Archive for Bad Experiences
Filed under Bad Experiences, Good Experiences
May 6, 2008 at 4:08 pm
Being part of the privileged few that are overwhelmed by social networks (contrary from friends’ popular belief that everyone has that problem), I’ve started to experience level of noise as I use various systems that was not there before.
I have always jumped on the alpha and beta band-wagons and am the first in line of coming soon lists, so I join stuff just to see what it’s like left and right. While that has always generated a volume of username and passwords I couldn’t possibly keep track off, it’s sort of a non-issue as some of these services become uninteresting and whiter.
Recently, though, a lot of the these services have started to become more of connectors of existing services than anything else. While openness and sociability have long been attributes of these systems, it’s only been in the last few months that I’ve seen it realized in the sense of function reuse and content cross-pollination.
Jott is a really nice service that allows you to call in and leave notes to self and others. It also allows you to automagically have your notes transfered to I Want Sandy, which is another service with similar intention but different approach. I Want Sandy allows me to interact with it via Twitter, which serves an entirely different purpose, but which has a very good input method that’s omnipresent in my life.
As you can imagine, this results in triplication of information — which totally works in these three instances because things only get divulged to the connected services to the extent that I want (as defined by my preferences). Not all systems play nicely like that though. And it becomes increasingly difficult to remember which systems I can count on and rely on to get to what I have gathered.
Last week I was in Chicago and I took this photo at Midway airport as I proceeded to the TSA line. I captured that with the intention to share it with Jared, who loves TSA as a metaphor in his presentations. I snapped the photo with my phone and uploaded directly to Flickr. Then I sent Jared a public message via twitter about it. Jared is connected to me on Flickr, so he probably also saw it on his friend feed. Because my message was public, Bill followed the link (he is also connected to me on Flickr so he’d get it eventually anyway) and added a comment asking if he could use the photo for a presentation. I immediately went to Twitter and told him he could. Then I thought maybe I should post that comment on Flickr as well in case anyone else wanted to use that photo. Two minutes later I checked my email and Bill had asked me the same question in a message (probably thinking I would not see his comment on Flickr soon enough). I wrote him back in confirmation.
Then I stopped and realized a) the sheer amount of content produced throughout this story b) the amount of interactions across and within different systems that allowed this to happen and c) the convoluted duplicated and triplicated content that came out of it as a result.
What this will mean for the non-hardcore early adopters of tomorrow? Will any of these products even reach such audiences? Will these things also wither and die for me because of the cumulative effect of these small duplicative efforts? How long until this social noise gets in the way of the conversations I actually want to have?
Filed under Bad Experiences
April 21, 2007 at 8:37 am
I keep getting invitations to Tagged and I am getting really annoyed. There are several signs that it’s malicious and I feel like I’m trapped.
First, the ‘invitation’ email:
I quote the word ‘invitation’ because you’ll notice that it says “Click here to unsubscribe from Tagged”. I never subscribed and never once gave them the right to use my email address so I am certainly not subscribed. However, because people have invited me to join using my address, they took the liberty to subscribe me. Not ok.
(It also gives no context as to who is inviting you. I know about 8 people called Ana).
When you try to unsubscribe, you see the obvious CYA message:
Which is fine, except, it says “We will not share your personal information with your partners”, which leads me to believe that they have already shared my email address. What’s more absurd about this is that if you get a new pseudo-invitation, you have to keep unsubscribing!
If that wasn’t enough, when you visit the site you will notice the quality ads that it displays. I don’t have an issue with display banners, but at this day and age, a pop-up with animated cursors spells MALICIOUS six ways to Sunday. If that doesn’t convince you, take a brief look at profile page to get a sense of the type of SPAM that goes around this network.
Lastly, their ‘About’ page is (conveniently?) broken, so you can’t really know much about who they are. I may seem like I’m picking on them, but when you only have a link to the About page on your homepage but not anywhere else on the site, and that link is broken, I think you’re cheating.
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Filed under Bad Experiences, Me, me, me!
January 22, 2007 at 10:14 pm
I have had major hard drive failures, I have accidentally deleted things from my computer permanently, I have had my computer stollen. Each and every time something like that occurs I feel like I am the dumbest creature for not having an appropriate system to manage my data.
After any of these things occurred before, I have – without fail – done something like started to do regular back-ups, put in a new email server or client, etc, etc. Time passes and something goes wrong again – either because the thing I put in place didn’t really fix the problem or because I got lazy, or because I’m just so damn unlucky.
But the pain of losing data sticks with you. Thinking about that loss makes you sweat and feel just as uncomfortable about it than the day it happened. And yet, it’s never painfully enough – APPARENTLY – for one to do something concrete and long-lasting about.
This whole blah blah blah wouldn’t be happening if I hadn’t done it again. At least now I know who to blame (I guess *this* lesson has been learned). I was “cleaning up” my emails and the incredibly intricate and thorough referring system I use to keep everything from interesting conversations to proof of purchase emails to registrations to pretty much any other electronic data I find worth keeping. ‘Cleaning up’ meant moving some things around and ‘rationalizing’ some spaces and organization systems, which resulted in utter and absolute failure. I pretty much delete every piece of information I have ever kept in email format from the past 4 years.
It is 5:15am and I decided that no further staring at the screen and opening and closing folders desperately seeking pieces of lost data will reverse the situation, so I decided to write this for future reference, hoping that perhaps I’ll actually do something smarter about it for the future.
But will I? It’s not like this hasn’t happened before. Truthfully, never to this extent, where everything is gone and the last back up I have (from December 2005) is corrupted (ha!). I don’t feel I even deserve the time to mourn the loss, but the feeling of uttermost dumbest would not pass me by as easily.
Perhaps looking towards the future is a good thing, but it is definitely hard when you want to scream from the top of your lungs with anger (or smash your forehead against the desk repeatedly). So what does it take to teach you a lesson?
Maybe I shouldn’t invite the idea, but at this point, I don’t know if I would learn even if my house burned down (or would I? Is that what the phrase ‘blessing in disguise’ means?). Regardless, I’m pissed off and I really don’t know how to answer the question.
One way or another, if you emailed me and you are waiting for an answer of any kind, try again.
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