adamyntium

Category: business and consumers

  • It’s (mostly) okay that everyone is everywhere all at once

    It’s (mostly) okay that everyone is everywhere all at once

    Brief thoughts about the fracturing of online communication

    tl;dr: I think a lot of folks are wrongly conflating personal messaging, topical communities, and general social networks (though I get there’s a bunch of overlap). And I think the increasing fracturing of these venues is actually fine, except for the first category… which is indeed quite annoying.

    PERSONAL MESSAGING

    iMessage, WhatsApp, Signal, Line, FB Messenger, etc. The apps we use to keep in touch with our family and friends, 1:1 and in small groups.

    It’s certainly a pain when the people we care about are spread across so many different services, because it means we have to keep a bunch of apps on our phone, remember which app so-and-so checks more often, etc. And a world where Apple opens up iMessage to the world or embraces RCS… seems, alas, unlikely.

    My personal favorite messaging app is currently Signal, from a non-profit org of the same name that’s created a well-made cross-platform, end-to-end-encrypted service. It supports the things most normal people want and expect from a messaging service, like sending your bestie a photo or short video that doesn’t look like a potato when received. Unless it actually is a potato, in which case… go Idaho farmers!

    TOPICAL COMMUNITIES

    This set includes Subreddits (groups) on Reddit, hobbyist forums, Facebook groups, etc.

    It’s fine that these are fractured! When one wants to talk about, say, Japan travel, it’s no problem that there are 4200 different places to learn and engage. Many of those communities are great and helpful and one doesn’t have to keep up with all of ’em on various phone apps 🙂

    GENERAL SOCIAL NETWORKING

    This describes services such as Twitter, Bluesky, Mastodon, Threads, and of course Facebook’s ‘main feed’ (but it’s complicated!*), and so on.
    And it shouldn’t worry us that users are — and likely will remain — fractured across these services.

    After all, in real life we have a set of places where we like to hang out, and they all feature different groups of people, distinct vibes, and so on.

    Folks are understandably concerned about a perceived “winner takes all” scenario here, but the internet has gotten big enough that… that’s unlikely to be an issue.

    Maybe Post will stay small.
    Maybe Bluesky will take off or maybe it won’t.
    Hopefully Spill (a newer Black-centric social network) will grow and thrive.

    There’s room for ’em all!

    My only firm expectation (and hope) at this point is that Twitter finally dies

    I genuinely understand and appreciate that many people have quite fond memories of that place and will be sad to see it go to that great big bitbucket in the sky. But it’s like your cranky-but-beloved granny who got bit by a zombie. She’s not the same granny anymore. Let her go, friends, let her go.

    Image credit: Pieter Brueghel the Elder – bAGKOdJfvfAhYQ — Google Arts & Culture, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=22178101

    (* As you can see from the multiple mentions of Facebook in the lists above, it’s a confusing/confounding example because it’s at once so many different things! (messaging service, topical groups, generalized social network, etc.)

  • Facebook’s Horizon Workrooms: don’t believe the anti-hype

    Facebook’s Horizon Workrooms: don’t believe the anti-hype

    Everyone’s hella snarking about the FB Horizons Workrooms project (collaborative work in virtual reality) but mark (ha!) my words…

    • 99% of them haven’t tried it.
    • 95% of them didn’t bother actually RTFA (“Who is gonna pay thousands of dollars per person for this??!?” [it costs $299])
    • Nearly everyone will be “WOW! This is revolutionary!” when Apple eventually copies, er, makes their own version (in fairness, Apple will introduce it in a far more polished way) 😀
    Introduction to Horizon Workrooms, by Oculus (a Facebook company)

    I haven’t tried Horizons Workrooms yet because, well, it’s not like Google is gonna go all-in on this for our remote work… and other than Google stuff, I’m generally not collaborating on projects (and I don’t think all my fellow non-profit Groupmuse Foundation board members have the Oculus Quest headset this software requires).

    But it seems reasonably useful to me. In particular, I’ve really appreciated spatial audio in gamings and social meetups on various apps!

    I know that a ton of us are really Zoom’d out at this point (including me), but there are some very key aspects of VR collaboration that mitigate many problems with ‘regular’ video conferencing:

    • No more constant eye-contact. Seriously, every colleague literally facing every other colleague is so unnatural and sometimes even unnerving, not to mention fatiguing!
    • You no longer see yourself on camera. Whew! Also a big stress relief.
    • And the aforementioned spatial audio is a surprisingly helpful way of quickly getting clued in on who is speaking. It’s just more natural to hear voices coming from different “locations” vs. all blended together via your laptop speakers.

    Not Yet Frequently Asked Questions

    (but I thought I’d answer them anyway)

    “But Adam, won’t the ads be annoying?”

    I’d be surprised if this product gets ads shoved in it, since it’s targeted at professionals vs. consumers. I expect it’ll be a loss leader, a way for Oculus to get people to buy their hardware, or something with a freemium upsell in the future.

    “How can we trust Facebook with private conversations?!”

    If they hope to get big companies onboard (and that’s their path to major profit on this I’d think), they’ll need to include pretty ironclad guarantees re privacy. And lying in that context would screw them over big time.

    “But… cartoon characters? With no legs? This looks like a kiddie game!”

    Fair. But, as I said, this thing runs on $299 headsets, and it has head and hand tracking but no other physical tracking. With the available computing power at that price point (and without a required PC in the background), any attempt at animated photo-realism would be a pretty painful Uncanny Valley experience.

    “Wouldn’t this be uncomfortable for 8 hour stretches?!”

    First of all, those of you in 8-hour-stretches of meetings on the daily… you have far bigger problems worry about than the uncomfortableness of a headset. But that extreme aside, yeah, I can’t imagine a typical VR headset being comfortable for particularly long stretches and, besides, the Quest’s battery only lasts 2-2.5 hours.

    But for collaborations that last, say, 1 hour… heck, I’ve spent far more than that playing mini-golf on my Quest without any adverse effects :).

    “Speaking of adverse effects, don’t people get nauseous in VR?!”

    Yep, they sure do, but usually from games involving motion (roller-coastering, running, falling, etc). I would be really surprised if many folks felt sick from a virtual collaboration app in VR.

    Curious to know what you think!

    Have you tried this yet? Or even just socialized in VR before? 🙂
    Any sort of collaboration you’d be interested in tackling with this?

  • Thrice-weekly postal deliveries: Pound wise or pound foolish?

    I was reading a fascinating article in The Economist about the U.S. Postal Service, and a few things came to mind:

    • Hmm, the comments are delightfully civil and informative!
    • Can I count on one hand the number of postal items I receive quarterly — perhaps even yearly — that I actually want?  Why, yes, I probably can!
    • What would happen if the U.S. Postal Service delivered only three days per week (say, Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday)?
    This latter idea, then, prompted me to wonder the following:
    1. Would this pose an actual hardship on people, and if so, would it (I assume) most likely hit the economically-disadvantaged more heavily?  And if so, in what ways?  Could other factors/proposals mitigate the potential hardship?
    2. What if the U.S. Government got out of postal delivery altogether, perhaps in conjunction with some sort of requirement (stick) or deep incentives (carrot) prompting private delivery companies to continue delivering to loss-leaders (rural areas)?
    3. Is the postal service largely public in most, or even all other industrialized nations?
    4. What about a subsidy or other incentive for households or even apartment complexes which offered to accept minimized or even eliminated postal delivery services?
    Keep in mind, I’m not necessarily proposing that pickup from centralized locations be reduced or eliminated.
    Your thoughts?

  • My idea for saving the U.S. Postal Service: Address for life

    As I’ve written previously, I’m in the process of moving from one townhome to another in the city of Mountain View, CA.  What a massive pain!  Transferring all utility bills to my soon-to-be-ex-roommate, starting or getting transferred utilities at my new place, and of course, all the physical moving!

    But there’s one other thing I’m majorly dreading:  change of address notifications!

    Sure, you can do a Change of Address form online with the USPS for a $1 fee, delightfully ensuring that all your junk mail follows you to your new location.  But this doesn’t relieve you of the oh-so-fun duty of notifying (online or otherwise) your banks, credit card companies, health/car/other insurance companies, student loan and other lenders, DMV, your work, magazines, e-commerce firms (amazon.com, ebay…) etc. etc. etc.  By my latest estimate, this means I have over 50 separate companies to notify, and I’m sure I’m missing some.  Assuming it takes about 5 minutes per address change (and that’s probably conservative), that’s over four wasted hours.

    It’s a lot easier in the online world (for geeks)

    Those of us who are geeky enough to have our own domain name online can get addresses like [myfirstname]@[mylastname].net.  Not only do these look spiffy (and mean we can actually have our first name as our username — a practically impossible feat in web mail!), but they also offer super-easy forwarding!

    For instance, I currently have my domain address instantly forward mail to my @gmail address.  Then, if by chance a cooler webmail comes along, I can instantly redirect all my subsequent incoming mail to that new webmail service.  Or I can even have my mail forwarded to two different services at once, also with fewer than two minutes of work.

    How about a snail mail address for life?

    Imagine if we could do that for our physical mail.  And, really, why the heck not?

    I’ve envisioned a service I’ll call USPS Mail Premier, available for a yearly fee.  Here’s what you get…

    At the “Silver” level (perhaps $79/year):

    • The ability to select a vanity address (from amongst a massive preset list, e.g., “Maritime Lane,” “Camino Verde,” etc., and a seven digit prefix (e.g., 805-3211 Maritime Lane), or just a ten digit number.
      • The USPS would automatically forward all mail sent to this vanity address to your physical address; so when you moved to a new location, all you’d have to do is update the pointer with USPS, and instantly all subsequent mail would get sent to your new physical address! 🙂
    • 100 customized return address labels with your name and address pre-printed on it, complete with QR code for easier scanning.
    • Forwarding of mail sent to you at one old address of your choice.

    At the “Gold” level (perhaps $99/year)

    • The stuff above, plus…
    • 200 more highly customizable return address labels, complete with clip-art logo of your choice
    • 200 fully customizable “New Address” (business-sized) cards to give to family and friends, also with embedded QR code
    • Forwarding of mail sent to you from up to two old addresses of your choice.

    And lastly, the platinum level (perhaps $159/year)

    • The stuff above, plus…
    • Control via an online dashboard of exactly who you’d like to get mail from physically, which mail types or senders you’d like to get mail from electronically (e.g., the USPS would open, scan, and recycle the paper mail, just like some third parties do today), and which senders or sender types you’d like to completely block (their mail would go to dev/null).

      • For instance, you could have the USPS bit-bucket all of those annoying circulars.  Sure, the advertisers would be bummed, but they could likely be mollified by receiving a cut of all Platinum level revenues.

    And for a one-time fee of, say, $59, the USPS would send electronic or paper notifications of your new address to all your credit card companies, insurance companies, etc.

    Very substantive benefits (but also many challenges)

    • More physical security; you wouldn’t have to disclose your physical address to random people and organizations that need or want to send you snail mail.
    • Environmental benefits, due to a lot of mail being scanned vs shipped and fewer no-such-addressee (less gas for mail vehicle trips).
    • And of course, removal of the need for consumers to notify a zillion companies every time they move!

    Of course, there are caveats / downsides / etc.:

    • This would obviously require humongous retooling for not only the USPS, but computers around the world that currently have a set field structure defined for U.S. mail addresses.
    • We consumers would lose the ability to grok likely delivery times, since we wouldn’t inherently know whether that person or business (if businesses could partake in this) were around the block or on the other side of the country.
    • Getting this to work internationally would require some insane amount of coordination.
    *  *  *

    Any amazing related opportunities or benefits or caveats I’ve overlooked?

    And would you pay for a set of services like this?

  • "Ultimate Rewards" by Chase = Insulting Rewards (marketing)

    I’ve had Chase credit cards for probably over a decade.  One of them was just converted to an “Ultimate Rewards” card and today a huge glossy brochure arrived in my mailbox.

    23 pages, bucketloads (technical term) of words, and one ridiculously obscured very-plain fact:  This card offers 1% cash back.

    Now mind you, that’s nothing to sneeze at… the 1% cash back part, I mean.  I currently have (and mostly love) my Schwab no-annual-fee 2% cash back card, but Schwab has ceased offering it to new customers and who knows how much longer the rest of us saps will be grandfathered in.  Discover Card offers a higher percentage cash back, but only once you’ve spent $x per year with $x being a very large number.  And how many places around the world — especially outside the U.S. — take the Discover card, anyway?

    No, 1% cash back on a no-annual fee card isn’t awful.  You know what’s bad, though?  Insulting your customer’s intelligence.  Let me explain.  Here are some of the zillions of offers breathlessly touted within the brochure:

    • 2,000 points = $20 check
    • 2,000 points = $20 statement credit
    • 5,000 points = $50 gift card (lots of variety, but, yep, same ratio)
    • 10,000 points + $191 = $291 airfare ($100 + $191 = $291, get it?  And whoa, “fly without restrictions”! Amazing!)
    • 10,000 points = $100 Hyatt Check Certificate
    Noticing a trend?  In fact, in every single listing I checked in this big conglomeration of dead trees, I see — wait for it — the equivalent of 1% cash back.
    So yeah, maybe I’m being overly cranky about this, maybe this is just fancy marketing, but to me it says, “Hi consumer!  We know you’re a moron that would be unimpressed or even confused by ‘1% cash back’ so we’re going to dress this up… page after page after page after page of oh-so-pretty-stock-photography-like photos.”
    I’d rather Chase, oh, I don’t know, cut out the lame marketing… stop filling our landfills with stupidly wasteful mailings… and from this, perhaps, save enough money to offer its customers 1.x or even 2% cash back on every purchase.

  • Quickly figure out cost savings for a fuel-efficient car

    I have a Prius and I like it a lot*.  It may not be universally seen as stylish, but I don’t care 🙂  It’s not only environmentally sound, it’s roomy, comfortable, and — with voice recognition and other geek pleasures — it’s fun, too.

    But you, bottom-line reader, may be asking, “Okay, so what’s in it for my pocketbook?”  Fair question.  So I jumped in my time machine, went a couple of years back, and found this handy Google Spreadsheet that I designed, just for future-you!

    Please be nice and don’t erase or otherwise harm this spreadsheet (though yeah, I certainly have a backup just in case :-)).  You can plug in numbers in the yellow “Edit below” fields to see just how much you might save in gas costs with a Prius.

    Enjoy… and, as always, feedback’s welcome!

    P.S. — Feel free to view and download your own copy of this fuel cost calculation spreadsheet.

    *P.P.S. — Quit yer snickerin’ about “runaway” issues. IMHO, this was a tempest in a teapot, with congressmen unfairly vilifying a foreign brand using scant evidence and employing scaremongering techniques. Yeah, yeah, I’m biased, but still…

  • Amazon, inexplicably hampering its most loyal customers

    [Note:  Links below are affiliate links, so if you click and buy, I make money.]

    I have bought hundreds of items from Amazon  (yes, I’m an Amazon Prime member, surprise surprise :-P)

    Some of them I’m particularly fond of and want to either repurchase or recommend to a friend… but I can’t do easily because Amazon won’t help me.  You see, I’ve not been able to figure out any way to search through my purchases; it seems I can only browse by year (and paginatedly browse at that… ack!). 

    I bought an amazing compressible travel pillow (below) a while back that I absolutely love, and I wanted to encourage my parents to get it for their upcoming trip to New Zealand :

    [oops, pillow seems to no longer be listed on Amazon, and graphic was just showing a generic Amazon ad.  Blech!]

    …but couldn’t find any sane way to look up the product. 
    – I tried doing an Amazon search for “travel pillow” but there are hundreds if not thousands of travel pillows in their store.
    – I then tried searching through my gmail (where I get my Amazon order receipts) for “travel pillow” but that didn’t turn it up.
    – Somewhat randomly, I then searched Amazon for “orange travel pillow” and that did the trick.

    Amazon, why do you make this so difficult for your active customers?  Why not a simple search box in the My Orders screen?

    Edited on November 8, 2009 to add:
    Looks like Amazon no longer sells this pillow.  Bummer!

  • Knott’s Berry Farm — For shame!

    Okay, this is not a rant on junk food.  I think when people eat Cheez-wiz, they aren’t misguided enough to assume they’re eating healthful real cheese.  When people eat a double fudge brownie, I doubt they’re confusing this with an apple.  And when people eat Cap’n Crunch cereal, there’s no way they’d assume they’re consuming real fruit.  Oh, um, wait a minute, someone did?  Er, well, anyway, you get my point 😀

    But seriously… sometimes there’s an absolute nasty & unhealthy food paired with such obnoxiously, blatantly misleading marketing that I can’t help calling a spade a hyrogenated [sic] artificially flavored spade.

    First, the marketing that, by all means, should condemn some marketer to eternal dietary hell:

    “In 1920, Walter and Cordelia Knott began selling fresh produce, berries, and preserves from a roadside berry stand in Buena Park, California.  Their family business earned a place in history in 1932 when Walter Knott cultivated a lucious new fruit, the boysenberry.  The farm that started it all has also become a family amusement park that delights millions. 

    The Knott family is pleased to extend their tradition of quality to include premium shortbread cookies.  Richly flavorful, these classic favorites are prepared using popular Knott’s Berry farm fruit fillings.”

    Let’s dissect this, shall we?

    > In 1920, Walter and Cordelia Knott began selling fresh produce, berries, and preserves from a roadside berry stand in Buena Park, California.
    …and boy, would they be horrified to see how their heirs have sold them out!

    > …when Walter Knott cultivated a lucious new fruit, the boysenberry.
    …which you’ll find all of likely one-tenth of a gram of in this plasticfood monstrosity.

    > … premium shortbread cookies
    … where “premium” means “premium profits for us, utter crap for you.”

    > … Richly flavorful
    … from lots of high fructose corn syrup

    > … these classic favorites
    … if you call a frankenstein concoction of chemicals “classic.”  Maybe a classic case of deceit.

    > … using popular Knott’s Berry farm fruit fillings.
    … oh, wait, we meant popular dental fillings!

    *  *  *

    But enough pre-commentary.  Without further ado, let’s take a look at these charming ingredients, shall we? (and out of kindness, I’ll substitute normal text for the ALL CAPS printed)

    Enriched wheat flour [artificial vitamin enrichment crap omitted], margarine (liquid soybean oil, partially hyrogenated [sic] soybean oil, water, salt, whey, lecithin, mono and di-glycerides, sodium benzoate a preservative, artificial butter flavor, beta carotene and vitamin A palmitate), raspberry topping (high fructose corn syrup, red raspberries, apple powder, fruit pectin, citric acid, natural and artificial flavors, calcium chloride, FD&C red #40 and blue #1), sugar, eggs, baking soda, natural and artificial flavor, baking ammonium, and salt.

    Mmmm… delicious, no?  Just like Grandma would have made it… if she had access to a chemistry lab *and* passionately hated your guts.

    Oh, and lookie here, (unsurprisingly) almost no redeeming nutritive qualities at all… little fiber or protein, and a charming 3 grams of trans-fat (I didn’t even know there were many packaged goods that still had this stuff in ‘em nowadays!)

    For comparison, let’s take a look at a typical recipe for berry shortbread cookies:

    1 cup butter, softened
    2/3 cup sugar
    1/2 teaspoon almond extract
    2 cups all-purpose flour
    1/3 cup seedless raspberry jam
    GLAZE:
    1 cup confectioners’ sugar
    2 teaspoons water
    1/2 teaspoon almond extract

    (from AllRecipes.com)

    Notice a difference?  Yes!  You recognize and can likely pronounce the ingredients, and there are fewer than a dozen of them.

    *  *  *

    Look, as I said, I don’t have a problem with companies making utter junkfood.  I do, however, have a problem about them so blatantly misrepresenting their product.  Even an intelligent acquaintance of mine said (without any prompting from me) that she used to eat these cookies every day for lunch, figuring that they were relatively harmless.  Oops!

    P.S.—Might think twice before buying any of Knott’s Berry Farm jams or other products, eh?

  • Pandora Mobile highlights awesomeness but also severe lame-itude

    Do you know Pandora?  If you’re in the United States, where Pandora is legally available, you may have come to enjoy this awesome uber-customizable music radio over the past years.  If you’re not in the U.S., perhaps you’ve discovered the beauty of anonymous proxies :cough:, which I’m not going to mention here :p.

    But perhaps you didn’t know that Pandora has become available on mobile phones!  More good news:  It’s available for free on phones that run the Windows Mobile operating system, free on Sprint phones, and free on (some versions of) BlackBerry phones.  Ironically, it’s also free on the iPhone, and I say ironically because AT&T apparently is charging—I swear I am not making this up—$8.95 per month to its other mobile customers for the privileges of using Pandora.  I mean, I love Pandora and all, but even if I were insane enough to be contributing to the income of the evilness that is AT&T, I sure as heck wouldn’t fork over that much dough for Pandora.  For an on-demand mobile music service?  Perhaps.  But for streaming radio?  You’ve got to be kidding.

    One other note on the Pandora Mobile offerings:  Apparently, I’m not supposed to be able to access Pandora Mobile because T-Mobile phones are not supported.  Which is odd, because I’m enjoying streaming music via Pandora on my BlackBerry Curve (on T-Mobile) right now.  Go figure.  I also shouldn’t mention that I was also able to do this while in Ireland a couple of weeks ago (listening to, appropriately enough, The Corrs on St. Patricks day 😀 ).

    *  *  *

    Anyway, if you’re an iPhone user or a non-AT&T subscriber, give Pandora Mobile a go!  If you’re an AT&T subscriber, well, heaven help you, and for reasons way beyond this Pandora issue.

    [Gee, Adam, tell us what you really think about AT&T :D]

    *  *  *

    Okay, okay, I’m thinking I should flesh this entry out a little bit 🙂

    Some stuff I like in the mobile app:
    – Seems to work internationally (though I can imagine this being “fixed” [sigh])
    – Works as a true background app on my BlackBerry!
    – Can play through my BB’s speaker (actually sounds decent!) or a headset
    – Song-to-song time isn’t bad
    – Nice graphics, simple, intuitive interface.
    – Access to all my stations 🙂
    – Can even view “Why [did Pandora play] this song?”
    – Thumbs up / thumbs down works.

    Some stuff I don’t like:
    – Takes a while to start up the app
    – No way to see detailed info on artist or song

    *  *  *

    All in all, pretty damn cool! 😀

  • A music solution that’s so brilliant, no wonder why the music industry has shunned it

    The other day I got a (yet another) piece of inbox spam on the otherwise cool service last.fm.  And no good can come from spam, right?

    Not sure what got into me, but I actually went to the site (which I’ll not name, so as to not potentially give them any customers).  And you know what?  They were doing something brilliant:  they were selling high-fi music tracks for 20 cents a piece.  No, that’s not in itself brilliant; Russian sites doing the same thing are and have been a dime a dozen.  What struck me as brilliant was their way of allowing music lovers to explore the *full length* of songs while still enticing them to buy the track.

    How did they do this?  It’s ridiculously simple yet, IMHO, likely to be remarkably effective:  they overwrote parts of each track several times with a moderately annoying audio blip (sort of a “chirp”).  Only the truly desperate would possibly stream and copy and store such a track as an mp3, and, as we know, the truly desperate are not one’s potential customers.  Had this firm been even more enterprising, they would have instead added once after each minute of song: “Sample brought to you by [companyname]; uninterrupted tracks just 20 cents!”  If they wanted to be both enterprising AND deliciously devious, they’d have seeded a ton of torrent sites with those tracks :D).  Or, at minimum, made it crazy-easy for bloggers to embed any track or album AND receive a cut of all proceeds from people clicking through to the site.

    Maybe I’m naive or missing something glaringly obvious, but it seems like everyone would stand to win with such a situation:
    – Music lovers would get to sample full-length (albeit slightly interrupted) songs, instead of dealing with the 30 second samples found on iTunes and similar sites.
    – Musicians would be happy to see samples of their work passed around in a way that wouldn’t damage their potential for earning revenue on the same tracks.
    – Bloggers and others distributing the tracks (especially if done so out of real passion for specific artists or songs) would be delighted to get commissions (though it’d be hard to grant commissions on just the bare passed-around MP3s).
    – The legit music sites hosting MP3s in this way would probably enjoy greater sales and profits.

    Your thoughts?