http://www.apple.com/au/itunes/ http://www.apple.com/au/podcasting/

In one small product point release, they seem to have gone from one piece of the podcasting puzzle, to the only game in town.

Sensible, grown men, have been bending over backwards to reconfigure RSS feeds that worked perfectly fine only a few weeks ago. Podcasters have stopped calling for people to vote for them on Podcast Alley. Almost instantly the only ladder that mattered was the iTunes ranking.

http://podcastalley.com/index.php

After encouraging listeners to download the podcasts using tools like iPodder Lemon and iPodderX – almost within a week the call went out to switch to the iTunes feed. Please. For the sake of the children !!!!

http://ipodder.sourceforge.net/index.php http://ipodderx.com/

All this fuss over something that has generally been received by existing podcasters, as a bit of a muffed launch. I doubt there is anyone who thinks Apple got it right when they released 4.9. It just reeks of a rushed job. Unusual for them really.

No doubt iTunes 5.0 when its released (probably to coincide with 5th Generation iPods – RSN) there will be fixes and within 12 months all will be well and dandy. All will be forgiven.

I tried iTunes 4.9 when it first came out. Unfortunately I was one of the many burnt badly by trying the shiny new toy when millions were also trying at the same time. My experience was a pretty crap one – slow responses, missing links etc. I know most of these things have been fixed, but I still like my iPodder Lemon software.

Maybe iTunes 5.0 will have me dancing a different tune?