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.
Google is buying video-sharing website YouTube for $1.65bn (£883m) in shares. So is this is a gamble or a winning investment?
Is this the best business model for an internet start-up? Have a clever idea, build a large audience while burning through lots of money, and wait to be bought by Google?
No matter how you look at it, you have to admit Google really did get a bargain with Youtube.com. Its now a corner stone of the web.
Funny enough further in the same piece…
YouTube is not MySpace
A few months ago the number of YouTube users overtook that of the web’s other great networking site, MySpace. Last year, MySpace was snapped up by old media giant Rupert Murdoch and his News Corporation for $580m. This, though, is not about who paid more for how many eyeballs. It’s about the underlying dynamics.
Thats pretty funny with the current state of Myspace
I seriously don’t get it. There is no doubt Inception was one of the high lights of last year but the golden globes seemed to skip over inception.
Anyway, this is my list of films you should have seen (or look out for in 2011) in 2010,
It still shocks me when I hear people say they haven’t seen inception. I mean I can understand it if you haven’t because of time but the reason I usually hear is because they have heard its a bit of a mind screw.
In actual fact, its actually not that much of a mind screw. Yes you do have to pay attention and quite a lot does indeed happen but its not any more difficult to understand that Twelve monkeys. Put it this way, its nothing like Primer. and that crazy timeline of the film.
For goodness sake if you’ve not seen Inception, go rent it today!
Its intriguing to see ideas you’ve had previously, explored and implemented. I wrote a while ago about mydreamscape and how it was going to make money. One of my suggestions was product and locational placements.
Maybe a lot of people are dreaming about a certain location or a certain product. If you own that location or product you may want to own that page and make it more like yours? So for example http://www.mydreamscape.org/items/buzzlightyear/ – could be a page about buzzlight year in dreams and have images and links to the item its self. This would also be true of locations too for example http://www.mydreamscape.org/location/europe/london/thamesbarrier – would obviously link to the Thames barrier in London with information taken from Wikipedia.org and other open sources. The information architecture of exactly how this would this work needs to be sorted out.
Realizing this in my head, but decided not to include the option of having people who were spokespeople for a certain thing in there dreams. So realistically if I was to consistently have dreams about buzzlight year not only would I be featured on a item page but I’d be highly ranked. So if one of my friends was to have a dream about buzzlight year not only would they have a link to /buzzlightyear but my friends thoughts or dreams would be ranked much higher. Of course this would change once Pixar decided to own that space.
Sounds confusing…?
Well Facebook just included this feature in a slightly different way… 
If someone checks you in to a certain place or likes a certain thing. Facebook can and will use your location/like to advertise to your friends that thing/location.
So back to mydreamscape, you would get. Ian Forrester had a dream about the Amazon Kindle automatically but the difference here is Amazon would be able to pick and choose which stories they would use in the advertising. So you don’t get that embarrassing problem, where a person has a negative dream and the advertising is based of it. Just because someone checks into Starbucks doesn’t mean they had a positive experience there, so to run it across a human eye makes sense to me.
Ok now thats out the way, I would agree that the whole process of mining users likes/checkins for data they can use for advertising purposes really sucks. But then again, to be fair to facebook. Its all in there in the EULA. If you don’t like it, for goodness sake switch to something else or stop using it.
Just quit moaning…
I’m with Kevin Smith on telling Hollywood to go suck it.
Writer/Director Kevin Smith premiered his new film Red State at Sundance today—he’d led everyone to believe that after the showing, he’d publicly auction the distribution rights to the highest-bidding studio. Instead, he bought it himself and used the attention generated to note how broken the studio distribution system is (why spend $20 million on a film that cost $4 million to make) and how he was convinced he could a better job handling things on his own.
Just like the guys who setup Revision3 and Twit.TV, they used there familiarity and popularity from the now defunct subscribe only techtv cable channel, to launch there own much more sophisticated and effective projects to basically replace techtv. The result is light years ahead of the old techtv shows in every respect.
Kevin Smith would be crazy not to "cash in" on his followers and reputation in this space. Its actually begs the question why he had not done it earlier really? Heck and whats wrong with a little shouting at the hand that use to feed you…?
It cost Red State roughly $4 million to make, and Smith didn’t see any sense in spending $20 million (i.e. 5 times the amount it cost to make the film) just to advertise it. Smith also was tired of huge marketing expenditures whose efficacy would be determined within a period of three days.
It does raise the question what do you do, if you’ve not got that track record behind you and your looking to self publish or self distribute but I’m a firm believer that the best will rise to the top. It may take 10 years, but they will get there in the end.
I never thought I’d see the day but it seems Microsoft have really got into the hacker spirit recently. I mean what would Bill Gates say about this new leaf of openness, who knows… but I can imagine a shudder of fear slowly tingling up his spine.
Remember Hacking the Xbox: An Introduction to Reverse Engineering by Andrew bunnie Huang
"Hacking the Xbox" confronts the social and political issues facing today’s hacker. The book introduces readers to the humans behind the hacks through several interviews with master hackers.
"Hacking the Xbox" looks forward and discusses the impact of today’s legal challenges on legitimate reverse engineering activities. The book includes a chapter written by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) about the rights and responsibilities of hackers, and concludes by discussing the latest trends and vulnerabilities in secure PC platforms.
Its not just phone 7, Kinect kicked off a new attitude for Microsoft. Good on them, but I do wonder how long it will last?
A side point
I was a little excited when I discovered Rafael Rivera was one of the people behind the phone 7 unlocking. But of course he’s not to be confused with the new BBC director of Future media Ralph Rivera. That would be so weird if it was…
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.
In my email today, a email from Chris Anderson of TED,
I’m delighted to share with you a significant new step in our efforts to promote "ideas worth spreading". We’re announcing today the launch of TED Books. TED Books are to Books as TED Talks are to lectures. They’re short, pithy, riveting. They’re designed to express a single big idea in a way that can be absorbed in a single sitting. A typical 18-minute TED Talk might be around 2000 words. A typical traditional book is at least 60,000 words. TED Books nicely fill the gap in between. They come in at 10,000-20,000 words. So they can be read and absorbed in an hour or two.
These books are designed for electronic distribution. We are launching with the Amazon Kindle Singles program which opened today. The Kindle platform allows books to be read on iPad, iPhone, Android phones, PC and Mac – as well as the dedicated Kindle readers. Each TED Book costs just $2.99 (but may cost more in international markets)
Interestingly me and Nicole were just talking about my Kindle and reading non-fiction books. I have quite a few non-fiction books like Malcolm Gladwell’s excellent tipping point. I regularly lend them out to friends and family.
I’ll be interested to see what permissions are attached to the these ebooks. Ideally it would be very open and easily sharable. But thats not going to happen… Wishful thinking on my behalf I think but its a shame because the authors seems to be publishing under the TED brand, so I imagine it wouldn’t be that hard to convince the authors to make there work freely available or at least with less restrictions. Oh well…
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.
