Thoughts and ideas of a dyslexic designer/developer
Add NO MATCH to your profile picture and lets tell them we’re really not happy with what you’ve done choosing to be bought by Match.com
You can download my one here and add your own picture. Mine fits perfectly with the online now sign as you can see above.
Continue reading “NO MATCH: Update your okcupid profile now“
OkCupid Acquired by Match.com for $50 Million.
I’m shocked… and to be honest I really want to get off OKcupid pretty soon. But I really want to take my data with me. I’m already considering building some kind of scaper so I can get my data out. The only good thing is…
OkCupid co-founder and CEO Sam Yagan will stay on at the site to run operations.
Sam Yagan also recently said
We Will Not Charge Users Following Match.com Acquisition
“Our goal is that [the acquisition] will have no effect whatsoever,” Yagan told us, saying that no positions will change within the company, and that it will continue full-steam ahead as usual — sans censorship or fees.
Sounds great but is this all lip service? To be honest, as some people have already noticed. A article about paid vs free online dating has been taken it down!
Internet denizens have also pointed out that a popular OKCupid article from last year titled “Why You Should Never Pay For Online Dating” has been taken down from the company’s blog.
“I chose to take that down. Match didn’t ask,” Yagan says, denying that the other site was attempting to censor OkCupid. Apparently, the story was pieced together from public information, and Yagan has learned that some of the assumptions made in it were untrue.
Also, he says, “It’s a common sense thing to do. We’re joining a bunch of new colleagues, there’s no need to have that post.”
There is the google cache of course. And no wonder it was removed… It starts this way…
Why You Should Never Pay For Online Dating
Today I’d like to show why the practice of paying for dates on sites like Match.com and eHarmony is fundamentally broken, and broken in ways that most people don’t realize.
For one thing, their business model exacerbates a problem found on every dating site…
Oi! No wonder it was removed, its a scaving deconstruction of the match.com business model, oh whoops I mean our new boss.
And if that wasn’t so bad enough, this bit will have you in stitches.
Match.com’s numbers are just as grim. They’re a public company, so we can get their exact subscriber info from the shareholder report they file each quarter. Here’s what we have from Q4 20094:
And finally this flow diagram kills it dead. The owners of Match.com must have been having kittens by the point.
Remember, sites like Match and eHarmony are in business to get you to buy a monthly subscription. There’s nothing wrong with profit motive, but the particular way these sites have chosen to make money creates strange incentives for them. Let’s look at how the pay sites acquire new subscribers.
That for me is a clear sign that we’re about to be shafted. Yagan might be right that he was not told to remove the blogs but to be honest the fact he felt that he had to take it down speaks volumes! And its going to be a very bumpy ride down to the bottom, I can feel it now. And I want to get off now.
I want out! And I’m not the only one. I’ll be interested to see what kind of protest the people of okcupid put up. Might be worth starting off a specially branded avatar… Bit like whats been done on flickr before.
Do you love books?
Do you love books so much that you’d buy a kindle and sell your kindle for a stack of books? Yeah I thought not…
But just in-case your thinking about giving up on your kindle. Microcosm Publishing will take your bet.
I think its all stupid but to be fair Microcosm must have knew it was going to get there name in almost every news site and blog. So to be fair to them, good on them. I wonder how many people have taken up there offer. Although I think the swap is for new books, so its hardly cost effective but then again a 2nd hand kindle can’t be worth that much, can it?
Its also worth noting that Amazon ebooks outsold Hardbooks…
E-books have hit a significant milestone. In each of the last three months, Amazon reports that sales of books for Kindle have outpaced the sale of hardcover books, and that growth is only accelerating.
…and Paperbacks just recently
The ebook revolution has swept past two more milestones in its ferocious advance upon the bastions of literary culture. As the Man Booker prize embraces the digital era, the online retail giant Amazon has announced that sales of Kindle editions have overtaken paperbacks in the US.
James mentioned I should check out this video. I thought well after watching a daily show and it being mentioned again. I thought I’d better check out Ricky Gervais’ Opening Monologue on the Golden Globe awards.
I couldn’t watching the TV after a while because it was uncomfortably funny. Hysterical even.
I don’t usually watch these kind of things but I did find Mary Portas Secret Shopper somewhat interesting…
In this brand new series Mary Portas has changed sides. Rather than helping businesses to maximise profits, she’s now championing the shopper, and battling to get Britain’s biggest chains to put customers first.
Mary believes that Britain is cowering under a cloud of poor customer service and that we’ve never had it so bad. By using the stealth weapon of secret shopping, she exposes shoddy customer service and uses the evidence to give company bosses a wake-up call. And, with the help of her covert cameras, she’s planning to start a retail revolution.
Customer service is indeed a sham in the UK. Everything has been pushed aside for higher profit. Theres a great scene where Mary is talking to the head of pilot in front of the owner of leon. He gives all the reasons why he felt everything was going well and they didn’t need to change. Of course all the reasons were to do with expansion and profit, customer service was never mentioned in anyway.
Its intriguing because theres so many elements we’ve learned from the online world via things like the cluetrain manifesto at play. In actual fact the real world can learn a lot from the online world.
Customer is king, how sad we are for not punishing them who forget this.
Yep its true the leader of BBC future media and technology Erik Huggers is leaving for a job in Intel.
We heard the news about 5pm today (Tuesday 18th Jan) and funny enough we had an informal meeting with the new director of BBC future media – Ralph Rivera, planned for 5:30pm in the Manchester office.
Although I did actually like Erik Huggers, I’m really looking forward to working under Ralph Rivera’s vision. John Linwood will now take on the Technology part of the old Future Media & Technology.
To be fair to Erik, he was actually a very likable kind of a guy. He made some very difficult decisions and brought in some very interesting people including Richard Titus, Anthony Rose, John Linwood, etc. He tended not to shy away from conflict and certainly made his presence felt when required. Erik always supported the Backstage project which is obviously now closed. But the thing which I will always remember Erik for is the look on his face when he came up to Manchester and we presented him with a Manchester City Tevez board saying welcome to Manchester, but switched Tevez for Erik. There was a certain amount of confusion but he never let on, he just accepted the gift with welcoming arms.
I do wish him well and I know he’ll do some great things at Intel given half a chance.
The first thing I asked Ralph Rivera, was about his background and the answer I got back was not just impressive but delightful to hear. Not only did he say all the right things about technology from his computer science background but he also said some great things about games and the internet. Not only does he get it, but he seems to live it. It was almost like if you were to cut him, Geek blood would pour out. So yes Erik was great but Ralph is just something else. To be honest, this is my own opinion, Ralph is exactly what the BBC needs right now. A geek running things…
Someone suggested it could be like when Greg Dyke joined the BBC. I wasn’t there for those times but I heard some amazing stories and some great projects. Bearing in mind Ralph is not the Director General of the BBC only (I say only, but you know what i mean) the director of Future Media. I’m intrigued and very excited what plans he has to shape up the BBC and take it on to to the next Decade. So excited I can’t bloody sleep…
Photo credit: hoyvinmayvin
The description says: Geeks Talk Sexy is back – bigger and better!
And it certainly will be bigger and much better.
So we’re kicking off with part 2 of the sexygeek series. Of course we always planned to do more. But I got a feeling part 2 might shock people because its quite distinct.
This time its all about the female geeks, except instead of the usual discussions about woman and men which we’ve all heard quite a few times. We’ll be digging down into the deep mystery of relationships between the two.
- How do girl geeks and guy geeks interact in the geek community?
- What happens when we go from techy hack day to romantic hack date?
- What are the problems we have to overcome?
- What can we do to make everyone feel comfortable in their role?
Yes the nitty gritty or you might prefer the nuts and bolts of male and female relationships within the scope of the geek culture.
Most discussions center around woman in the workforce, as entrepreneurs, in places which were along time ago though as only for men. But there is little talk about relationships of men and woman. In actual fact I’m kind of lying. There is quite a lot information but they tend to be buried deep down in places where most of us don’t go looking. So we’re uncovering and discussing it on Friday 4th Feb at Madlab. We may also have a very special guest stopping in, so what you waiting for? Sign up now at our event page.
Disclaimer
Now I have to add the very serious disclaimer because people are going to get very irate about the whole thing.
We are fully aware that this title and concept is only a vague approximation to reality and that gender is not just binary. We are in no way assuming that there are only straight, cis, monogamous, male or female geeks. For the purpose of the talk we picked the most obvious intersection for arising problems, which is the role of women in the geek community that is usually only discussed from a professional point of view.
We hope this decision does not offend anyone (although I got a feeling it will) and that people of all genders and orientations join us for the talk. Please do get in touch if you have got serious concerns.
The whole series
I said in my new years resolutions for 2011, a lot of things regarding Take Geek Culture to new heights. We (me, Samantha and Hwayoung) have worked hard on the series and have some cracking surprises to come. I really hope people bear with us, the first one was great and we learned a lot from that one but it was ultimately very difficult because we tried to cover a load of issues in one overview session. In this one we will stick to one subject, so it will be a lot more tighter. We’re also hoping to have a special guest join us for the event, who that will be will be revealed later. To get you all started, there is this Comfort-a-Crying-Woman
Next in the series we will be exploring Gay, Lesiban, Bi, Poly, Transexual and what ever else there is. I’m happy to say we have some help from Simon Carter who has stepped up to help us better represent section of geeks talk sexy. Me, Samantha and Hwayoung are not that familiar with most of these. So to do them any real justice we certainly need help.
Of course its all about part 2 right now, so what you waiting for? Sign up now!
So now the ebook is out there, this pretty much spells the end of the BBC Backstage project. The backstage site & blog will go into a deep freeze so none of the links will be broken. It was interesting to read the Guardian wrap up of backstage, there was some good quotes from our interview way back in December 2010. But what got me was after a while was the slideshow from Rainycat. She was so good at documenting things. Of course afterwards I spent about a hour or so going through my own photos tagged bbc backstage.
I’ll say it again, BBC Backstage was an amazing project to be part of and even run. Not just the big stuff but also the small stuff. The good times (the many events we did, the prototypes and finally getting our own backstage playground servers off the ground) and the times when I thought I might be sacked (such as undermining the podcast trial by launching our own using blip.tv or crossing the hacker/BBC divide by sympathising with the DRM protests).
Its been simply incredible and looking back through the pictures, I see a lot of really happy people. Theres no doubt I’ll be chasing the high of working on backstage for quite some time to come. I think I remember a conversation I had with Rain after her attachment came to an end.
"Working for the BBC should be that way, and anything we can do to make that happen is always a good thing."
As always thanks for tags hackers of the new world, hopefully what we do next will be even more exciting that backstage ever would have been.
According to Stephen Mount, online dating goes something a little like this.
Person A: Hi
Person B: Hi
Person A: What’s your financial circumstances?
Person B: I’m skint
Person A: Bye
In my experience this is certainly not true. It would be interesting to hear where Stephen is meeting these ladies? The only time I’ve ever had someone challenge me about how much I actually earn is when I went speed dating for the first time and it ended up on ITV 1 primetime.
The woman (who I won’t screen shot for her own sake, although I really would like to) who is person A in the following role-play and I’m person B.
Person A: So what do you do?
Person B: I work for the BBC on a special project which I love
Person A: Oh thats a shame, I heard the BBC don’t pay very well
After a slight delay (I was weighing up in my mind how this would play out)
Person B: Well that only matters if your a gold digging ******
Person A: **** ******* ******** ******
Lets say the next 2.5 mins were some of the most difficult conversation you could have with a stranger…
Luckily its only ever happened once and even more luckily it was not caught by the camera for the ITV viewing public, because that would be too embarrassing at the time but ever so funny now.
From Tara Hunt, 5 reasons why I can’t date muggles
- We speak a different language: just today I told a nice man who wants to meet me for coffee that I couldn’t because I had the Montreal Python meetup to go to. His response? “You are into snakes?!”
- The most romantic thing anyone has ever done for me is to use my avatar in the mockups of their web app. Flowers, poetry and the like just can’t quite measure up anymore.
- A list of some of the stuff that turns me on: hackathons, data, a vigorous debate on web standards, competing for the most badges on Foursquare, pushing to production from dev…see?
- Most men are uncomfortable with our arguments being resolved on Quora.
- I kinda want to use the Angry Birds theme as my first wedding dance someday.
Bonus: using the word muggle brings on puzzled looks in the first place!
Entertaining slight of words by Tara Hunt, glad she shared it with the world (outside of FB). I would suggest I have a list like this…
