Crap

I am glad that someone compiled a list of all of the unanswered questions that the Lost producers/writers left when the show ended.

I don't really care about the answers to most of these but watching it irritates me that they jerked us around with the Dharma/Others/Walt/4-toed statue crap when it didn't matter at all. Oh, and the fucking numbers and the whole ARG thing. "All of this matters", Jack? Uh, no.

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This is what will do facebook in.

Last week I learned that if you ‘Like’ something on Facebook, you give that entity permission to put updates (read: ads) in your newsfeed.

Yesterday a friend emailed me a link to watch the new Nike World Cup 2010 ad. It was recommended from a friend, so I was pretty motivated to watch it - even when they forced me to “Like” it before I had watched it.

No doubt it’s a fantastic ad. It’s exciting, and football fans the world over are waiting with baited breath for the World Cup to start.

No doubt it cost them an immense sum of money, and they need to work hard to justify the cost. Today, this shows up in my newsfeed:

This campaign is completely dishonest. It should be clear to people what they are signing up to when they hit the “Like” button on the video. In fact, people shouldn’t be forced to hit “Like” just to watch it, and when they do, it should be clear that they are allowing Nike to send them messages in their newsfeed.

Welcome to our newest form of spam.

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So, we all know that Apple will be releasing the next version of the iPhone sometime this summer which usually means that a whole bunch of people are going to want to upgrade when that happens. The unfortunate part of that deal is that they end up having to pay some sort of early termination fee for their existing iPhone. Now as much as that sucks and really speaks badly of AT&T it seemed to be a price people were willing to pay.

Well that may change – drastically.

Word is, via the Wall Street Journal, that AT&T is going to jack up the price you will have to pay for that early termination (ETF) to an almost ridiculous price.

AT&T Inc. (T) plans to raise the fee it charges customers trying to get out of their smartphone wireless contracts early, a move that comes amid expectations that the carrier will lose exclusivity on the iPhone over the next year.

The Dallas telecommunications provider will raise its early termination fees to $325 from $175 on contracts signed for smartphones, as well as cellular-connected netbooks. But for contracts on feature or messaging phones, AT&T will drop the fee by $25 to $150. The changes, which don’t apply to current customers, take effect for new and renewing customers on June 1.

Victor Godinez at the Dallas Morning News Technology Blog has gotten confirmation from AT&T on this.

UPDATE: I just spoke with AT&T spokesman Mark Siegel, and he confirmed the numbers in the Journal report.

“The idea is, and we think that it’s fair approach, that if you spend less on a device, your early termination fee should be less,” he said. “If you spend more, your early termination fee should be more.”

He said the decision to implement the higher fee was unrelated to the iPhone or any other single phone.

I wonder if anyone truly believe that crap.

I recently crossed 1,000 friends on Facebook. Am I actually friends with a thousand people? No. Not even close. If I were using Facebook to only be in contact with people I consider myself at least somewhat close to, I’d probably have more like 100 friends. Maybe less.

For a long time I haven’t cared about using Facebook in this restricted way because I’ve basically been using it like Twitter — which is to say, with the assumption that just about everything is public (and I have a filter for the few things I don’t want public). The problem I’ve been encountering though is a massive amount of quasi-spam.

Many of the people that I follow that I don’t really know seem to love to auto-suggest that I become a fan of some bullshit page that they’re in some way affiliated with. Most of these things they’re suggesting I’ve never even heard of. I ignore every single one of these every time. Yet, they keep coming, every day. More and more.  

Had I not accepted them as friends, they wouldn’t be able to bombard me with this shit. But I did. And so they can. 

Yes, that’s my own fault, but it has me thinking about Facebook at a high level. As the company continues to move to make more of its users’ data available to the public, I think it’s time to simply allow people to follow other people without the need for reciprocation. 

This way people would be free to follow me, but if I don’t follow them back, they can’t send me requests for things like signing up for their page. 

Yes, it’s basically the same model Twitter has. (You can follow me, but unless I follow you, you can’t DM me.) But it would be potentially more useful with Facebook because of all the different things you can do (beyond just messaging) on that service.

Yes, I know that this is why Facebook created Pages. But, aside from brands that want to use these, this model is crap.

Why should I have to actively stay on top of two different profiles (my profile and a fan page, or whatnot) when I should just need one unified source of the information I want to put on Facebook?

Obviously, I understand that implementing this is infinitely harder than I’m making it out to be due to the nearly 500 million users that already are on the service and have their social graph intact. But I’d love to see this happen.

And I think this could solve some of the privacy issues that Facebook seems to encounter on monthly basis now.

One big problem, as I see it, is that Facebook’s privacy settings are entirely too convoluted. I think I’m a pretty savvy guy, and I can’t figure out what all the different settings mean. 

At a high level, if you had privacy settings for Followers vs. Friends, I think this would make things much easier to understand. You could still have all the detailed privacy filters for groups and whatnot, but that would only be for more power users. Having one key Followers vs. Friends batch of settings would simplify things greatly. 

The Friends stuff would be mostly private by default. The Followers stuff, could then be entirely public by default — just as Facebook now clearly wants most stuff to be.

Again, it’s all easier said than done, but doesn’t that sound a billion times better than the privacy clusterfuck system Facebook currently has in place? I think so.

A couple of days ago I wrote about why I don't like the Facebook Likes strategy. It surprises me that a few of the responses charge me as "someone who just doesn't like advertising, as Mario put it in a  comment submitted to that post.

We'll get to that in a minute. But if I was not sufficiently clear a few days ago, let me summarize. My objection is that Facebook is deciding what its users should decide about revealing their preferences. I am not alone. Four US Senators have expressed the same concern, have had their staff sit down with Facebook executives . They are now considering legislation to stop Facebook from doing precisely what I was complaining about.

I would probably take a less strident approach to Facebook's actions if the company simply let users opt in to the Likes system rather than force them to opt out and make it difficult for most of us to even find that opt out option.

Mario, however, since you ask, I do not much care for most advertising. Ironic, because I grew up in an era known as the Golden Age of Advertsing. Some of the most creative and scientific minds in the West went into advertising. They created a multitude of visual, musical and prosaic content that reonates in my mind today.

That was then and this is now. Most everyone I know--including some in the ad business--considers most ads to be intrusive crap. We create devices to bypass ads on television. We build filters in our minds to block messages from penetrating our foreheads.

From a consumer viewpoint ads are something to be usually avoided. From a company perspective they have become an increasingly expensive and inefficient way to try to reach customer and prospects. This is one of the many reasons that social media has exploded.

In that explosion almost all traditional institutions have felt waves of disruption and they have started to change--some rapidly, others more slowly.

The ad industry has been among the slowest institutions to adapt to the inevitable change. Doc Searls, co-author of Cluetrain Manifesto and the former head of an ad agency has done some pioneer thinking on this subject and has many ideas that lead to some interesting scenarios for advertising on demand.

More recently Twitter announced an advertising program where sponsored tweets will get scrapped if users do not retweet them. This may or may not succeed wildly, but Twitter is to be commended for its transparent approach and sensitivity to users in this effort.

I do not sense much sensitivty among Facebook executives.

Of course Google is the established leader in creating non-intrusive, effective contextual ads. Very few people object to them and Google has become among the most financially healthy of all companies using them.

I have previously said that to accomplish what it is doing, Google's knowledge of what we see frightens me. The current decision-makers for the most part seem to really try to adhere to a "do no evil" policy. There are no examples of abusing user data at Google. Someday, others will be the decision makers at Google and what happens then is another story.

Now Facebook wants to have the same access to what we like and what we watch and what we read or listen to on the Internet and based on recent performance those guys scare the Hell out of me.

The film studios apparently should have spent as much time making sure their DVD new release DRM actually works with popular Blu-Ray players as they did on their new 28 day new release delay scheme. Avatar, which of course Netflix and Redbox users now won't be able to rent for a month, was released on DVD last Friday. While the title's hype and box office success easily translated to disc sales records, AdamR writes in to note that some customers were rewarded for their purchase by finding out the disc wouldn't play on many Blu-Ray players. While some users are able to fix the problem if they can manage to download new firmware that plays nice with the new Avatar DRM, new firmware for players like the Samsung BD-UP5000 doesn't (and may not ever) exist. It's almost as if the studios are trying to perfect the art of annoyance when it comes to Blu-Ray -- something that has helped contribute to the platform's less-than-anticipated adoption rates. While DVDs have always been loaded with unskippable crap (that ironically pirates don't have to deal with) newer Blu-Ray DVDs seem to enjoy taking this to an entirely new level -- with even more unskippable previews, promotions and warnings downloaded to your player via broadband.  Somehow the studios continue to believe that layers of seemingly-endless annoyances (DRM, delaying new releases, unskippable "features" -- none of which pirates experience) are actually going to help keep piracy at bay and physical media relevant forever.

One of the big releases for 2010 is the new Iron Man movie and come May 7th when it hits theaters AMC has a kool promotion where you can “Spend A Night With Iron Man” by catching the first release and then after that at midnight you can catch Iron Man 2 and if the theater has the option you can go IMAX!

How sweet is that deal?  I know myself I a cannot wait to see this movie.  The trailers have only gotten my geek senses tingling and if the 2nd one is as good as the first it will be a night of non stop geek out action.

Wanna know if and where it is happening in your area?  Check Here

How about a little trailer action (but i know you have already watched this like a crap ton already if you are like me)

While we all know in our hearts that the best place to get any new extensions is obviously from the official extension pages but sometimes we forget and get suckered into installing them from unsecured places – such as email. The one that is going around right now is coming at you as an unsolicited email with a supposed Chrome extension as an attachment.

When activated it modifies the Windows HOSTS file in an attempt to block Google and Yahoo pages so that when you do try you will find yourself redirected to a different IP address at which point they can do all kinds of nasty crap like install other pieces of malware.

One give away to a bad Chrome extension file is to look at the file extension (the last three letters of the file after the period) and if it isn’t “.crx” then it isn’t a valid Chrome extension file. Do not install it.

via Malware City