘ Ben Scott earlier this year. “The FCC should immediately stop Comcast from blocking Internet traffic and then proceed with this important investigation and public comment process. It’s high time to involve the American public in this matter.”
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Currently, significant parts of Twitter are down (in fact, the whole website). However, instead of blaming the problems on scalability issues associated with Ruby on Rails (which is the most popular explanation about the problem), or their own slow reaction time to the problem, Twitter is choosing to blame its most loyal and heavy users, such as tech blogger ubermensch Robert Scoble.

Scoble follows 20,000 people on Twitter and is followed by about the same number. Obviously, he and similar users put a heavy strain on the system. His reply? “Please Twitter: fix your darn problems and stop blaming your users. You now have $15,000,000 in venture. You have no excuses anymore.”
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There’s a piece by Nick Wingfield of the Wall Street Journal today about what Forrester Research is speculating will be the next steps for Apple. Apparently, they believe that Apple’s future lies in the home, in every room, and with gadgets that aren’t exactly mind-blowing.

This is just Forrester’s forecast of what is coming, and nothing is set in stone. But it makes sense that Apple’s next steps would be about simplifying and modernizing everyday household items.

For example, Forrester sees Apple coming out with touch screen HD picture frames that connect to your computer and put out various media, including videos. Of course, digital picture frames are already out there, but there could be room for Apple to improve. Excited yet?
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While this may be a blog about social media, search engine marketing, etc., I couldn’t help but notice today the dominant position Nintendo and their Wii and DS have taken in the battle against more upscale machines like the XBox 360 and Playstation 3, proving that Nintendo’s decision to maintain their niche was a brilliant one.

When the Wii came out around the same time as the other machines, many expected the high-powered X-Box 360 and Blu-Ray capable Playstation 3 would knock the gimmicky-looking Wii out of the water.
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Henry Blodget at Silicon Alley Insider wrote an article today about the potential of the Amazon Kindle to reach iPod-like status and become one of the cornerstones of Amazon’s revenue going forward.

While the current Kindle is not much to look at and is rather overpriced, it’s winning over skeptics who initially thought it wouldn’t work. Attributes like the ease of downloading books and the relatively low price of the books that are downloaded are convincing people that this could really be a phenomenon in the making.

Of course, like early versions of the iPod, people are waiting to see what the next generation Kindle looks like, and how much use early adopters get out of the product. But a healthy number of sales combined with an iTunes-like purchasing model could bring in as much as $750 million a year to Amazon by 2010, according to Mark Mahaney of Citi.
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