What do you get when you cross the holiday season with Web 2.0 technology, some free time and a sense of humor? If you're FriendFeed, you develop a new service called "Festivus Feed", letting us FriendFeed Addicts air our grievances toward one another, and the technology market in general, in the Festivus tradition, "Airing of Grievances".

The new service, which debuted late last night, celebrates the Seinfeld-inspired alternative holiday, and features the much-famed Festivus Pole, as you can see below.


My Grievance: Robert Scoble joins every network but this one. :-)
While the Festivus Feed is wrapped in fun, it does mask a true innovation, the ability to post directly to the FriendFeed news feed, in an interesting cross between Twitter and traditional chat. Now, FriendFeed offers the ability to combine your activity from services around the Web, it lets you post individual stories through its bookmarklet, and gives the option to post comments directly. I can't wait to see the new innovations this company has planned for New Year's Day.

See also: ParisLemon: FriendFeed Morphs Into FestivusFeed for the Holidays! and Paul Buchheit: Twas the night before Festivus... or follow me on FriendFeed here.

With the new TiVo HD installed, we have access to the Amazon unbox service, letting us rent popular movie titles directly through the TiVo box. For only $3.99, we can download everything from "The Simpsons Movie" to Jim Carrey's "The Number 23" or "Close Encounters of the Third Kind", and keep each show at home for a full 30 days.

So now, from one box, I can record multiple TV channels simultaneously, get recommendations for new shows I would like, stream my iTunes and iPhoto library via TiVo Desktop, and download movies from Amazon.

Meanwhile, my Apple TV just sits there. If Apple offered movie rentals through iTunes, I'd likely have bought them through iTunes, out of loyalty, and the company's typical leading interface and ease of use. But they don't... still. So tonight, I purchased three films for $3.99 apiece, totaling $11.97, sending my money to Seattle, Washington instead of nearby Cupertino.

The more I can do with my TiVo HD or my Wii, the less I see myself using the Apple TV. The Apple TV still offers the best way to get my full iTunes Library and access YouTube through the television, but that's it. And if I keep using the Amazon unbox service and find myself happy with it, then I just might become a fairly loyal customer for them instead, even if Apple eventually follows on with movie rentals.

Apple, your time for leadership with the Apple TV has passed. Now, just get your act together and stop forcing me to give my money to your competition.

Response to Saturday's note on AssetBar's imminent debut was a lot of fun to see, as the story stirred up quite a bit of interest this week. The post hit StumbleUpon, gaining hundreds of visitors, and, garnered links from a number of sources, including Library Stuff and Harsite.com.

Meanwhile, my e-mail inbox has been inundated with dozens of new account requests.


A screenshot of Assetbar in action
There is clearly demand for change in the RSS feed reading and consumption space, and I believe think AssetBar has seized upon an incredible opportunity to combine what's traditionally been a passive event with social activity. But while I expected to hand out new invite information to the several dozen people who have sent me e-mail, I'm waiting to hear back from the company's developers, who are still working to move the service to a more robust setup in anticipation of wider use. (See: Pre-Launch delayed: Bugs to Blame)

So don't panic if you haven't yet gotten an invite. I have all the requests flagged in my e-mail in box, and will get them to you as quickly as I can. And the wait... will be worth it. If you didn't yet request an invite, please send me an e-mail, and I'll alert you as quickly as possible.

Aside from a single presidential race, Al Gore has won quite a bit over the last few years, including an Oscar and a Nobel Peace Prize. He won by getting on Apple's board of directors, and he won by being a high profile advisor to Google. He's winning by being affiliated with Kleiner Perkins Caulfield and Byers and is winning by not being a part of the 2008 presidential race, already crowded with good candidates. But his ground-breaking film, "An Inconvenient Truth", is losing opportunities on Apple's iTunes store, both by being too highly priced, and by being incorrectly labeled.

Most Apple films are $9.99 apiece, unless they are a new release, in which case they are usually $12.99. Other sought after films gain a $14.99 price tag, as Gore's film has.

Amusingly, if you go the Movie channel in Apple's iTunes store, and select "$9.99 Movies", "An Inconvenient Truth" is included, with its $14.99 price.


So are a number of other titles, including "Babel", "Freedom Writers", "Glastonbury", "Jackass 2", "Jump In!", "Nacho Libre", "The Prestige", "An Unreasonable Man", and possibly more, all of which retail for $14.99.

So what is the criteria for being listed in the "$9.99 Movies" category, if not price? Is it arbitrary? Is it a bad script that just says (price ≠ $12.99)?

Whatever it is, it's fairly inconvenient that Al Gore's great documentary is included here, as potential buyers are turned away, seeing the quintessential movie of the generation on the environment remind us instead of waste - that of money.