In this final entry on Earthling, I mainly write to say thank you all for reading, commenting, e-mailing, talking, listening, and contributing. The blog helped us make the porous membrane between internal and external conversations a bit more...porous, helped resolve lots of individual one-off needs from customers, departments, and partners, and gave us a way to participate in conversations going on around us. I have enjoyed sharing my view of the internet with you, and hearing about yours.

I'd like to extend a huge thanks as well to all of the people inside and outside of EarthLink who supported the blog in numerous ways, made me feel welcome at their meetings and planning sessions, invited me in to their corner of the world and helped me get issues addressed, strategies refined, and problems solved.

If you'd like to keep up with me, you can do so over on Extraface, my own blog. Grab the Extraface RSS feed here. And if you happen to be at BlogOrlando where I am today, come find me and say hello.

If you'd like to keep up with EarthLink news and announcements, we've developed the new RSS feed below just for that purpose:
feeds.feedburner.com/elnk

As a final programming note, on Monday I'll be permanently closing comments and trackbacks and I’ll be preparing the site for its role as an archive throughout next week. Expect to see some visual changes then.

Thanks again,
Dave Coustan

Posted by dave coustan at 2:15 PM |

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With me moving on as part of the restructuring, and the company in the midst of transition, we decided it's best to end Earthling's run. I say "we" in all honesty; assessing the situation and available resources, this is the path I recommended, and my leadership agreed.

Since I last wrote I've been working on how best to handle the "sunsetting," and what to do with all of the stuff Earthling has produced. In addition to the 459 blog entries I've published and the 1739 comments you've contributed, there are lots of other things that have come out of Earthling. When thinking about wrapping it up, it's important to think about what's behind all of those things and the larger world they connect to. And that can be complicated.

To help inform these decisions, I've been reading the advice of a few people, including Josh Hallett, Jake McKee, and Jeremiah Owyang. Jake McKee has written about the question for companies as the bus test -- i.e. could your corporate communications vehicle still persevere if the main participant were hit by a bus. Jeremiah has kept a single blog throughout his career transitions, and that's been tremendously valuable for him. In my case, I came on board to create and run a blog for EarthLink, so I knew going in that Earthling would be something of a joint interest between me and the company and would be deeply tied to both parties. Josh has recently been observing the EarthLink situation and asking some strategic and practical questions about how an individual corporate blogger and the company he/she represents should best deal with transitions. I'm working through that in realtime, and through these last couple of blog entries hopefully I can offer some insight into how I'm doing it.

Over the past two years, I poured a great deal of myself into this blog and tried to avoid too many arbitrary distinctions between Dave, the person and Dave, the guy who represents EarthLink on Earthling. I still think this approach is the right one, although it does make it difficult to make a clean break. I'm grateful the company has for the most part trusted me with hashing that out. In part to help me sort all of that out, here are the parts and how I'm accounting for them. This is an active process and I may be adding thoughts here:

• The blog entries, comments, trackbacks - I'm leaving Earthling up as an archive in case it can be useful to future readers. I'm also respectful of preserving the information here so that inbound links don't turn in to dead ends. I'll change all of the templates to make it clear that what remains is a static archive, and comments and trackbacks will no longer be accepted.
  
• The Flickr stream - For the past couple of years I've been keeping both my personal photos and EarthLink-related photos on the anearthling account, at www.flickr.com/photos/anearthing. I think that's given you a better sense of who I am and hopefully made me more accessible and easier to connect with. I've gone back and forth on how to handle this, and I think it's best for me to start a new Flickr account for myself and keep Anearthling around at least until the Flickr Pro status runs out. I'll probably mirror some of the same photos from there on my account, to make sure they don't go away. On Flickr, my new home will be www.flickr.com/photos/extraface. Add me as a contact there if you'd like to continue to see my often goofy photo stream.
  
• The RSS feed - I'm working on helping EarthLink create a new feed just for announcements, and one tough decision was whether to have that take the place of the old Earthling feed, or be a new feed that people opt-in to. I decided on the latter, and I see it this way -- it's a completely different vehicle, with different purposes, schedule, and utility. So it should have its own, new feed. As soon as that's done, I'll be passing that address along.
  
• The product blogs and employee blog directory - The product blogs will continue in the hands of their respective owners, and I'll make their placement prominent on the front of Earthling. I'll be taking down the employee directory, but welcome readers to connect with me online and vice-versa.
  
• The relationships - I've had the privilege of interacting with thousands of people through Earthling, via various forms of online communication and in person. I've helped answer questions, resolved issues, gotten and given advice, connected product teams and leadership with their users, connected people to each other, and just gotten to know a whole lot of people. Fortunately I don't see those relationships as changing much, and I get to take all of that with me, and hope that many of you will continue to keep in touch.

I'll be publishing a final blog entry next week, and will include my future contact information and more on where to find me online then.

Posted by dave coustan at 7:04 PM |

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How the heck do you follow up a restructuring announcement on a corporate blog? A Friday heh list didn’t quite seem right on the heels of such a weighty announcement, and I’ve been struggling with that question and what to talk about next. Nothing seemed quite right, so I stepped away from Earthling for a while. As I return today, I thought it might be useful to give you a brief rundown of answers to questions that you may have about the current state of things:

Were you personally impacted by the restructuring?

Yes, I was. I will be moving on from EarthLink in a few months, but will continue to help out the product teams in the meantime.

What are the plans for this blog?

I’ll be making a last couple of entries in the next few weeks and wrapping things up. As far as what the company’s plans are for how to handle that transition, as those decisions are made I will include them in those final entries.

What is EarthLink's focus now?

In plain but broad English, we're focusing our attention on how we can best serve our current user base. Teams are starting to meet within the new structure, and the executive team is working on next steps as far as the bigger picture.

How will the products and services you offer change?

Nothing to say about this yet, as the product teams and leadership are currently getting together to work through any necessary changes. Our core offerings should remain unchanged, but there may be some adjustments as we evaluate our portfolio of products with slightly newer eyes.

What is happening with Wi-Fi?

As I wrote last week, despite misinterpretations in the press, our current networks continue to operate and we continue to explore new models for Municipal Wi-Fi deployments. Glenn Fleishman of Wi-Fi Networking News explored the topic in greater depth in an interview with EarthLink CEO Rolla Huff recently.

How has it been since the restructuring as an employee?

Everyone will react to this question differently, and large scale change within any company will bring with it some growing pains. For me, it's been a little chaotic, and I'm looking forward to things settling in to a new routine. In addition to offering severance and transition assistance, the company has done some nice things to help impacted employees get their next position, like rounding up a list of all of the firms, agencies, and companies that have contacted EarthLink about possible hires and sending it our way.

If you have any additional questions, drop me a line and I'll do my best to get them answered. But bear in mind that as we work through the company transition, we're not ready to entertain conversations about future directions or next steps yet.

Posted by dave coustan at 10:40 AM |

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I've seen a few articles online this morning suggesting that EarthLink is getting out of the municipal Wi-Fi business. This is not the case. After checking with our leadership this morning, I want to confirm two points:

1. We will continue to operate our existing municipal wireless networks in cities like Philadelphia.
   
2. In the other markets such as San Francisco, we're approaching city officials to discuss needed changes in our business model, which includes them stepping up to some sort of anchor tenancy agreement. Our CEO has stated publicly that he is not willing to invest any more money in new network buildouts under the old business model: coming in up front with the cash to build out the network and trying to buy customers one at a time.

If you'd like to hear more on this question, EarthLink CEO Rolla Huff discussed it on yesterday's EarthLink Restructuring Call for Investors(free registration required).

Posted by dave coustan at 8:57 AM |

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Today EarthLink announced a corporate restructuring that included downsizing and organizational changes that refocus us on our core business. Here's a link to the full press release with all of the details. EarthLink CEO Rolla Huff sent along some brief thoughts he wanted to share with you directly via Earthling:

Today, we announced changes to EarthLink's corporate structure that better position us to operate profitably and focus on the heart of our business: delivering award-winning Internet tools and services to our customers. These changes will affect all of us -- both our friends and colleagues who will leave EarthLink, and those who will remain. I am grateful for the hard work and care that all of our employees have contributed in their tenure here, and we are seeking to make the transition as smooth as possible for everyone involved.

If you are a customer, these changes will not impact the level of reliability and service and support you have come to expect from EarthLink. If you are a partner, nothing in terms of our relationship has changed; what’s changed is that we’ve right-sized our business to better compete in today’s marketplace.

Sincerely,
Rolla Huff

Comments are closed on this entry.

Posted by dave coustan at 12:13 PM |

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Late last week EarthLink made available a beta version of Montage, a new, free email/RSS/address book suite for Windows XP and Vista. It's a desktop application that lets you handle multiple email accounts along with RSS feeds and podcasts, all with a unified interface and organization system. Mike Strutton, Director of Client Software, calls the treatment of multiple inboxes "Separately/Together," and he explains how it works as follows:

"Using Montage you can manage multiple email accounts EarthLink/AOL/Yahoo/Gmail/Etc. in a way that other Windows clients don't do. You can view the inbox as an aggregate across all accounts, or just one account -- it's simple. No need for filters/folders or jumping back and forth between different webmail applications. This was one of two features that got the most reaction in our demonstrations and user testing."

Montage Mail View (click to see at screen resolution)

Smart Sorts are another Montage feature that help you bring order to your inbox. They allow you to automatically place email or feeds that match certain conditions into a folder or "sort". This is a way to nondestructively make piles of or views into your information without manually thinking about, keeping track of, and moving everything yourself. The productivity nerd sites abound with examples of how to use smart sorting to get a better handle on your overflowing inbox. If you're a Mac user familiar with the Apple approach to email and desktop management, you're probably already enjoying non-destructive sorting and easy mailbox aggregation.

On the RSS aggregation side of the application, Montage takes the RSS-as-email metaphor and treats individual articles within feeds as if they were email messages with the titles as subject lines and a read/unread state. There's a preview pane that shows either the article summary(referred to as the "abstract") or the fully-rendered web page the article comes from. You can also apply Smart Sorts and folders to feeds, and use tags to organize articles you'd like to hold on to in ways that are meaningful to you. There are also some good features behind the scenes, like it appears there is built-in support for authenticated feeds. The only one I know of off the top of my head today is Daring Fireball, but I expect to see lots more of these in the future.

Continue reading "Separately/Together And EarthLink Montage"

Posted by dave coustan at 12:03 PM |

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• The beta release of EarthLink's new integrated email client, address book, RSS, and podcast aggregation software Montage is now available as a free download for Windows XP and Vista. Here's the FAQ, and I'll have a more detailed write-up on Montage shortly. (Alright, not technically on a product blog yet, but it is now ;))
  
• Protection Control Center version 3.0 launched last week, with support for Microsoft Windows Vista. Ben has all of the details on the PCC blog.
  
• Travis answered a common new user question about deleting posts from myEarthLink Reader.
  
• And John wrote about increasing the folder limits in Web Mail in response to several user suggestions, so that you can now make up to 200 folders in your account.
  
• (update: a straggler) On the myEarthLink start page blog, Tom explains how to change your preference for what happens when you sign out of Web Mail.

Posted by dave coustan at 4:18 PM |

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Just got a Fin in the mail today (thanks, Helio!). It is one thin, sleek machine. I'm already having a bit of an identity crisis -- not sure if I'm a QWERTY powerhouse Ocean type or a wafer-thin magnesium-encased Fin type. Fortunately with Helio's account system, if you are lucky enough to have two devices, you can switch back and forth as you please with an online switching interface.

For scale, at 11.43 mm the Fin is thin enough to act as an underline on the spine of a book like this:

Here's another size comparison, some Fin unboxings a previously recorded Ocean/Fin Live Grope, and a Quick Look video.

As an aside, I also just got photo geotagging to work (to Flickr, via Helio UP on Fin/Ocean), which means my photos will now automatically be added to Flickr's world map interface. I'll write a separate entry on that.

Posted by dave coustan at 2:25 PM |

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This morning Helio released its newest device, the superthin, magnesium-cased Fin. At 0.45 inches (or 11.43 millimeters if you prefer), it's the thinnest clamshell-style device in the U.S. market.

(it's this thin)

It does everything its QWERTY sibling the Ocean does including the integrated messaging system, a great AIM client, and GPS integration, and also has a beefed-up 3 megapixel still and video camera.

Helio also released several software updates today, including a rentable ($2.99/day) Garmin turn-by-turn voice GPS app to go along with the included Google Maps for Mobile with GPS software, and an update to device desktop RSS software H.O.T. for the Heat, Fin, and Drift. The new version of H.O.T. supports adding your own feeds as channels, so you can receive updates on your device desktop and see them at a glance.

I've used Google Maps for Mobile with GPS on my Ocean countless times to search for restaurants, call them up for reservations with click-to-call, and then dial up directions on the fly from wherever I am. I can see using the Garmin Mobile app for those times when I don't have a copilot, have no idea where I am, and need the heads-up turn-by-turn directions spoken out loud to me.

The Fin costs $175 and is available at Helio.com, in Helio stores, or by calling 1-888-88-HELIO.

As far as the pun watch, I had to really stretch this time around. The major gadget blogs stuck with prosaic titles like "The Helio Fin," and I had to do some searching to find the more traditional punny blog entry titles. Here are the best of those:

• Helio dips a thin Fin into the flip phone pool
  
• Helio Fin - Thin is most definitely IN!
  
• Ain't No Fin Thinner Than This
  
• And the award for weirdest Fin headline goes to...
  Helio Fin, the Fine that it Satisfies - Either a weird machine translation, an SEO-spammy mashup, or a human who needs a little more practice.

Posted by dave coustan at 2:58 PM |

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I'm working on a couple of small enhancements to Earthling this afternoon:

• Enlarging the width of the main content area to allow for standard 500 pixel photos straight from Flickr
  
• Added the AideRSS widget to the right side, which provides some suggestions for the top posts on Earthling from the past month

Special thanks to Chris at Citizen Studio for his assistance with some graphics crunching.

Posted by dave coustan at 4:21 PM |

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Principal Engineer Jeff Pabian drops in again today with an update to Usenet Revisited:

Hey Folks,

Jeff Pabian, Principal Engineer at EarthLink here. Dave asked me to post a follow-up to Usenet Revisited since we made the cutover to our outsourced Usenet service provider recently.

The cat is out of the bag; EarthLink is outsourcing our Usenet service to Supernews. As I said previously, we were all pretty excited we would be able to improve our service. There are some changes and growing pains if you will, but over all I believe the Usenet service we offer now to be much improved.

Today, I'll talk about what I believe the improvements are and some of the issues we've come up against, and what might be in store for phase II. First, just to clarify, I am not the Product Manager for the service; I'm just a long-time employee who has seen the ups and downs of the service over the years. My colleagues and I conduct analysis and make recommendations to the Product group, (who also read the blog and comments and post every one in a while).

If you've been over to the earthlink.* newsgroups, you've most likely seen the lively discussion we've been having around the changeover to the outsourced provider. Right off the bat, I consider these items to be the biggest areas of improvement:

• Complete posts
  
• Way longer retention
  
• Additional newsgroups that ELNK hasn't added for years (binary AND text)
  
• Off network access (provided you have a valid Earthlink username and password)
  
• Excellent anti-spam measures
  
• No download cap / limit
  

In contrast, our old news service had the following, uh... features:

• Incomplete posts
  
• 2-3 day retention for binary groups
  
• We haven't added groups for about two years
  
• Limited to ELNK networks, only
  
• 5GB limit with a rolling 30 day window, then your connection was throttled down to 64Kbps

As far as what we're hearing from you all:

• Some users have had problems with their clients and seeing the changes to the new groups. The fixes range from simply "resetting" the news server settings in your client to completely removing and re-creating your newserver account.
  
• Some customers feel the download rate we're currently using to be inadequate. I anticipate we'll be able to conduct some analysis and adjust the rate accordingly, (but don't quote me on that). I can say that I've shared the concerns and feedback I've gotten with the product managers and the support groups.

We are getting ready to begin "Phase II" of the project. If you have any ideas or input towards "Phase II" please feel free to send them to me or post a comment, or... post it to one of the EarthLink newsgroups*!

Thank you for your feedback and keep it coming.

*Here's a listing of them:

• earthlink.watercooler
  
• earthlink.test
  
• earthlink.support.wireless
  
• earthlink.support.windows
  
• earthlink.support.web
  
• earthlink.support.usenet.newstest2
  
• earthlink.support.usenet
  
• earthlink.support.unix
  
• earthlink.support.startpage
  
• earthlink.support.other
  
• earthlink.support.macos
  
• earthlink.support.integrations
  
• earthlink.support.highspeed.satellite
  
• earthlink.support.highspeed.dsl
  
• earthlink.support.highspeed.cable
  
• earthlink.support.email
  
• earthlink.support.dialup
  
• earthlink.general-discussion
  
• earthlink.coffeehouse
  

Posted by dave coustan at 4:48 PM |

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I've been in "Certified Scrum Master" training for most of the past couple of days, which has my head all abuzz about agile development processes. In a week or so, I'll get my Scrum Master license in the mail. Not sure if that comes with a decoder ring.

After our initial round of Scrum training at the end of May, Dave summed up his impressions and the basic principles. To recap, Scrum is a rapid development method based on completing a set of "shippable features" (features or functionality that you could potentially release to the world) within a locked time period, called a sprint. You decide what you'll be doing at the beginning of each sprint, and you make every effort to get that work done in the sprint period, while not adding to it

Scrum trainer Pete Behrens returned this week to complete our training, and his second session was well-timed. The myEarthLink team has now been through two two-week sprints, and is gearing up to start a third on Monday. Some things have gone really well, but we've hit some major obstacles too. So, this week, we were right at the point where we have a little experience under our belts and several questions on our minds.

Speaking from my "product owner" seat, these have been some of the successes so far:

Continue reading "Scrum Update"

Posted by Tom Harris at 10:14 AM |

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Guest blogger Tom here, taking the wheel while Dave is on vacation.

I expect to talk a bit this week about my main project, the new myEarthLink start page. So, I thought it would be helpful to take a page from the "Lost" playbook and do a quick "catch-up episode" explaining what the portal team has been up to.

Our story so far:

Toward the end of last year, we took on the considerable task of redesigning the myEarthLink portal from top to bottom. We started with the portal's front door: the personal start page. We had a lot on our mind as we got down to business, but I would sum up our overall mission as "tightening up." The main user criticism of the classic start page has been "too much clutter," so a big part of our focus was streamlining the new design.

In tightening up, we focused on two things: grouping features together logically and keeping important information close at hand without taking up a lot of space on the page. One of the key ideas here was to show select information as soon as you load the page, and pop up additional information when you click a tab or button for more. This post from the myEarthLink product blog walks through some of the details of that approach.

In early February, we launched our Alpha release to EarthLink employees and a small group of early testers. At the end of February, we opened up our Preview release to everybody. Since then, we've launched several major updates with smaller tweaks along the way. Here are the highlights:

Continue reading "Previously, on myEarthLink"

Posted by Tom Harris at 9:25 AM |

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Helio Ocean users can now sign up for a 60-day free beta trial of Microsoft ActiveSync that enables calendar, contact, and email syncing with Microsoft Exchange Server. The service will cost $9.99 per month after the beta, and an additional software update will include Helio File Viewer, with support for viewing .doc, .ppt, .pdf and .xls files on the Ocean, which will make many EarthLink Ocean users happy.

Eric Zeman at InformationWeek observed, "It does everything from POP email to instant messaging, text messaging, and picture messaging--all while looking hip and embracing the young-at-heart. Many publications, including InformationWeek, have listed it as a solid alternative to the iPhone. But is it a business device?"

I'm not sure what that means any more for devices and services. Let's look at the example of Facebook. Initially it was built to service and is still used by millions and millions of high school and college students. But there's another set of users as well. Part of the recent explosive growth at Facebook comes from people signing on to use it for what can be considered business applications. Robert Scoble writes an awful lot about how he uses Facebook. Although it hasn't replaced Scobleizer, he sees it as a new platform for publishing and communication:

"See, what’s cool about Facebook is that for the first time I can see all of you and anything you publish on your Facebook profile also comes to ME.

In five words he nailed Facebook and why this thing has such huge value.

Facebook makes my blog seem very one-way. I can’t see anytime one of you writes something, or puts some media up, even when you do it on your own blogs. Facebook makes our media a lot more two-way."

Earlier this week, Judi at Web Worker Daily wrote up 12 ways to use Facebook Professionally. And Business 2.0 is looking to Facebook users to help them stay in print.

The line between what's "business-oriented" and what isn't is more blurry than it's ever been and can't be drawn based on form factor. The communications needs of "passionate young consumers" necessarily have lots of crossover with what would be considered the traditional business user. I'm seeing SMS become a much more common form of business communication all around me, and for a long time that was thought of as solely as a young person's social medium. As more of those worlds intersect, the same things that make the Ocean appeal as a personal communication device give it appeal to business users.

Business tools don't look matte speckled gray anymore and don't firewall off your needs as a "person" from your needs as a "business person," thank goodness. Helio's addition of Exchange now just gives people who use Exchange Server a way to integrate more of their streams of contact into the same communications system. It doesn't magically become a "business device," nor was it initially a "non-business device."

Posted by dave coustan at 11:10 AM |

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A round-up of what's happening on the EarthLink product blogs:

• On the PCC blog, Ben is baiting a phisher scammer to demonstrate the likely scenario if you answer a "get rich helping me launder money" scam email.
  
• John's Web Mail blog answers a question about how to automatically forward all of your EarthLink email.
  
• A tip for the myFavorites blog -- check out Anil Dash's article on how people have come to use the "toread" tag in social bookmarking applications. If you want to hunt around for other interesting ways people use tags in myFavorites, you can look at the tags in the "Everyone" tab on the main page. Or just try a url that starts with http://myfavorites.earthlink.net/tags/ and then add any word to see what people use it for. Gregg recently started using revisit for things that are good and merit a re-read. I use [this is good] to mark things I find particularly excellent.
  
• Tom from the Security Center writes about all of the various groups that help fight internet malware, scams, spam, and mischief.

Posted by dave coustan at 1:33 PM |

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Through our own networks and products, partnerships, and agreements, EarthLink looks to provide as many choices as possible to get internet and voice services to you the way you want them. If you look at what we offer throughout the country, it's a pretty diverse menu including standard DSL, accelerated dial-up, several different types of voice over IP, cable, satellite, DSL2, and Wi-Fi at home and throughout select cities. And as always there are more forms in the works via our next-gen broadband team. Today we announced that in Verizon territories in many of the states we service, we can now offer "freestanding DSL," or the ability to get our DSL service alone, without having to also pay the phone company for phone service if you don't want it. Freestanding DSL is now available(product page) in Verizon territory, including parts of California, Florida, Illinois, Indiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Hampshire, New York, New Jersey, North Carolina, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Texas, Washington state, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, D.C., West Virginia and Wisconsin. This should help lots of people reduce their communications bills and stop paying for services they don't want or need.

This isn't the first service we've rolled out to help achieve that goal. EarthLink DSL and Home Phone service, also known in the industry sometimes as Line-powered voice, was one of the first products we offered that put you in a position to fire your phone company. In fact, search Google for that phrase and as of today the first result is still the blog of EarthLink alum Chris Holland explaining how it allows you to do just that in the areas where it's offered.

All of these choices and the specifics of what's available where can make it difficult to lay out the best option available to someone in a particular place off the top of my head, but at our EarthLink High Speed page you can browse for what's available to your home specifically via the availability check tool. If you want the fastest speeds available and VoIP service that works even if your household power goes out, keep an eye out for DSL and Home Phone service, or if you're in one of the cities where we're building municipal Wi-Fi, that's a good choice for portability. And now in many parts of the country, if you just want plain old DSL but don't want to pay the extra fees associated with keeping a landline active, you can do that too.

Posted by dave coustan at 10:45 AM |

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Erin Murphy and Don Roberts, product managers for myEarthLink content, sent along the following update explaining some changes to myEarthLink Radio:

We’re proud to have partnered with Pandora to offer myEarthLink Radio powered by Pandora. While we at EarthLink enjoyed the service and used it extensively, it never found the level of acceptance in the myEarthLink community that we and Pandora had hoped for. While we and Pandora are disappointed, we thank our friends at Pandora for their creativity and hard work.

We went back to the drawing board to develop a new and improved myEarthLink Radio and myEarthLink Music Channel. Pandora is wonderful at helping users to discover new artists and songs that they might like, but discovery is only one piece of a truly useful music site and player. Just as important is granting access to and allowing you to store songs, albums, and artists that you already like and want to hear. Fortunately, we found a like-minded partner in Rhapsody, which allows you to save and listen to the music you already know you like as well as choose from more than 100 radio stations, ranging from acid jazz to afro-pop, bluegrass to bossa nova. Rhapsody requires a monthly subscription to reap all the goodies of the full Rhapsody service, but no worries—there’s plenty to enjoy for free: You can listen to more than 25 stations absolutely free for as long as you like, and if you have a particular song in mind, you can use one of your 25 “free plays” to listen to it on demand.

In the next few months, users can look forward to an expanded and improved myEarthLink Music Channel, one that will help users find new songs and artists in their favorites genres, keep them up to date on the latest music news, and give them access to the hottest music videos.

If you’re a devoted user of myEarthLink Radio powered by Pandora, we thank you! You’ll be able to get to your myEarthLink Radio stations on Pandora for the next few weeks by clicking the “Looking for your Pandora stations” link in the myEarthLink Radio area. After that, never fear—you’ll continue to have access to your stations directly through Pandora. And we hope that you’ll come try the new myEarthLink Radio from Rhapsody.

Posted by dave coustan at 5:03 PM |

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Update: The first phase of the Usenet changes described below have been completed, and Jeff has published more information here.

Principal Engineer Jeff Pabian borrows Earthling today:

Hey Folks,

Dave let me step in and post about something we are all pretty excited about.

Internet veterans and the savvier users among us will be familiar with a service called Usenet. You might have heard them called “Internet newsgroups” by some of the other providers. This was one of the first services on the Internet and it even existed before (the common use of) email as a way for users on various nodes to communicate electronically.

Today, the service has evolved into a service that allows people to communicate with like-minded people in various newsgroups, (like rec.running or rec.games,chess for example) to discuss topics, get help, tell stories and other things. If you have used Google to search “Groups” you have taken a foray into the world of Usenet.

Earthlink has offered this service to our users since the beginning. However, we’ll be the first to recognize that our Usenet service has been… let’s just say, not up to par for the last few years. I know several of you have written Earthling and to customer support about this. Although there hasn’t been much to share until now, we’ve been evaluating options and working on a plan to bring our Usenet offering back up to acceptable levels and get it where it needs to be to meet the expectations of the mainstream user.

In an effort to increase the level of service, we are working on outsourcing our Usenet service to a top-notch provider. If the current experience offers around two or three days of retention, the improved experience will offer months of retention with a lot more complete postings than we’ve been able to offer in the recent past. Internally, my fellow engineers are very excited about offering a great Usenet service AGAIN.

Continue reading "Usenet Revisited"

Posted by dave coustan at 12:04 PM |

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Weekend blog entries are fairly rare for me, but I wanted to write up some thoughts about my first day with the iPhone while they're fairly fresh in my mind. Now that I have both an Ocean and an iPhone in my hands, I'm well equipped to start thinking about how they stack up side-by-side.

iPhone in hand

I'm putting this entry in the "@EarthLink" section as a reminder that Helio is a joint venture between my employer, EarthLink, and SK-Telecom, and that Helio provides me free use of their devices and services. This entry reflects my own opinion and experiences.

Ocean in hand

Getting to know the iPhone has been really really fun. Especially because of the innovations around the touch screen interface, I think along with the Ocean it does point the way to the beginnings of a new kind of device, and Helio's "don't call it a phone" mantra equally applies here. In fact, the interface is so different from what I'm used to, I feel much more like a newbie learning a brand new operating system than I have in a while. As an example, when I first started browsing the web, I couldn't figure out how to just close the browser window. No "X", no obvious box to hit. Or how to wake it from sleep. Depending on what you're looking for, the prospect of being a total newbie again could either excite you or turn you off.

Read on for more.

Continue reading "Ocean In One Hand, iPhone In The Other"

Posted by dave coustan at 2:01 PM |

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If you're an Helio Ocean user, there are a couple of updates to the onboard apps you ought to take a look at. These haven't been officially announced and according to Crunchgear that will happen on Monday, but I've seen them publicly available on the Ocean I use, set them up, and given them a quick test drive.

First off, there's a new and easier-to-navigate version of MySpace Mobile in the Download Apps menu. I first spotted it a little over a week ago in the menu, and sure enough it's a refresh to the way you access MySpace. I can't get them side-by-side to do a features comparison, but it's a separate application instead of a section of the Surf menu, and it smartly adapts the full web MySpace experience to what you'd want on a smaller screen. Pages and images load quickly, layouts are formatted nicely for the size, and on profile pages, it offers you all of the basics on one screen, and then in the Go To menu you can drill deeper into categories.

Second and more exciting for an everyday Flickr user like myself, new versions of Helio UP and Helio Album make it even easier to upload photos to Flickr and video to YouTube. Within Helio UP, which you can get to by either taking a photo and hitting the blue "Helio UP" button or choosing it while looking at an existing photo in your album, hit the menu button and choose "check for updates". It should find and offer to download a new version of the software.

Once you get and install the software, go to Helio Album under the Snap menu. You should see a newly functional choice -- "share". Choose that and it will allow you to enter your upload addresses for Flickr and YouTube. There's a checkbox there to set it to auto-upload every time you Helio something UP as well. That's the fastest option, and potentially as new sites get added, it's a way to share your stuff with several places at once, to hit all of your YASPs(Yet Another Social Profile). In my experiments, this method took fewer steps than my usual way of sending a photo via email or pic msg to Flickr. But unlike that method it does add a subtle-ish transparenty Helio watermark to the lower-left corner of the photos. If that's not your thing, you can stick to the tried-and-true upload via email method by choosing "send" instead of "Helio UP".

Posted by dave coustan at 8:30 AM |

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• Much of the EarthLink press attention this week was focused on our new CEO, Rolla Huff. Here's the coverage from CNet News and CNN/Money , and for more commentary here's a link to a Google Blog Search, which seems to pull in mainstream media coverage as well.
  
• EarthLink was the featured sponsor for last Friday's episode of Rocketboom, where host Joanne showed off ebay listings including theirs of the domain name supercalifragilisticexpealiphone.com, a tornado, a time travel ring, and The Price Is Right toast. EarthLink was Rocketboom's second original sponsor in the first incarnation of their sponsorship model back in May of last year. More on how that developed here.
  
• President of EarthLink's Access and Audience business unit Craig Forman recorded a Trendspotter podcast covering his first online experiences as a pioneer user of NSFNet, the role of the new myEarthLink start page, and his vision for EarthLink's role in the lives of our users. Craig also participated in the Supernova 2007 conference. Some of the conference liveblogs, materials, and interviews are available on their Conversation Hub site -- here's a live blog from a discussion Craig participated in on Building Long-term Value Through Collaboration.
  
• We're offering free, secure Wi-Fi on our municipal networks on the Nokia N800 Internet Tablet. If you're on an N800 and within one of our Wi-Fi networks in Philadelphia, Milpitas, Anaheim, New Orleans, or Corpus Christi, you can create a free account and access the network by clicking on the EarthLink Wi-Fi logo in the connections menu or through the Tableteer portal.
  
• I also added conference badges just below the Flickr photo badge on the right of the Earthling main page, to show which upcoming events I'll be attending. I'm looking forward to leading a session on corporate blogging at BlogPhiladelphia in a few weeks. And if you're in Atlanta don't forget about tonight's SMC meeting.

Posted by dave coustan at 3:20 PM |

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If you use myEarthLink Radio off of the previous version of my.earthlink.net, today you'll notice that application serves you a message from Pandora CEO Tim Westergren instead of the music you usually get. Along with hundreds of webcasters, Pandora is participating in the Internet Radio Day Of Silence, and is therefore going dark today to shine a light on the Copyright Royalty Board's recent drastic increase in online music licensing fees that is making it difficult for all online streaming music providers to do business. Ian Rogers provides some more context on Yahoo!'s Yodel Anecdotal blog and a timeline of events on the Yahoo! Music blog. SaveNetRadio suggests that if you want to do something to help the cause, you can call your congresspersons and ask them to co-sponsor the "Internet Radio Equality Act" that would fix the rate hike.

Update: I read via Rusty and TechCrunch that Last.FM is about the only major music streaming service not participating. Their side of the story is over here. They see the day of silence as "punishing the user" unnecessarily. I think if this is their position, they should be making some other significant gesture today supporting the cause, as any gains will be to their benefit and they're all in this together. I'd like to see a "we don't believe in punishing our users over this, but here's what we're doing instead..." that's something other than business as usual.

Posted by dave coustan at 9:20 AM |

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Today Rolla Huff joins EarthLink as our new President and CEO. He comes to us from MPower Communications, where he served as Chairman and CEO. I look forward to meeting him and hearing more about his vision for the company.

There's more about him and the board's search in the press release issued this morning.

Posted by dave coustan at 11:15 AM |

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I was out of commission with a nasty cold for the past day and a half, so I stayed away from Reader for a decent stretch longer than usual. When I came back to it this morning, thanks to one of the new features, at the end of my first page of articles I saw this:

Previously when the number was lowish, I really liked knowing. But with the number so high today, it added some stress to my morning. Getting through my articles felt more like work than it usually does, and I felt like I had to get to all of them, instead of that breezy feeling I usually have that I can always skip a bunch and nothing bad will happen. Prior the new feature add, when I wasn't at all reminded what lay ahead at the bottom of the page, often I'd stop short and didn't feel stressed about it.

I've said before that a good test of a feed reader is what it feels like after you come back from an absence, and after this test I feel like maybe we've lost a little of that breeziness. As a Reader devotee, I think we should do some more thinking around the psychology of knowing what lies ahead. What should that moment be like when you first return after a long absence? Should that be a special case, and be handled in some special way? And on the flipside, what should happen when you get through all your recently updateds? Is there a way we can mark that moment or would that sort of goal-orientedness add to the stress factor? Maybe there's a way to mark it more than we do now without making it emphasized until you get there. A powerup or a surprise.

This is one of two new places on the app where Reader gives you a little more information. The other is in the "Recently Updated" box, which now looks like this:

I like the new timestamp lots. It gives you some good context for what you're seeing.

Reader basked in a lot of good attention when it launched, but since then I think it's gotten too comfortably nestled in its place while the closest comparable reader, Google's, has done some really innovative things. Reader is still a daily addiction for me, but it could be much better. I think there's still a huge opportunity for ours -- how about if we dedicated ourselves to making it the most stress-free and encouraging environment out there for getting through your morning's work? The app you look forward to seeing every morning, that brings you the things that are valuable to you, and does it in such a way that doesn't nag or overwhelm you on top of all of your everyday nags and concerns. It would be a worthy mission.

Posted by dave coustan at 11:00 AM |

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You might remember the new EarthLink Security Center from its beta launch back in April. Kinks have been worked out, a little polish has been added, and as of yesterday Security Center is now officially out there as a full product. As you may have noticed, our beta releases don't tend to stay in beta for long. Keep up with ongoing news about the Security Center and talk to the team via their product blog.

We've also got a new build of the myEarthLink start page as of today, bringing with it the ability for you to remove some of the page features if you don't want them on your page. Tom has the full story.

We're also anticipating a new build of myEarthLink Reader rolling out very shortly -- it's short on cheap thrills but long on much-needed performance enhancements and bug fixes.

Posted by dave coustan at 11:50 AM |

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