Archive for January, 2009
My new Facebook app: Depression Gifts
January 9th, 2009 | 
Author: 
Sure, you want to send your Facebook buddies a beer or a bouquet or a box of chocolates or a plant or a pet or any of a zillion other virtual items available through the many Facebook gift-giving apps, but who can afford them?
Times are tough, and even free gifts might be too a little too much for your strained budget. Fortunately, I can help.
Depression Gifts allows you to send economy-appropriate presents to your friends. Pencils, apples, sticks, and more easy-to-afford items are available, with more coming. Your friends will appreciate the thought and your wallet will appreciate the break.
Depression Gifts. Available wherever lots of sad-looking people stand in line, in black and white.
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I see the fnords! (on my iPod Touch)
The Fnords have come to the iPhone and iPod Touch!
The newly launched app from Steve Jackson Games allows the Illuminati to send you messages… more obviously than usual, I mean.
Use it to boggle your friends… or ask it for help when you need to make a decision. Think of it as an I Ching for paranoids.
Also comes with stylish Illuminated wallpaper you can use for your iPhone or iTouch.
Free app, and worth every shekel.
So where's the iPhone version of the Principia Discordia?
In other news, I got an iPod Touch. You'll hear more of this later. Oh, yes.
The People's Choice Awards and their award-winning red-headed stepchild
Watch the People's Choice Awards last night? This year they added a great interactive feature where you could go to the cool flashy voting thing on their Web site and cast your vote in four categories, with votes being tallied all the way up through the first half of the live awards show itself. Sweet!
Of course, two of those categories were never, at any point, expressly mentioned during the telecast. Those would be Favorite Online Sensation and Favorite User-Generated Video, the online-only awards, which apparently were popular enough to drum up some Internet buzz and traffic for the PCA site but not enough to, you know, explicitly acknowledge on camera in any audible way.
This follows the pattern set by last year's Emmy Awards, which included an online-only poll for people to vote for TV's Most Memorable Moments, winners to be shown during the Emmy broadcast, only none of them ever were, probably because they barely had enough time to cram in all the long, cringe-inducing bouts of reality-show-host banter as it was. Why show a moment from the history of television which touched the hearts of millions when you could just let Howie Mandel rant aimlessly for another 10 minutes?
(Of course, it could be a conspiracy. Joss Whedon's show "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" won the "TV's Most Memorable Moments, Drama" Emmy last spring and his "Dr. Horrible" won Favorite Online Sensation last night; maybe there's some sort of legendary Hollywood prophecy, whispered amongst the ancient executives, that California will sink beneath the waves if someone is ever foolhardy enough to hand him an award?)
So we're good enough to fan the flames of buzz, give marketers something to do and make the awards shows seem marginally more relevant, but we don't get to sit at the big kids' table at the ceremony. Fair enough, fair enough. Especially since I don't watch the awards shows on TV anyway.
They're a lot better online.
After all, those are the people's choice…
When the economy fail-whales
You may be getting a lot less social soon if the economy keeps de-bubbling.
LiveJournal, home of diaries, dreams, daily ruminations, and eye-watering slash fan-fiction for a decade, just laid off a buncha people (early reports said 20, LJ says "about a dozen").
LJ was one of the first sites to include social networking as a major component of their operating system and for many, many people it's still the place to go if you want to keep up with your friends' lives without being blasted with blinking neon ads for the latest Hollywood pablum or having to decide how to respond to a virtual vampire attack from the guy you barely know from Human Resources. But it's looking like their tiered payment-and-ad-supported system isn't making the beans it should. How will the economy affect other social networks?
Facebook (which just announced this morning that they hit the 150 million user mark) is ad-supported, with reasonably unobtrusive ads popping up on the side. MySpace went the hyperactive-used-car-lot route and plastered ads on every available surface of your profile. They and other community sites will probably weather the storm; adversity draws people together, and they'll need somewhere to share their pain (Mood: 
Homeless).
But what about Twitter? A micro-blogging-and-SMS service with no ads, no membership, no fees? I don't know what's keeping it going now, much less how it will survive when grocery stores begin holding customer gladiator fights for the last pound of ground chuck. Twitter lives on nothing but starlight and moonbeams, and about a zillion tweets about Obama. How will it survive?
I have joined the iCult
What I am now… is a man with an iPod Touch.
Up to this point I had successfully avoided the Apple cult, sometimes with the aid of diversions and clever disguises. I've just always used a PC, mostly from the inertia of always having had one. My MP3 player has been whatever was selling for 10 bucks at Wal-Mart that was marginally capable of pushing a song into my earhole. And my handheld needs have been more than adequately filled by my series of increasingly complicated Palm Pilots.
Besides, Apple fans are… let's face it, they're a little scary. I've used Macs in college and here at work, and yeah, they're decent machines, I've got nothing against them. If you don't gush about them, Mac fans simply regard you as a lesser being who simply doesn't get it. But God help you if you even slightly disparage anything with a shiny, half-eaten apple on the side or hordes of rabid iPod people will swarm hand-over-hand across your column, blog and Twitter feed to click and hold you until you submit and endlessly sing the praises of Steve Jobs and all that he holds dear. Even if I was interested in a Mac, I would feel like someone slightly intrigued by Scientology who was freaked out by Tom Cruise.
But Palm seems to be walking away from their PDAs, preferring to stumble forward with smartphones in their eyes, while friends with iPhones and iPod Touches (iTouches?) have been flagrantly fondling their shiny toys at me. "Look," they say, dancing in monochromatic poses. "We are Bright and Futuristic and Good. Join us!"
