Categories
games industry

The Escapist talks crap … again

Typical Escapist. The very first page of their article on “Videogame mths debunked” waxes eloquently (and contemptuously) about supposed “facts” without much apparent fact-checking.

And then the following pages go off on a personal journey of ignorance and attitude. Nuanced opinion, researched journalism, or even useful commentary … this is not.

(The only scientificly valid studies I’ve seen for the brain-training game showed that it DOES have a positive effect. They also suggested that people who otherwise claimed to play it every day were apparently lieing, or blurring their memories of how often they played … which might explain the failures of some of the other “studies”, including the pop-science one that The Escapist bothers to cite)

Apart from Zero Punctuation (a canny acquisition on the editors’ part), TheEscapist seems to continue to be happy as mostly a waste of (internet) space. Sigh. I think EDGE has a lot to answer for…

Categories
community web 2.0

Someone at LinkedIn needs to be fired

LinkedIn has unofficially officially removed their “updates” system – you can no longer find out what’s changed in your contacts’ roles, busines, lives, etc.

Some idiot at LI corp – who apparently is unaware of the normal consequences of becoming the lowest-common-denominator (i.e. unless you are the market leader on size, and *force* your competitors out of business, you price yourself out of existence. Well, you’re nowhere near Facebook, so you’re most likely to just put LI bankrupt) – has replaced it with a massive, 5-page long aggregation of twitter feeds.

(currently 5 pages on my account, but who knows how long it will get if more people add their twitter accounts?)

There’s a website for that – it’s called Twitter.com. Funnily enough, I already have 5 different Twitter clients, and they do an AWESOME job of subscribing to the twitter feeds I want to read.

None of that is applied to LI, of course – LI simply *forces* me to view everything that is tweeted by anyone. It’s as if the LI management team HAVE NEVER USED TWITTER IN THEIR LIVES, and have no idea how it works. Amazing!

The (hypothetical) idiot at LinkedIn has clearly achieved something – they’ve given a very short-term boost to the “Activity” on the site. At the cost of removing functionality that used to be there.

I suspect this is the beginning of the end for LinkedIn. At this rate, it will get more and more useless.

I wonder, is there a community anywhere for maintaining business contacts, viewing resumes, while preventing spam and leaving you in full control of who sees what and who can contact whom?