Is Facebook used or blocked in businesses?
It's hard to get good data on this, and I keep get wildly varying opinions. I haven't fully formed my own yet, but here's another data point:
"In contrast, 50 percent of respondents said that their company did not block access to [tag]Facebook[/tag], with eight percent specifying that the reason was fear of employee backlash." (from Sophos)
What do you think?
The Long Tail of Facebook Applications
Check out this post about the distribution of Facebook applications on Christopher Herot's Weblog:
As of today, there are 3,593 applications listed on Facebook. The most popular, Top Friends, has 2.4 million active daily users, and there are half a dozen more that have at least half a million users, but the usage drops off rapidly after that. The curve looks like the familiar long tail, but only if one plots it on a log scale (right). If one looks at the area under the curve, the 41 applications that have between 100,000 and a million users account for 11 million users total. (Of course, there is duplication as most users have more than one application installed). At the bottom, 2,500 applications have less than 100 users and 218 apps have no daily usage at all.
active daily users apps users over 1,000,000 1 2,420,082 100,000 -999,999 41 11,336,828 10,000 - 99,999 92 2,717,193 1,000 - 9,999 291 981,756 100 - 999 700 234,749 10 - 99 1,250 45,950 1 - 9 1,000 3,850 0 218 0
Seth Godin has good insights
Check out this post where Seth Godin gives some really good ideas about how Apple might have better handled the price change of the iPhone. See it in Seth's Blog:
-- Free exclusive ringtones, commissioned from Bob Dylan and U2, only available to the people who already had a phone. (This is my favorite because it announces to your friends-every time the phone rings-that you got in early). -- Free pass to get to the head of the line next time a new hot product comes out. -- Ability to buy a specially colored iPod, or an iPod with limited edition music that no one else can buy.The key is to not give price protection to early buyers (that's unsustainable as a business model) but to make them feel more exclusive, not less.
(from: How to spend $20 million)
Barcoding the planet
Semapedia is a quirky project that wants to get us to put
these special little barcodes on everything on the planet.
The idea is that you walk up to something, say the Eiffel Tower, or my house, point your cell phone camera at it and a click or so later, you get a nice article on the screen of your phone, describing it.
I first read about it in Jeremy Wagstaff's 'Loose Wire' series.
Quirky, in a Don Quixote kind of way.
Top Ruby Books
Over the last 2 weeks I've been actually able to carve out some quality time to get my head around Ruby and Ruby on Rails.
My play project is something called myscum.org, which is a lightweight scrum tracking tool. Basically it's modeled after what I've been using for BlogBridge, working with Aleksey. So a pretty simple case, makes a decent play project.
But of course, that's how BlogBridge started. A decent play project…
Security Myth: Generic Login Error
Check out this post from Jay Fields Thoughts:
Here's where I have an issue. Maybe I can't find out from the login screen what is a valid username and what isn't, but it only takes me a click to get to a screen that tells me what a valid username is. Do we really believe that a hacker is going to give up on the login screen and not just hit the "forgot password" link like I do? I
Yay. This has been bothering me forever but I just didn't have the time to blog about it. I totally agree.
While we are at it, the other annoyance is this. If a site requires my password to have at least 6 characters with one numeral, please put that little hint right under the password box. With all the different passwords I have to enter in different places with different rules, it will save me a lot of grief, and this one also does not add any security concern. After all, the hacker could just request a new account and see what the password requirements are.
Thanks Jay!.
Silly morning laugh
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BMT5odb90-o]
Out of body experiences
A really interesting experiment reported in various places trigger the sensation of an [tag]out of body experience[/tag]. I read about it first in the New York Times: "Scientists induce Out-of-Body Sensation."
But here are some additional links about it:
- New Scientist: "Out-of-body experiences are 'all in the mind'"
- Ars Technica: "On-demand out-of-body-experiences: all you need are VR goggles and a stick"
- Mind Hacks: "Do try this at home".
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PQAc_Z2OfQ&w=425&h=350]
Rebate trickery, again
Many consumer products, like cell phones, computers, and so on seem to come with some kind of a [tag]rebate[/tag]. Buy now and get $50 back, and so on. I don't quite understand the business or marketing intent of this scheme.
I just switched my whole kit and kaboodle cell phone business from Sprint to [tag]Cingular/AT&T[/tag]. And as encouragement I get $50 off on each of the phones, at least so they say.
What I actually get back
- A form that looks like a 1040 that has to be filled out in gory detail
- A requirement to cut out the [tag]UPC[/tag] bar code from the box
- Which I then have to place into an envelope, address and stamp and mail
- Weeks late, I receive a little orange debit card pre-loaded with $50…
- Which EXPIRES in 4 months
- Which needs to be 'activated', requiring a 10 minute phone call
- Which I then need to use when I purchase something. And who knows if that will work?
Hmm. What's going on here? Seems like they are hoping (or better, have calculated precisely) that a percentage of the eligible rebates never get collected. So they make it look like it's $50 off, but statistically it's more like $30.
Is this a good business practice? I suppose their statisticians and accountants say it is, but there's a real cost in brand loyalty and good will.
And it's not just [tag]AT&T[/tag] - everyone does it: Staples, HP in my personal recent experience, but lots and lots of others.
So the deal is: [tag]advertise[/tag] and promote a great offer and then place as many speedbumps and obstacles in your customer's way and hope that by inconveniencing your customers you recoup some of it.
Vitamins
Check out this post!
" Vitamins can help with the aging process as well as preventing premature aging. For more information on vitamins , you may want to visit Vitamins Explained. Vitamins A, E, C, and the B complex vitamins How To Approach Anti-Aging Treatments.
BlogBridge release 5.10 now with more vitamins( Pito’s Blog): Over on BlogBridge we just announced that release 5.10 just came out, you should try BlogBridge out! In the post there is also a review and explanation of the difference between our bi-weekly development releases and our full-fledged stable releases which come out every 6 or so months…[snip…]"
(from: Vitamins)
This is from one of my many SmartFeeds caught this in its net…. This purports to be a blog about vitamins, but obviously it's robot generated and it deemed to pick up my lame joke about BlogBridge, now with more vitamins…