- Grr. Amazon wants to stop paying me because they think I’ve been buying search keywords to link to them. No, I haven’t. Update: Two days later, they responded: it’s a bad form letter, and even if I were buying keywords, they’d only stop paying referral fees on those links.
- More concerned than usual about person sneezing in stairway.
- Bad idea: leaving your pay stub in the brochure holder by the ATM. WTF? Someone’s asking for identity theft.
- Good deed for the day: tearing it into tiny pieces and tossing the confetti in the trash.
Category: Tech
Geocities Fading Away
Farewell, Geocities. It was nice knowing you. (Wait, no it wasn’t!)
In a message on Yahoo!’s help site, the company said that it would be shuttering Geocities, a free web-hosting service, later this year and will not be accepting any new customers.
Update: I wrote a bit more on the fandom side of things over at Speed Force:
I can’t say I’ll miss GeoCities itself — but there are still a lot of sites connected to comics fandom hosted there. Some are kept current, some are old but still contain useful information, and some are snapshots of an earlier era of online fandom
Spam or Not? Trick Question!
I try to hit Spam or Not a couple of times a week, since it helps train the MSRBL-Images blacklist. Tonight I came up against an image that seemed oddly appropriate:
I had to wonder if it was a trick question…
Social Bots
Amazing how many “people” are sending Facebook messages to the postmaster account, offering helpful links to resources for *ahem* improving uptime.
On a related note:
Google’s Social Graph thinks I own Cute Overload. It seems to treat all LiveJournal syndication feeds as one profile, and I linked to K2R’s LJ feed with XFN.
NASA and Aliens
If NASA really knew about aliens, wouldn’t publicizing it be the best way to solve their chronic budget problems?
Color-Switchin’ Coraline Apocalypse
Neil Gaiman remarked on his blog that images his agent emails from Germany end up with the colors inverted, and posts an example of a Coraline poster:
“…ah yes, I thought. That’s the sequel, all right. CORALINE APOCALYPSE”
I used to run into this with TIFF images when building websites. (No big surprise, given that there are a million variations on the TIFF format.) I think it was around 2000 or so that I was working on a website for a law firm, and they sent me their logo. The logo, as I received it, was yellow on light blue, so I built a site with black text on a white background for the main areas, and yellow on light blue (matching their logo) for the title, navigation, and borders.
I sent them a link to the test site. They looked at it, and said it was very nice, but could I try to match the color scheme on their logo instead?
It turned out that red and blue had gotten switched around (and possibly more, because I can’t remember how the yellow ended up in there), but anyway it was supposed to be white on light brown. I switched the channels, redid all the graphics and styles for the site, and they stuck with it for several years.
Back on the subject of Coraline, Gaiman adds in his post that the film has become “the second highest grossing stop-motion film ever” after Chicken Run. So why does it seem to be forgotten already? Just two months ago, commentators were falling all over themselves to say Coraline was the turning point for 3-D animation being part of the storytelling and not just a gimmick. Now everyone’s talking about how Monsters vs. Aliens is the turning point for 3-D animation being part of the storytelling and not just a gimmick.
The REAL Problem with Twitter
Forget Ashton Kutcher and Oprah, forget #unfollowfriday, forget 25 Random Evil Things about Twitter — the key problems with the social media / microblogging / broadcast IM / whatever you want to call it service boil down to two problems:
- It asks the wrong question
- It was designed around limitations of cell phone text messaging
The Wrong Question
Twitter’s prompt is not something general like “What’s on your mind?” It’s “What are you doing?” That encourages people to post things like “I’m eating lunch” or “Just got into work,” or “Posting on Twitter.” Presumably what they mean is “What are you doing that you think people would find interesting?” but of course that’s too long a prompt from a usability standpoint.
The thing is, there’s no reason to broadcast the mundane to the world. Don’t tell me “I’m eating soup.” Tell me, “Just learned that gazpacho soup is best served cold. I wonder if they eat it in space?”
Unfortunately, that means the signal-to-noise ratio can get pretty bad at times.
Outgrowing its Limitations
Twitter posts are limited to 140 characters of plain text so that the your name and comments can fit in a standard SMS message. Now, this is great if you use Twitter via text messages on your mobile phone. It’s not so great if you use Twitter on the web, or through a smartphone app like Twitterific on iPhone or Twidroid on Android, or through any of the zillions of desktop apps.
I don’t have a problem with the 140-character limit itself (it can actually be liberating in a way), though it would be nice to have some formatting options beyond all-caps and *asterisk bolding*.
The real problem is that links have to share that limit. URL-shortening services have exploded lately as people try to squeeze links into the tiniest space possible to save room for their precious text. Even if you use something as short as is.gd, just including one link means you’re down to 122 characters.
Plus URL shorteners come with a host of problems, in particular the fact that they hide the destination. That’s no big deal if the target matches the description, or if it’s a harmless prank like a Rick Roll, but it’s all too easy to disguise something malicious.
Seriously, if you got an email that said something like this:
Look at this! http://example.com/asdjh
Would you click on that link? Even if it appeared to be from someone you know? That’s just asking to get your computer infected by a virus, trojan horse or other piece of malware. Or to see something you wish you could unsee.
Better Link Sharing: Facebook
I hesitate to bring up Facebook as a good example of anything, and I know the current layout is largely reviled by its users, but they really got posting links right.
When you want to post a link to your Facebook profile, you paste in the full URL. Facebook reads the page and extracts the title, a short summary, and possible thumbnail images. Then you have the normal amount of space to write your comment. Continue reading