ThisWillNeverMakeMoney.com

I’m starting to think nobody on the internet browses like I do. 3 separate job sites broke for me when trying to do tab based browsing.

1. TheLadders.com - Ctrl-clicking a job post doesnt open a new tab due to js weirdness, and totally breaks my usage pattern of opening everything I’m interested, and then doing deeper reviews after the first pass.

2. Taleo (backing Amazon’s listings) - Taleo will open a new tab, but all it will say is “please don’t use tabs, we’re retarded, and stuck in 1999.” Ridiculous.

3. EA.com - opening the job listing in a new tab resized my entire browser. Fail.

What they should do
Treat the job posting as a regular page, like everything else.
It should be directly addressable, not hidden behind JS/Flash/Session/Whatever.
It should stay the same size, and not mess with the rest of my browser.
It should never, ever play music. (unrelated beef with the internet at large)

/rant

The ugliness of my current theme was getting to me. I’ll change it to something more reasonable soon.

Twitter search has opened the site to spam for the first time, and I’m calling this kind of spam “swine flu”, mainly to prove the point that this will be more read if I spam popular keywords. Read on for more.

First off, background reading for the biggest reason why twitter is interesting. 30 sec version - twitter is the first truly opt in communication tool. You must follow to get content. Pull, not push.

You’re thinking, hmm, never thought of it that way. Wow, that is different. I knew there was some reason I loved twitter besides Ashton Kutcher (@aplusk).

Btw, for the uninitiated, twitter’s business plan is roughly -

1. 1. 140 character updates about the sandwich you just ate.
2. 2. ????
3. 3. Profit.

(does that ever get old? no.)

Turns out that 2. is actually Twitter Search (launched last week) plus TweetSense, making them into either the 140 character google, or, if you’re into hype, the real-time google. Wow, even cooler. This crazy internet company is gonna be rich!

To recap: Twitter is opt in, pull, and trusted people only. Twitter Search is opt in, pull, and the whole wide world. Oops. Hello porn industry. Hello scams. Hello keyword squatters. And the only line of defense seems to be manual control by twitter’s people of “suspicious accounts”.

More to come in the morning, but this screams opportunity. I’m still trying to determine an angle that doesnt involve spamming.

Also heres a metric for twitter search terms, just discovered tonight while trying to decide on posting this as “Swine Flu” or “#swineflu” - tweets/hour - the number of new tweets found by searching for the term in an hour. Since twitter doesn’t give counts of results, a better metric is the speed of results. Aggregate those speeds, and voila - twitter trends.

Ran into a problem with AIM today, all of my third party options for connecting to AIM are failing. If this is on purpose, its really not cool. They are all giving an error trying to connect.

See this thread -

http://messageboards.aol.com/aol/en_us/articles.php?boardId=565563&forward=false&listPos=_articleId:16:2034096511459833_threadId:16:1750422511493674_pageNum:1:1&
articleId=37095&func=6&filterRead=false&filterHidden=true&filterUnhidden=false&numPageTokens=9

Saw this note from an old friend on facebook, had to share it:

Facebook is to Me What a Hemorrhoid is to an Already Mean Old Man

I hate facebook. It is going to give me a fucking seizure. I log on and am bombarded by all kinds of ridiculous requests. I’m supposed to take a quiz to find out which type of chair I’m most like! I’ve been nominated as someone’s cutest friend! I have to nominate 46569676 of my own goddamn friends! I’ve been bitchslapped on facebook! I’ve been poked! Jesus. I am leaving this “Note” up for a day or two for whoever to read before I delete my account. Facebook, for me, has become a hemorrhoid- a big irritating pain in the ass. I can’t even find any of these functions that all you all doing. And some of these cost REAL MONEY???!!!
No. No. nonononono. I’m going back to Myspace only. peace.

Love it.

I recently decided that I’m supporting Ron Paul in the next US election, not because I agree with his policies, but because they are so out of the ordinary that they might actually stand a chance of shaking things up.

This post is partly inspired by an article that’s been sitting in a tab for over a month, waiting for me to slog through the 10 full scroll nubs it will take. (Can we get this going as a unit of measurement for the internet? My wordpress post writing thing right now takes up about 2.2 scroll nubs, for example. Gmail clocks in at about 1.8.) The post talks about terrorism as a revolutionary form of war, akin to the shift from traditional soldiers in a line to Napoleonic warfare, and in the process, there is this choice quote:

What if their objectives were more minimal–merely to create chaos, and the space for some kind of change? Their goals are rather easy to achieve–create mayhem. Or, as Lenin himself put it, “the worse, the better.”

That’s why I support Ron Paul. “The worse, the better.” George Bush was pretty bad, but look at the dem candidates? Any of them get you really excited? If you really think about it, is anything gonna be dramatically better? Let’s go with someone absolutely awful, like Ron Paul.

“If you were alive in 1947 and knew what you know now about the last sixty years of mass marketing, what would you have done? What would you have built? Was it just about making better TV commercials?” (Squidoo lens about meatball sundaes)

It wasn’t about the dancing lucky strikes, it was about a company that could sell cigarettes to the entire nation. Likewise, youTube and all the ‘new media’ isn’t about getting people to make commercials for you, its about being personal again, building a relationship with your customers, and getting them to believe and participate in what you are doing.

This has turned into a bit of an opus on my thoughts on marketing, so I’m publishing it in parts.

As part of my job as a product manager at TheLadders.com, I have numerous test accounts on the site, which are treated no differently than real users with respect to email updates. Lately, I find myself reading quite a lot of it. I chalk it up to eating our own dogfood, and it’s that, but with a healthy serving of ‘hey, this is actually useful’, followed by a side of boredom.

We produce a volume of email that some would call spam, but it’s actually pretty content heavy. Marc has a weekly email, with his thoughts. Recent highlights have been his tirade against a disenchanted American Airlines stewardess, and a poem from a member called ‘Twas the Job Before Christmas’. Maybe not the best content on the web, but I think the personal touch is a big part of why almost all of our customer service emails are addressed to him personally.

We also send out an email in the middle of the week with career advice. This is real content we’re sending, not the daily crap I get from retailers advertising the sale du jour. We also include a section called ‘freetime’ at the bottom of the email, with our staff’s pick of the goofy stuff on the web. Last week we had a Mobile Notetaker, new glow in the dark technology, smile recognition technology, and the Wired gift guide.

The best ones, though are the marketing ones. 90% of the content is the same, but they also include an ‘industry buzz’ section of articles specific to marketing. This week, there was an article on what I’m going to call authenticity marketing, focusing on a fake blog supposedly by the creator of a TV show that was ruined by advertiser meddling. The weird thing is, the blog was created for the advertiser that the blog criticises, a new hair gel by Garnier. The ad agency decided the best way to get people’s attention was to fake ruining a fake tv show to advertise a real product. What?

I don’t know about anyone else, but lying to me twice doesn’t give me any warm fuzzy feelings inside. They say they thought of this in the Times article

To allay concerns that the campaign will be dismissed as a flog — the derisive name given to fake blogs that do not identify themselves as sponsored — the Web site is liberally peppered with references that it is “brought to you by” Garnier Fructis Style Bold It.

“If someone was fooled, even for a minute,” Mr. Gunn said, “we hope they’d get a kick out of the fact they were fooled.”

I’m not a moron, and I fell for it hook line and sinker when I saw it last week. And I didn’t know it was fake until I saw the article from TheLadders. And the web site being “liberally peppered with references” is bullcrap. The web site says it in the context of the ruse, as in this quote.

This has been the absolute worst experience of my life; I am financially broke and psychologically broken. But whaddayoucare? You were promised a comedy.

So enjoy the show.

And don’t forget: This is all brought to by Garnier Fructis Style Bold It! Endurance Gel and Power Putty. (I didn’t make up those names. They did.)

Oh, I see. This is a sponsored fake blog about a fake cancelled TV show. That’s definitely what that quote tells me. So this is obviously a bad experience. I don’t think it’ll sell more products. If the viral trend described in the blog of using the hair gel as a sex lubricant had actually happened, maybe. Best case scenario, Avenue A/Razorfish gets some cred for putting together one of the most convoluted marketing campaigns of all time.

So here I am, in some ways a marketing professional, faced with 3 different examples of how you can talk to your customers. You’ve got AARF lying about a lie, Philips Norelco joking with you about second puberty (haven’t written this section yet, but the site is referenced in the NYT article), and TheLadders.com giving me some advice and pointing me to some interesting reading. I’m happy to say that I trust my company the most.

I don’t know when Part II will happen, hopefully Friday. I intend to talk more about these black hat marketing techniques, misguided attempts at user engagement, and other idiocy that marketers think works.

As much as I’m incredibly excited that I get to read some insightful brain dumps by an author I trust on the internet and linguistics, I’m not quite sure I agree with the connection you’ve described so far.
At face value, your idea sounds good, first generation combines two distinct languages (writing and talking) into a pidgin (blogging) that gets the point across, but lacks the structure and fluidity of expression of either source. Then, the next generation builds nuance into the new paradigm and develops it into a full fledged communication tool, the creole. I view this as the spectrum of internet communication available now, from facebook at the ultralight, ultrapersonal end, through twitter, all the way to blogging, at the heavy broadcast end. See this post on A VC to see a hand-drawn graph that perfectly shows what I’m thinking about.

My problem with this metaphor is that the creole isn’t one language, its multiple channels of communication that play well together for different purposes. Yes, the power of the internet has given us new abilities, and the maturation of those platforms is powerful, but I don’t think it is on the level of the qualitative change from pidgin to creole.

Still, I’m excited to see what you have to say about it, I miss the dense, brain strain articles you used to write about conversational marketing and the database of intentions.

posted as a comment on John Battelle’s Searchblog

I’m a firm believer that the three virtues of a good programmer are laziness, hubris, and impatience, and I try to build and design to enable others to function like programmers do.

The best way to enable laziness is through a great interface, that removes all barriers between what you think and what you do. Minimize clicks, minimize thinking, and you maximize productivity.

Hubris can be engineered into a system with artificial intelligence, natural language processing, and anticipating users needs. Let the user work easily, and better than their own brain, and they will think nothing is impossible. With the right software, they might be right.

User interface design is the key to enabling impatience. Everything should be instantaneous in a good ui.

When these things aren’t true, there is an opportunity, and that is where I get interested.

(this might end up as my linkedin profile summary)