A.Connector

Kinda knew right??

Didn’t we all kind of know that Facebook and all the hype and invites and linking and the early joy and wonder were too good to be true. Not to mention the fairy-tale valuation of $15 billion(albeit shrinking) dollars. Well Humpty Dumpty had a great fall and the damage control is in effect as customers begin deserting Facebook’s Beacon program. First Coca Cola, now Overstocked and Travelocity are fleeing the rat ship claiming ignorance of what the evil Facebook was up to.

Should Facebook be held accountable for violating it’s users privacy and going overboard with sharing and collection of data and being generally creepy? Of course, but we need to hold the advertisers that encouraged them and joined them accountable as well.

Om Malik has a piece titled, “Beacongate…” and PC World addresses the privacy issues in detail.

ADSL Down…

Came into the office this morning refreshed and well rested from our long holiday weekend. Fired up my 2 computers and…they worked fine but…THERE WAS NO “NET CONNECTION! This can not be. In this 24/7 connected world what can you possibly do with your computers if they’re not connected. I quickly called my China Telecom technician friend on his cell phone, “Mr. Lin good morning are you at work yet?” Well of course he told me no and it was probably not a system problem…and of course make sure to call the office and he’d stop by later.

We take hyper-connectivity for granted until the unthinkable happens and it comes to a grinding halt. Then the usually seamless, invisible, dependable all becomes a worthless intangible-the new reality is you’re cut-off. Anxiety comes rushing in until…just as suddenly it goes back to normal. For an independent person like myself to be made to feel so utterly dependent is not a good feeling. How did we ever cope before with just phones and fax machines? The Net truly is a disruptive technology.

When I was a kid it was, “I want my, I want my MTV…” That won’t do anymore. Now it’s broadband or bust.

I Hate walking on eggshells…

This is one of those posts that started out with clear concept/idea but a concern on how to state my thoughts in an inoffensive way. On second thought, I opted for the direct approach. So to all my Facebook friends. I’m totally fine with you poking and being poked, vampiring, zombieing, pirating, comparing yourselves to everyone and declaring how I’m one of your best friends.

However, I choose not to participate for personal reasons:main one-already having too many other time sucking activities, 1) my life(including business and family),2) practically a half dozen blogs and 3 podcasts with new video addition, 3) Twitter, Skype , telephone and e-mails, video and voice mails, etc.

No I’m not better than you, or pooh poohing your choice of fun FB apps. We all need to draw lines somewhere for the sake of preserving time and or sanity(think I failed on the latter a long time ago). Hope you understand, if not maybe one of my friends with those cool apps will bite you for me?

Old media wool…

Once again old media (in this case a major label record company) realizes the power of new media and “games” the system-read here.

What the release failed to mention is that Hollywood Records signed Ms. Digby in 2005, 18 months before she became a YouTube phenomenon. Hollywood Records helped devise her Internet strategy, consulted with her on the type of songs she chose to post, and distributed a high-quality studio recording of “Umbrella” to iTunes and radio stations.

Guess they missed out on Transparency 101 class @ New Media U? Hey guys-don’t game us engage us OK? Then if we like your product/media/widget/whatever-majiggie we’ll feel good about it and become word of mouth agents of prosperity for you. Now there will just be a sour taste over your flavor of the minute/flash in the pan. Oh well the old pearls before swine paradigm strikes again.

Skype hype?

I’ll never forget when one of my Taiwanese business associates asked me if I was on Skype(pronounced Sky-pee by most here)? I had no clue what that was and he explained. I tried it and loved it immediately. Then I was pleasantly surprised to find out that many podcasters and bloggers(all new to me then back in mid ‘05) were also on Skype.

Well when and application becomes that ubiquitous and even supersedes application utility becoming a virtual phone replacement that is a great level of achievement. Unfortunately, Skype undid what it had gone to great pains to do, it broke down and we all noticed.

Not a good thing for a utility like electricity, water and phone(in this case Net phone.) Sure things happen, software breaks or gets attacked,etc. P2P and Web apps while making great strides and offering much convenience still have a ways to go before they offer comparable stability. Just sayin’.

Freakonomics say it ain’t so…

I’ll never fault anyone on making any decision to improve there economic picture. I’m assuming that the Freakonomics blog’s move to within the NY Times(behind their wall) was for that reason. I happen to have mucho respect for the Times being a native New Yorker. However, while the blog used to be very RSS browser friendly it is now very much not. They still have rss feed going out to GReader except now it is a one sentence blurb. You must go to the Times site to read every blog post and it isn’t even pretty-just the NY Times online drab look. Oy Vey-I mean freaky “nomics.”