(a.k.a.: “how not to advertise on the internet, lesson 101 for Advertising Agencies who have no idea how “advertising” works, or what it exists for”) Tonight, as I tried to show someone a game, it took 12 – twelve! – refreshes of this page before Gamestop would stop replacing a […]
web 2.0
83 posts
Oh, yes: http://xkcd.com/869/ …please, FOR THE CHILDREN, don’t put a “make it look like an iPhone app, but remove 90% of the content” theme on your website.
I had a serious customer-support problem with Skype recently, relating to money they’ve taken from me. It’s proved excessively difficult to get a response from them – surprising, considering their size, their brand, and the fact it’s a paid-for service. It raises some interesting questions over Customer Support / Community […]
IMHO, Flickr/Yahoo has one of the best user-authentication systems I’ve ever seen. I’m sure it’s no accident that Twitter (eventually) moved to a system that is extremely similar. (NB: I don’t know if flickr copied if from someone else, but they were the first I remember seeing like this, many […]
Google has just announced that they’re deleting all web content (pages, files, downloads) from Google Groups, leaving only the mailing lists. (Incidentally, they failed to inform the group-admins / owners that they’re doing this – which is mind-blowingly stupid when you think about it) Just to be clear, *without* the […]
LinkedIn is running a promotion right now to get more people using their advertising platform. It’s nicely conceived – two clicks (the first to login), and I was straight into writing an advert. Brilliant! The advert-writing was simple, easy to understand, and fit within the top 500 pixels of the […]
When I log into LinkedIn, I now receive 3 pages of spam. That spam is “every tweet by every person I’ve ever met”. Somewhere, buried inside the avalanche of spam, are a few genuine LinkedIn messages. e.g. today I saw that a friend had moved to a new company – […]
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 […]
Is there a place to complain that UK government departments are breaking the internet standards and refuse to fix their websites? Occasionally, you find sites that do this. Usually, when you tell the organization, they’re a little embarassed, and rush to fix them. From HMRC, I got a polite, pedantic, […]
There’s a conference in Brighton this week, and one of the industry media – GamesIndustry.biz – has a base here, so they’ve been cropping up a lot in the reporting. In passing, I noticed some glaring howlers in their web-design. The 1990’s called, they want their web-design templates back… Three […]
…and Amazon’s intelligent recommendation engine leaps into action: (if you don’t know who Tim Langdell is, and you work in the games industry, just Google him.
(where normaly people might “Be original, then Apologize if you fail”) Just a minor piece of recent DRAMA! DRAMA!, something to cheer up the week… This excellent piece of Advertising / Fun / Augmented Reality / Creativity was – like most big-budget ideas – based on someone else’s idea, someone […]
From one of those strange wending web-browsing sessions that started as innocent “work-related research” and ended up following the history of CDC… IBM, 1964: How is it that this tiny company of 34 people —including the janitor — can be beating us when we have thousands of people? …to which […]
One great achievement of the web is the huge reduction in barriers to publishing. But the flipside is that we now see extremely low incentives for publishers to keep content “live”. Back when it cost money to publish info, you had good reasons to *keep* your content live once it […]
(…or else forgo it) (EDIT: To be clear: Piracy isn’t theft, but it certainly is illegal. Please do not misconstrue: I do not condone piracy; this post is a lament at the extent to which the retail industries encourage or coerce consumers to pirate content. I am still looking for […]
What’s a browser MMO? Today, not 5 years ago? In the previous post I poked Earth Eternal for claiming to be the “*REAL* MMO for your browser”, and disappointing on that front (although it could be awesome on all other fronts). I finished with: So … EE may be a […]
I got this in my inbox a few days ago, and it’s been forwarded to me by a few people since: (NB: the fact that you still have to login MERELY TO READ THE DAMN FAQ linked from the PR statement is IMHO symptomatic of some of MP’s problems :( […]
A year or so ago I did a roundup of the major free Web Analytics services. I was interested to see how Google Analytics had affected the market: was there a market left any more? One of the trials I signed up for I found so useful I carried on […]
This came from a perfectly nice-seeming person, so I took it as genuine. Until I discovered the site I’d been lured in to. Very disappointing. Unsolicited email I received today: Hi Adam, I’m the editor of GamerBlips.com and MassiveBlips.com I wanted to share the news that T=Machine is a hit […]
(for the three people who haven’t heard yet, EA just bought PlayFish, for circa $400 million) Three things I have to say on this: Mainstream games industry people question it’s value Yes, of course it was worth it What Would Zynga Do? Mainstream games industry people question it’s value I’ve […]