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The President’s Analyst Eerily Predicts AT&T’s Omnipotence

[ 1 Comment ]Posted on June 28, 2009 by admin in Popular Media

Sunday, June 28th, 2009

The surreal and clever 60′s movie The President’s Analyst eerily predicted AT&T’s creepy potential for control over our lives

Much in the same way that you could mistake the brilliantly offbeat and overlooked sixties film The President’s Analyst for a film that’s about being hunted by the FBI and the CIA, you could easily mistake what you’re reading at the moment for some kind of obtuse film review. I hadn’t thought of “The President’s Analyst” for quite some time, until I recently had an almost epic series of problems with The Phone Company (why kid ourselves, there’s only one, when you get down to the basic plumbing). My recent problems all involved a ridiculous series of lapses of communication which at one point inspired one of their own technicians to share the witticism: “Remember, we’re a telephone company, not a communications company“. With my problem still unresolved after literally hours on – how ironic – the telephone, I began to feel a little paranoid and persecuted. As maybe I should. In the hilarious, surreal, and quintessentially sixties film that stars James Coburn in a very In Like Flint role, it ultimately is revealed that “The Phone Company” is more powerful and secretive than all the world’s intelligence agencies combined. Which is disturbingly prescient, given the recent history of AT&T’s relationship with the NSA and their creepy and insidious FISA amnesty lobbying. Which, since I’m publicly bellyaching, all makes me wonder if I will finally get my DSL service activated on Tuesday as promised, after three weeks of waiting. I mean, Adam Savage of Mythbusters has gone public with his AT&T frustrations, but he has millions of followers on Twitter to back him up. Dissociated Press only has about 8,000 readers, and only about 5 of them comment with regularity. Now’s your chance. Had any problems with AT&T yourself? Feel free to vent in the comments.

Real Men Don’t Twitter

[ 2 Comments ]Posted on June 10, 2009 by admin in Technology

Wednesday, June 10th, 2009

Is Twitter a vast nation of sheep led by a handful of loud-mouth marketers and celebrities?

Take any large group of people, say, a cocktail party. Inevitably, there will be one or two loudmouths that draw a circle of listeners, while most people wander and mingle, maybe forming small, more civil two-way conversations. In my view, this remains Twitter’s biggest obstacle to broader adoption: it’s a huge herd of sheep. 80 Percent Of Accounts Have Fewer Than 10 Followers, or as this Harvard Business blog puts it, Men Follow Men and Nobody Tweets. The article also points out that Twitter reverses the usual social network pattern in which men mostly follow women they don’t know, and women follow women they do know. Additionally, since Twitter is mostly a one-way broadcast medium, it draws a tremendous number of multilevel marketing and tech guru types who spam the system. I’ve been saying for a while that Twitter would max out somewhere around the number of Blackberry users, who number around 21 million users as of May 2009. These numbers seem to indicate Twitter is at least leveling off, and guess what? It’s just under 20 million users. I chose this number a little arbitrarily based on the idea that Twitter is such a perfect fit for mobile device users. I personally have used Twitter as an MLM tool, as mentioned above, but otherwise would only find it useful if I worked with a large, mobile work force of some kind. For personal use, it just has little appeal. Don’t listen to me though, Twitter to your heart’s content. In fact, here are 10 tools to help you do it better. Do you use Twitter? I’d love to hear about how and why.

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Is There Life After Facebook?

[ 2 Comments ]Posted on May 29, 2009 by admin in Technology

Friday, May 29th, 2009

And are you tragically un-hip if you keep using it? Don’t worry. We have ideas for you.

Well, apparently not, if you’re over 55. However, there are some interesting things going on out there. For one, Microsoft is launching Bing, their new “Decision Engine”. Make sure you understand the distinction, they’re worried that you’ll think it’s just another search engine. Nope, this one will make decisions for you. Finally. I’ve been waiting for something that does that. Although it’s easy to hate Microsoft, I’m personally looking forward to trying it. Google, for all its warm, fuzzy, Googliness, has become the bane of my existence when it comes to search. And what about Twitter? Well I and many people who are smarter than I am feel it’s already peaking. Which means, in a way, that it has a lot of life left in it, but some users will stay on board, many stop using it quickly, and most importantly, the hip people leave when the masses move in. Maybe the ability to search Tweets with tools like Topsy will broaden the interest. My bet? Back to the awesome Googliness. One of the main things that draws people and retains them with Facebook is the multitude of methods to interact easily. Unfortunately, Facebook fails rather miserably with things like chat functionality and a more versatile “inbox”, both of which should have been a no-brainer, in my opinion. A strong possible contender here is Google Wave, which, if they can bundle it all together flexibly with tools like Google Voice or PhoneVite would be a real winner. I would be ecstatic if a networking tool like Facebook allowed me to easily switch from a chat or inbox dialog to a cellphone voice or text dialog. So the questions arise. Am I pathetically uncool if I keep using Facebook? Where are you going after Facebook?

It’s Okay To Be A Twitter Quitter

[ 1 Comment ]Posted on May 3, 2009 by admin in Technology

Sunday, May 3rd, 2009

The future of the social web? Real time search, recommendation tools, and better aggregation.

My head’s going to explode if one more person tells me why Twitter is the next big thing, or uses the term Google Killer or Facebook Killer. It’s just my opinion, of course, but anybody who claims to know where the web and social networks are headed on a granular level is just regurgitating what they read on tech blogs, or is someone you’d like to make friends with, because they will soon be very, very rich. All the same, this is a pretty interesting time for the web. The obvious trends right now are real time search, social networking, and recommendation tools. When someone makes the simplistic statement that Twitter’s the “next big thing” after Facebook, they’re missing three profoundly important points: 1.) The services are completely different in nature; one is a closed, user-defined network, the other is an outward-flowing stream of information available to anyone. 2.) An estimated 60% of users stop using twitter after one month, and 3). The “next big thing” is already happening. Most would agree that the next big thing is some version of the open web, and if you think about it, that’s what a lot of us are striving for: some kind of reintegration of all the services we’re using. That’s why one of the coolest short-term “Twitter Killers” is making such a splash right now; Seesmic Desktop just added Facebook feeds to the existing tools they had for Twitter. Between Seesmic Desktop and services like NutshellMail, you should at least be able to get your lifestreams under control. I’m personally considering a more effective alternative: unplugging

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CNN Gets Punk’d By Ashton Kutcher On Twitter

[ Comments Off ]Posted on April 18, 2009 by admin in Popular Media

Saturday, April 18th, 2009

Will an Oprah endorsement kill Twitter before people know what it is?

I apologize in advance to any Twitter addicts reading this, the piece will almost certainly be longer than 140 characters. The fact that Ashton Kutcher punk’d CNN the other day, combined with Oprah’s first all-caps tweet (see below), spoke volumes about Twitter’s future. First of all, Kutcher really did punk the game, with donated billboard space. That’s not viral marketing, it’s germ warfare. And many would agree that an endorsement from Oprah is more like a command to a zombie army than it is an indication of the validity of something. I predict that unless Twitter either implements some amazing and broadly accessible real-time search (as has been suggested), or builds a more Facebook-like central site that incorporates additional social networking features, the service is destined to max out somewhere around the number of active crackberry users. If Twitter is all about sharing what you’re doing at any given moment, you have to remember you could get the same information about many Americans by just looking at that evening’s TV listings. And those same Americans are probably not texting very much yet. I mean, although a Google exec may be showing a lot of ignorance by calling Twitter just another e-mail service, these Americans we’re talking about are the same people that in a CNN poll responded to the question “Do you use Twitter?” with  6% saying “Yes,” 64% saying “No,” and 30% saying “What’s Twitter?” Read the rest of this entry »

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