Why am I a Mushroom?

Posted on September 24, 2010 by spikep

I have been working with bit.ly enterprise to set in place a short URL for some of social media efforts. Bit.ly is one of a few companies that shorten URLs so that your tweets actually fit inside the 140 character limits. I have no problem with them. Bit.ly has been easy to deal with and patient while we decided if we were going down this road. My problem is with the company that I registered the short URL with.

It has been 10 days and apparently  our short URL is still awaiting approval. Maybe it is because it is an international URL, maybe it has to do with the country code we went with, who knows. I do know that even in a world where patience is not a forgotten virtue that 10 days for a domain name registration is an extremely long time. But in this 24/7 tweet-by-the-minute world 10 days is a very long time. Some of the things that can happen in 10 days: puppies open their eyes, Kate Hudson can lose a guy and Microsoft can kill one of their phone projects.

You might think, “what is this guy griping about, 10 days isn’t so bad.” and for almost everything offline I would whole heartedly agree. When I order computers I know unless I am picking them up in a store I will have to wait for them to be shipped. The same for any other equipment I order. I understand this and my brain can comprehend a physical good traveling from one location to another. Travel takes time, I get that. But we are talking about 1s & 0s here. Going from one computer to another, there is no physical manifestation.

Adding to the frustration is the lack of information. This is the statement I see regarding pending approval

“PENDING APPROVAL Your domain registration request has been processed and is currently pending approval.”

What does that even mean? Who has to approve it, where in the approval process is it. If my registration has been processed what is pending approval. I see more information about a process when I swipe my debit card at the grocery store then about the process of international domain approval. Let me know up front that due to political climates around the world some country codes might take longer than others, or the entire process will take 10-14 days and then spell out the approval process steps.

Right now I’m feeling like a mushroom, sitting in the dark, being feed BS and waiting to be picked.

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Ping This

Posted on September 20, 2010 by spikep

pingI have been casually using Ping since Apple launched the social music service.  I have to say  I was excited at the prospect of Apple launching a service like this, after all this is the same company that revitalized the mp3 player marketplace in the late-90s and set the bar for all future mp3 players and then created a phone that all smart phones have since been compared to.

I was excited, however I have found it a little lacking. One of the features I was really hoping Ping would have is a list of the last few songs I had played with iTunes. Think about that for a second, if someone recommends a song or movie you might check it out but if the song shows up on someone’s playlist maybe even repeatedly you are more likely to believe the review and more likely to check it out. The core idea behind social media is sharing, but in a real genuine manner, not in a salesy, shill-like manner.

I am also a little disappointed in the recommendations that Apple provided. Apple has the info on all of my iTunes purchases and has the info on the all of Genius playlists I asked about and probably has all the tracking info on every piece of music, video or app I have looked at but instead of recommending I follow alternative rock artists I get Christina Aguilera and Avril Lavigne along with others as recommendations. I have nothing against either of those artist but neither performer is really the type of music I listen to. Even more ridiculous is that neither of those artists as written a review. So even if they listened to bands I might like I wouldn’t know it.

There is also no way in this version of the recommendation service to tie it into other social media services such as twitter or facebook.

I am not going to give up on this service just yet since it has just launched and I would like to see where it ends up going in the next version of it but I won’t be actively participating in the service.

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