I know this is seriously a #firstworldproblem, but this is a serious time-waster and makes me not want to click on NYTimes links. This tactic harms you more than helps you, guys. Seriously.
From thepete.tumblr.com:
"Netflix doesn’t want you to remember “Qwikster”, it wants you to forget DVDs."
-theMattSmith
You could be on to something. However, I don’t think Netflix is as clever as you seem to think they are. It’s muuuuch cheaper to just start ignoring their DVD service and focus on their streaming. Trademarking a new brand, separating out their DVD service/website from their current website/service and confusing the crap out of their customers and potential customers is not cost-effective at all and is also a huge risk. If this theory is correct, and they are trying to get us to forget about DVDs, I think Netflix is still damned because they are spending way too much money on this whole thing and pissing a lot of people off in the process.
If it were me, I’d just:
1) rename the two services to “Netflix DVD” and “Netflix Now” and give them both their own department.
2) slowly drop resources/staff/titles from the Netflix DVD service and increase resources/staff/titles to the Netflix Now service. This would happen over the span of years. This would minimize the “drama” aspect of these changes (along with any negative interpretation to these choices) and ease customers and potential customers into the idea of only streaming.
3) keep prices as stable as possible. In today’s economy changing costs (whether up or down) can be confusing and difficult for a growing number of people who are being forced to consider where they spend every penny.
These days it’s hard for me to accept that stupid-looking choices are anything but stupid choices. There’s a distinct lack of creative, imaginative and legitimately clever thinking in the world today and I just can’t give people who make these stupid-looking choices the benefit of the doubt since there is no evidence of these choices being anything but stupid.
Just my ¥2, but I just don’t have much faith in these guys or corporate types in general.
The real mistake Netflix is making here is that they look like idiots. If there was a reasonably priced, reasonably stocked alternative to Netflix I would switch to them right now, rather than waste my time with a company that doesn't seem to know what it's doing. So, even if there is some sort of cleverness behind their apparent lunacy, along the way, they may hemorrhage so many customers and investors as to damage their business beyond repair. Why stand by a company that is behaving in this way?
Again, just my ¥2, but I think messing with how the public perceives you as a company is a huge mistake.
Link: EXCLUSIVE: Google to Retire Blogger/Picasa Brands in Google+ Push -- Ben Parr
From stoweboyd:
Ben Parr reports — exclusively — that Picasa and Blogger will become cogs in the Google+ refactoring of Google’s social tools.
As I recently wrote, ” Google+ is currently a browser based system, but it is relatively easy to imagine the core functionality implemented in a next generation Android, and all the tools — like Circles and Hangouts — accessed as complementary apps, along with dozens or hundreds of others built by Google or a growing ecology of developers.”
And it seems that Google is moving to quickly ‘plusify’ systems that were standalone apps until the present day.
Hmmm, wish they would absorb YouTube and ditch that stupid name while they’re at it (“YouTube”—REALLY?). Of course, sucking Blogger into g+ seems to be making it a serious competitor with… Tumblr.
Ruh-roh!
;)
From whitneymcn:
“Jason Calcanis sent an email to Facebook early this morning, because just after the new Facebook Groups feature went live, someone added both him and Michael Arrington to the newly-formed NAMBLA group. (NAMBLA, for those of you who don’t watch enough South Park, is the ” North American Man/Boy Love Association”.) So not only were they both enrolled by someone else into a group they don’t want to be a member of (we assume) but now they’re receiving email notifications for everything that happens in that group. Thankfully, your group memberships are not shown on your profile page, so it’s not as if they are suddenly publicly broadcast as NAMBLA members to anyone else…outside of existing NAMBLA members.”
—
Hey Facebook, Please Make Group Email Notifications Opt-In (RWW)
Gee, who could have imagined that allowing your friends to make this kind of statement about you this might create problems?
I need to write a longer post on this, there are some really interesting social dynamics in play here.
Another wonderful example of how Facebook is lame. How many more screw-ups like this will people put up with before we get a fricken clue and stop using that site? I’ve already limited my activity over there—I think I’m going to have to do more limiting. Like deleting my content entirely and blocking as many apps/ads/etc as I can. I just don’t like a site that keeps effing up like this. These are obvious problems that should have been worked out before going live with them and it’s not like any regular users of FB are freaking out about these features—no one was screaming “OMG I NEED GROUPZ!”
I’m so sick of this constant drive in the tech sector to improveimproveimproveimprove. It’s like TV commercials for McDonald’s. Really? Not enough people eat your food? Likewise with Facebook: really? A larger number of registered members than the population of many countries not enough for you?
This level of excess is just absurd.
If Facebook can get taken down… NObody is safe!! O_O
“Microblogging wars?” Really?
From the usually well-balanced underpaidgenius:
Microblogging Wars Escalate: Posterous Claims Tumblr Blocks Its Autopost Feature
I think this is a smart move by Tumblr.
Not as a strategic way to make Posterous less useful, but because I don’t want content auto-posted from one social network to another anywhere, be it Posterous, Twitter, Facebook, etc.
Auto-posting, link dumping, are the worst things to ever happen to social media besides social media “experts”
Since Stowe hasn’t added any commentary here, I assume he agrees with the soupsoup post. This doesn’t make him unbalanced, but usually he throws a little something in to let UnderpaidGenius readers know what he thinks. Since he didn’t assume is all we can do. In that case, then I disagree with both of them. The worse thing to happen to social media is the idea that people can decide what’s right for everyone—even *saying* that a particular use of a particular site or function should not be allowed is a downright douchey thing to do. Who are you to decide what things are used for? Who cares? Don’t like how someone uses something? Don’t follow them or don’t use the site. One site being deliberately jerky to another, regardless of the reason, has one effect that matters—the users being inconvenienced.
But no, no, it’s much more important that these “Microblogging wars” continue, for they are just wars! WAIT—no they’re not. Posterous and Tumblr are both pretty good at being douchey.
In fact, from my first experience with Tumblr I felt that Tumblr cornered the market on uber-controlling, doucheyness in that it has a few odd limitations that almost turned me off the site, entirely. For starters, Tumblr tells you exactly how to post what you post. Want to post a picture? No title allowed. The same goes for video and audio posts, too—Sure, you can add a title to a text post, but it is “optional,” which always feels like discouragement, to me. When I email a picture directly to Tumblr, it only accepts the email’s subject as the caption (rather than the title, unlike Posterous, which logically does this) and Tumblr ignores any *actual* caption you include in the body of the email (also, *unlike* Posterous).
Then, when you do post a pic, depending on how you do it, it may show up in full-size *only* on your blog and as a thumbnail to any Tumblr users who follow you or possibly, to them, not at all. See, if you only visit a Tumblr-user’s main page, you see everything they want you to see—which is fine. But if you take advantage of Tumblr’s largely AWESOME Twitter-style dashboard (which displays your stream of Tumblr blogs you’re following), all bets are off. Tumblr will either display a seriously tiny thumbnail of your image or not at all, putting a tiny rectangle icon in its place. I don’t care why Tumblr does this—it is intensely frustrating.
Tumblr does a few things really well, however. The previously-mentioned Twitter-style dashboard is completely addictive. I *love* it and it’s really why I continue to use Tumblr. It’s the single easiest way to keep up with blogs you care about. I wish every other blog service would rip it off because every time I come across a blog I love that isn’t on Tumblr I get frustrated because nobody makes it easier to follow you than Tumblr. In fact, I just walk away from blogs on other services for that reason :(
Tumblr also makes it SUPER easy to run multiple blogs. I run over a dozen of them. Their theme system is straightforward and incredibly simple to use or customize. Their tags work incredibly well (even as categories) and you can provide RSS feeds for each tag if you want to. I love that Tumblr will allow you to import feeds. However, like regular posting, there are rigid guidelines the imports must fit into—which I don’t like.
One other thing I like about Tumblr is that they let you include Google Adsense in your theme. Letting you make a few pennies off of your own content—imagine that! This was my main motivation for moving all of my online blogging to Tumblr and to put up with their other limitations, in the process. It’s been worth it, but I wish they’d improve—loosen up their absurd posting rules—I was using Posterous to crosspost to Tumblr just because it was more flexible than directly posting to Tumblr—but since Tumblr doesn’t allow for crossposted images to display to Tumbr-users in their streams, I’ve stopped doing this. So if Tumblr could allow for images to be displayed, that’d be great, too.
See, I love Posterous for it’s flexibility of posting but hate it for everything else. It’s themes are hard to use, it’s interface is cumbersome and clunky, and their recent “Tumblr is for high school kids” post made them look like a bunch of dickweeds and inspired me to block anyone from seeing my content on their site. In fact, it looks like they’ve just been targeting every blog site known to man and talking about how Posterous is better—it’s like they’re really desperate or something.
But of all the blogging services I’ve tried out, Posterous does have the most potential. It is truly mobile and is as easy to post to as sending an email. Of course, anything beyond that and it’s a horrible pain in the ass.
Imagine combining the best of both worlds from Tumblr and from Posterous! It would be the perfect blog host!! Uber-flexible posting and incredible back-end and following ability! It would be heaven!
What? Nuns are hot.
That aside, there’s nothing wrong with my connection speed for everything else I do on the ‘net (and I do a lot).
Honestly, though, I’ve never understood the whole “search instantly” thing. Macs have done it for years and I’ve always found it annoying. When I start typing, I’m still deciding on the best words to use for my search. And what if a typo results in something offensive instantly showing up in the search results?
Sometimes the word “advances” really needs the quotes around it.
Come on, Google—just get us to Mars and stop wasting our time with this crap.
You know what I mean, right? It’s when, instead of a date/time-stamp on a blog post or article it says “3 hours ago” or worse “3 months ago”. It’s useless in so many ways and I’ve never heard an argument for the use of relative dates.
“They’re perfect for people who don’t really care when something was posted!”
“Relative dating, for when specificity doesn’t matter!”
“Who wants a cold, in humanly precise date and time on an Internet post? Give me warm, human vagueness any day!”
I’ve tried really hard to come up with a good reason for relative dating to be better than absolute dating.
Isn’t it ridiculous that we even have a phrase for that? “Absolute dating.” Funny how that just refers to “putting the actual date down.”
Imagine if we tried to use relative dating on formal documents. You sign your tax return “4 months ago.”
I guess you can avoid being late that way.
Link: The conscience of Google & how to opt out of Stalkery Ads
Apparently Sergey Brin had some issues with Googles move towards ad-targeting that relies on “stalkery” to the point where there was a shouting match in front of subordinates. Also: find out how you…
So, on August 3, 2010, I tweeted the following:
“Does anybody remember this thing called “Google Wave” or how we were so excited about it?” 1:25 PM Aug 3rd
The next day, on August 4, 2010, the Google Blog announced:
I know, I know, it was a little obvious that Wave was failing, I just thought it was cool that I happened to mention it the day before it was officially discontinued.
I GOT MY FINGER ON THE PULSE OF THE INTERNETS!! … or something like that…
What’s funny is that I now find myself thinking of gMail more like I thought of Wave, the few times I used it, anyway. I make sure the subject is relevant to what I’m emailing about and I find myself sticking to one topic in the email to make the entire “gMail conversation” a single unit.
…Interesting…
OH yeah—anybody wanna take bets on when we’ll see Buzz buzz-off?
