Amazon Is Pretty Much Satan
Point: Rob
Amazon.com. They are one of the many online shopping “malls” and most certainly the biggest. On Amazon, you can find just about anything you want. Food, movies, music, car parts, motorcycle parts, gun parts, books, phones, stereos, computers, desks, chairs, instruments…like I said, just about anything.
Amazon will present you the item you’re looking for, plus similar items, plus items that other people who looked at your item bought, plus items that may be of interest to you based on the item you’re looking at. It will give you tons of shipping options and, I’m told, will even whisper sweet-nothings in your ear if you ask it nicely.
What it won’t do is help the average store owner survive in this world – quite the opposite, in fact – it will bury them.
Google+ Is Doomed
There’s an adage that the most popular posts on Google+ are either about Google+ or how it compares to Facebook. We were indifferent to the web titan’s social networking platform when it launched in July and in the months since then, there’s been nothing to change my mind. It seems to have become a shantytown for people to abandon Facebook, and ultimately their friends, for something different. With today’s unveiling of Timeline, the next big leap in how your profile there will look and function, the irrational cries against it have resurfaced while Google+, still a pale imitation of an older version of the service, looks appropriately destined for the dustbin of internet history.
Facebook To Change Layout Again, Millions To Whine Violently For Next Week
Man, I pine for the AOL days (not the Aol days, mind you) where every eighteen months brought you a whole new version of America’s favorite dial-up provider with a shiny, slightly larger version number along with slightly iterated graphics. Also: advertised everywhere. Yeah, boy! It seems strange that time is not kind to change as we’re still over a day away from Facebook’s annual f8 developer conference (where they traditionally unveil their biggest service changes) and somehow there are people already up in arms over the partial list of changes the social network will be implementing soon.
Those people are silly.
Google+ No Longer Invitation-Only, Also No Longer Cool
Remember 3-months ago when you’d do anything to get your hands on a Google+ invitation? Well, good news to those considering selling your soul for an invite — Google’s social networking service has transitioned from field test to beta bearing new features that’ll leave you saying “I was using Google+ before it was cool”.
Engadget Eliminates Review Scores, I Disagree
In an editorial today, Engadget’s editor-in-chief, Tim Stevens, declared that the era of numbered scores on product reviews was going away in favor of bullet-pointed pros and cons and a summation in under 140 characters. It’s hard to remember a time before their various reviewed gadgets were adorned with those color coded numbers… nah, nevermind, they were implemented a years ago as one of former EIC Topolsky’s last big moves on the site. Still, the use of numbers to denote, in an abstract way, the quality of products is of much debate among many websites. At the end of the day, I think they’re a necessary evil and I think Stevens is on the wrong track here.
Netflix Lost More Customers Than Expected With Recent Price Hike
Look, I kind of get it, content providers want more money so Netflix ups the price. But with technology we all see things as only getting cheaper and not more expensive so when you start out with a high price tag then drop to $10/month you can’t expect people to be willing to pay 60% more for the same thing they were just getting. Read the rest of this article…
Does America Need A Government-Run Cellular Network?
Let’s face it: wireless technology here in the US is kind of a mess. We have two largely different standards for cellular broadcast (CDMA and GSM) and with four carriers, we see a lot of duplicated phones across various providers. A company like Apple spent years developing a version of their iPhone that would work on Verizon (and soon, Sprint), but all of these variables conspire to make the job of a headset manufacturer a pain in the butt. On his podcast, and recently in editorial form, Joshua Topolsky suggests that we should socialize our wireless standards and let providers duke it out amongst exclusive phones and services. Is this the right way for America to go?
Microsoft Dropping Flash Support in IE10
This is really another win for Apple. If it wasn’t for them being so anti-Flash this wouldn’t be happening! Not yet at least, maybe in the future but not this fast. Steven Sinofsky from Microsoft says “Many of the 62% of these sites that currently use Adobe Flash already fall back to HTML5 video in the absence of plug-in support. When serving ads in the absence of plug-ins, most sites already perform the equivalent of this fallback, showing that this approach is practical and scalable.” Read the rest of this article…
Sam Biddle Is A Fool: Everything Should Be A Game
Those kids over at Gizmodo (yes, one of those sites) are at it again! No, not a stolen iPhone to be found, this time it’s a nonsensical rant about gamification. See, there’s a new site called Badgeville that basically gives you rewards for being on the internet. In vile response, author Sam Biddle did his best to ravage the idea that people should be rewarded for ‘frilly, stupid things’. But he’s missing the entire point: it’s not about the carrot or the stick, it’s about the road it takes us down.
How Do You Even Fix Yahoo?
Don’t you remember when Yahoo! was the shining knight in a sea of failed dot-com companies? Y’know, back when people thought it would be profitable to do everything through the internet, like grocery shopping? As a contemporary to the dial-up service providers like America Online, it served as a one-stop shop for basically anything. Wanted to know the weather? How your stocks were doing? Sports? Yahoo did it. But time has not been kind to Yahoo as today, the company’s board of directors ousted Carol Bartz, their latest CEO. Their previous chief exec and co-founder, Jerry Yang, was removed not long after turning down a lucrative buyout offer from Microsoft. The problem the company really faces however, is what their business is and what it needs to be, something Bartz couldn’t even explain.
