Adam-Jackson

AT&T has responded. See bold text below.

Oh AT&T you love to give us a reason to hate you. You’ve done some pretty good stuff for us and I’m still not convinced it’s the AT&T network that makes the iPhone so crappy but whatever, I’m over that and won’t complain about it on this blog.

The Red Cross setup a terrific system that allows anyone in the US and possibly the entire world to send a text message to 90999 with the text “HAITI” which will add $10 to your next month’s phone bill. This money will go to the Red Cross to support those who have lost their homes, loved ones and much more in the earthquake that occurred there. I think this mobile payments platform that works very well for so many organizations is a great way to get people do donate effortlessly. Yes, it will be a success.

I was excited when I saw AT&T put a press release online that shows their support for the cause. By “support” and “PR”, I assumed AT&T took the stance of waving the text messaging fees instead of actually donating money to the cause. So what if AT&T loves 1/8th of a penny of profits on the 100,000 people who decide to donate this money to a worthy cause. AT&T isn’t really put out as we already know that SMS rates are completely blown out of the water.

From gthing.net:

Cost to transfer 2560 songs:

From my ISP: $1
Via SMS messaging: $15,339,212.80

Whatever, so we know that AT&T’s rates are bullshit but let’s thank AT&T for waving the “fees” as their support for this noble cause to benefit those in need. Except, they don’t wave the fees. Here’s the press release from AT&T’s Press Room:

In response to the horrific earthquake in Haiti, wireless customers of AT&T* (NYSE:T) can send $10 donations to the Red Cross International Relief Fund by sending a text message from their mobile device. Standard text messaging rates may apply.

A customer simply types the word HAITI and sends it to 90999. A confirmation message will arrive within a few minutes, to which the customer replies “yes” to finalize the donation.

100 percent of all money donated will be passed on to the Red Cross.

*AT&T products and services are provided or offered by subsidiaries and affiliates of AT&T Inc. under the AT&T brand and not by AT&T Inc.

Yes, they said, “Standard text messaging rates may apply.” Those are the same lines uttered at the bottom of those 2AM “sex line” advertisements you see on comedy central. “Text Single to 41145. Standard text messaging rates may apply.”

So AT&T puts up a press release to show their support for this amazing effort to save lives in Haiti NOT because they actually give a shit about anyone affected by this but because the process will earn them 80 cents from anyone that doesn’t have a text messaging plan. If you pay $9.99 – $19.99 a month for their messaging plan then you should be okay because you already paid but if you don’t and just pay for text messages as you go, that’s 20 cents per text.

I found this screengrab from a loyal AT&T user who did the donation.

It looks like they spent 80 cents right into AT&T’s pockets. That’s 80 cents that could have gone to victims in Haiti. If my math is correct, that’s 8% of the donation tacked right on top of the money the user donated that AT&T takes. It’s bullshit.

Now, I’m not saying AT&T is the only evil corporation in the world, nor am I saying that they’re the only evil telecommunications company. My point is, their support for this program, if successful, will yield them a huge additional profit this week over what they would have made otherwise. So, of course they want to promote the hell out of it. The company looks good and makes money.

AT&T, would it have killed you to waive these fees to this number if only for 48 hours? The SMS infrastructure was paid for 15  years ago, it’s a cash cow now and yet you still are making serious dough through this program. I’m surprised that you didn’t give money, support or even waive fees for this program and yet find a reason to put it out as a press release.

Utter Bullshit.

UPDATED: John Britton of AT&T Corporate Communications contacted me via telephone to clear things up. He provided this statement.

I wanted to let you know that
your information on AT&T’s texting support to help the relief effort in
Haiti is incorrect.  All AT&T text donations to support the relief
effort in Haiti are free.   The vast majority of our customers are on
texting plans, but for those who use pay per use, we want to make it as
easy as possible to make donations to this worthy cause.  The entire
amount of the money donated goes to the relief effort.

Well, I guess that clears things up. Just so you guys know, AT&T’s press release from yesterday still says “. Standard text messaging rates may apply.” so it’s clear or maybe unclear that their original intentions or possibly oversight was to charge the normal rates and then they now realize that the users don’t like that very much. Good on AT&T for changing but I still think it should have been that way from the beginning.

TechCrunch is the site that always makes a point to say, “we told ya so.” For those of you that respond with, “well they’re just that cool.”- maybe so and that’s why I’m going to “pull a TechCrunch” and take full credit for Apple’s new vertical artist tab in iTunes 9.0.

That’s right. Not only did I call it but I also am the only person on The Internet that inspired Apple to do this. I called it back before the engineer that coded it was even working at Apple. Just like TechCrunch, I’m that cool. Jealous? Yeah, you should be!

In 2005, while we were still using iTunes 4.7, I wrote a blog post on my (now defunct) blog, DailyTechTalk about what we could expect from a future version of iTunes. Sure I said that this was a feature that should be in version 5 but Apple spent the past 4.5 years perfecting it so I’ll let this one slide.

In this post, I said:

The way we organize music is more and more difficult every time I get a new CD. I have almost six thousand songs in my iTunes library and finding one to listen to is difficult so I just hit the Random button or organize the library by “Date Added” and listen to my latest songs because I have songs in my library I am tired of and tend to skip more than I listen to. Apple should add a hierarchical view in the Playlists area that enables Playlist grouping. You can create a group called, “Favorites” and put your top 25 songs, favorite love songs, dance, hip hop and movie soundtrack theme songs. The list is yours to make but grouping them together would be great for users with tons of playlists. I was connected to someone’s library via Airport and saw they had hundreds of playlists for only ten thousand songs. I was amazed how they even navigate those playlists.

Also, you can organize songs one way. You can sort them by name, artist, genre, album, year, type and more. What if I want to hear all songs by Michael Jackson organized by year. I would have to create a playlist with all Michael Jackson songs and then sort by year. I could save time by having two sort bars at the top of the screen. The top bar would be general organization. The second would look the same but would organize those songs. You could organize all songs by Genre then all genres organized by Artist. All Oldies songs would be in order and each artist would be in order in that genre or year, album, whatever. I proposed this idea in an old article but is a feature I would really like to have. I also think you should be able to save a search in iTunes to a playlist. I feel this will be added with Tiger’s spotlight technology and is only a matter of time since Tiger’s Finder can already do this.

So there you have it. I out-scooped TechCrunch and I wanted everyone to know that I was first at calling this feature! Me and only me! No one even had a bit of insight to to this on iTunes until I said it so I guess you can say that I had the exclusive taste of the vertical artist sidebar even back in 2005. BOOYAH! Naturally, I wanted to make sure everyone knows I’m just being sarcastic.

BTW, don’t make fun of my old blog’s text formatting. I’d rather not talk about it.

Two weeks ago, I posted this blog post about Twitter and how the API is making it less user friendly and annoying new users. The API is the cause for Twitter’s success and it could serve as the demise of Twitter as well and slow adoption rate. Without revisiting the point I made, let’s move forward and I’ll explain how Twables and FB140 are taking the very forgiving API and really pissing people off.

Last week, @Ev sent this status update to Twitter which was an endorsement of a service that helped you find which of your Facebook friends are on Twitter and it made it easy to follow them. I immediately jumped on board because I was very interested in seeing this in action.

The concept is, visit http://www.twables.com/fb140 and Connect your Facebook Account. Then connect your Twitter account. Both of these use OAuth so I was pretty stoked about that but once you set this up, the pain begins.

The site it self wasn’t designed well and I had some issues getting started and really taking advantage of it for the intended purpose. The issue is with spam and how Twables OR FB140 is leveraging Twitter’s way of handling spammers.

Once I used the service, I removed it from my “authorized apps” on Twitter which usually means, “hey I’m done using you now. go away” but I failed to remove it from Facebook as an authorized app but no problem I’ll do it when it comes to mind and I don’t think it’s hurting anything at this time.

Well, I received a reply on Twitter from @FB140 the next day that “Jad” is a Facebok friend who is now on Twitter. I was lazy and away from my computer so I just blocked the account. That would resolve the issue and I’d never hear from them again. WRONG!

The next day I received another reply, thinking I had somehow made a mistake when blocking the user, I blocked again but since then I have received SEVEN replies from FB140 and here’s how they’re circumventing the blocked feature.

As you can see from this Search.Twitter.com result, they have multiple accounts. At this time I know of 10 so I’ve pre-emptively blocked all of them but I don’t know if that will fix it but what is confusing is how they’re gaming the system.

Does FB140 or Twables know when they’ve been blocked and their software registers a new account and sends a reply using another account automatically? That’s what’s curious to me because if so, that’s a great idea that more app developers will adopt that is sure to piss people off.

I’ve removed FB140 as an authorized app on Facebook and that might be the last link that resolves this once and for all, if not I’ll be calling the company directly and telling them to bug off because this is becoming ridiculous.

There’s a reason Twitter added the block functionality and when someone blocks you, that’s your queue to screw off but FB140 thinks that it’s a mistake because, “if this user still has our FB app authorized, maybe they blocked us by mistake” no because after 7 replies, the last account to reply to me was @FB140_7 so they’re clearly not taking a clue.

Just to prove I’m not pulling the typical social media douche bag crap, Here’s a link to Search.Twitter.com showing some other people are are clearly pissed off. This TWEET shows exactly what I’m going through as well.

[UPDATED]: Clearly removing the app from Twitter and removing the app from Facebook did NOT fix the problem. I just received THIS REPLY from FB140 (copied below).

When I began working on a project that taught Twitter to the masses, the service was still small with only a couple of celebrities and American mainstream media didn’t know the definition of tweet. My project is still going strong but there was a phrase I coined that, “Twitter is The Gateway Drug to Social Networking.” I still feel Twitter has that potential but honestly, this is no longer the case in Twitter’s current form.

What inspired this quote was when I compared Twitter to other social networks and realized that Twitter has the easiest point of entry and is really that easy compared to other networks. Facebook & Myspace are the top two US social networks and joining these can be a bit of a challenge for people who weren’t born in after 1980. The issue isn’t that 30 and over web users don’t understand social networking, it’s that the amount of people they relate to and interact with aren’t on social networks. Why join a network to connect with friends when there aren’t any friends there to connect with. Twitter is different.

In the most extreme case, my grandmother would join Twitter and experience something so basic that involves updating her status. What seems like a completely idiotic thing to do at 71 years old, it’s easy to do and requires no more than a text message or dial up Internet connection. I’m sure that if she saw it on television enough, she’d try it out. The beauty of Twitter is that so many people are searching it every day and right below my grandmother’s info is a link to search Twitter or, “What people are doing right now.” She can search knitting, bbq, fishing, farming and even sweet potato pie and instantly find other people with interests or performing those actions RIGHT NOW. With as little as two clicks, she’s following someone with at least one similar interest as her and this become something fun to her.

Soon, she may connect with family members and build up more followers. 1 year later, my grandmother has heard so much mention of Facebook on Twitter.com that she decides to sign up. She’s not web-savvy yet but she knows copy and paste so she posts a link on Twitter to her facebook.com/cool-granny profile. Soon, she has 10 friend requests and she’s successfully joined Facebook and found some people to connect with.

Do you see what just happened? My grandmother, who is not the ideal member of Facebook.com and would never join because she has no one to talk to has successfully transitioned to Facebook.com after simply joining Twitter and talking about what she’s doing. It’s a truly beautiful thing and completely possible with Twitter but never would have happened if she joined Facebook.com a year ago with no contacts.

The reason why this story and my idea of Twitter and its title of “The Gateway Drug to Social Networking” is because the system is flawed now and I blame The API+Simplicity of the system.

Twitter has done an amazing job at creating a web standards system that allows ANYONE to develop applications for it that can pretty much do anything. I’ve seen amazing things performed with the Twitter API and this is part of the reason they’re successful. I’ve heard that 90% of Twitter’s traffic comes from The API which is a testament of this simplicity. Why does the API get the poor rating?

The Twitter API & Search API can be completely pwn3d meaning you can use them to your advantage to cause really annoying things to happen. Now when grandma joins Twitter and talks about knitting, she gets replies from companies trying to sell her things. These are auto-replies when she simply mentions knitting. She also now gets about 20 followers a day from accounts of naked woman asking her to check out their cam-site. The worst of all, as if that wasn’t bad enough is that she might follower a spammer back by accident and now her phone or inbox notifies her with direct messages from these spammers.

This is something the Internet Generation is used to but my 71 year old grandmother will see it as advertisements, pornography and more advertisements and she’ll leave. She needed a simple system to help her find new friends on the web and now she’s confused and overwhelmed which is exactly what happens when you first join Facebook or Myspace. This issue is only getting worse and for over 6 months, Twitter has done nothing to combat these issues.

Let’s also briefly touch on trending topics. These were pretty awesome up until around 4 months ago when more API goodness was used to hack these trends. Now there are bots that have bios linking to sex camera sites and free auction houses that simply tweet out what topics are currently trending. Why is this bad? Well it’s ok if you follow one of these that once an hour tweets out the topic but these systems tweet out every minute or more what topics are trending and thus make the trending topic completely useless and impossible for you to find out why the topic was originally trending. It also keeps something trending. Taco Bell starts trending and then 5,000 spam accounts start tweeting every minute that the topic is trending and now everyone has stopped talking about it but that topic continues to stay on top for quite a while! This problem isn’t going away.

Going back to my grandmother for a second, now she always sees a ton of topics that are confusing and when she clicks them, she sees a ton of spam. Is this advertising too? She probably doesn’t know how to collapse this sidebar and it’s just an annoyance. At the end of 48 hours, my grandmother leaves Twitter and decides that The Internet isn’t for her and that’s that.

What’s unfortunate is that this horrible truth will ultimately lead to Twitter’s failure. As more and more networks see that 80% of their followers are photos of nude woman and trending topics are full of spam it will cause media networks and celebs to also give up on Twitter which have accounted for most of the site’s growth in the past 8 months.

By fixing these API hijack tools, they ruin functionality of honest and awesome sites built around Twitter. It will be a sad day in Twitter history but I see no other solution.

My Twitter eco-system is fine aside from the fact my last 500 followers were spammers and I get 10 replies a day from companies trying to sell me things. i deal with this but most users won’t. This patience will eventually wear out and Twitter will not get those users back. Until further notice, Twitter is not, “The Gateway Drug to Social Networking” but it can redeem itself. I hope this title will be re-enacted soon because right now, it’s not looking like a very bright future.

*If you found this blog post via a link in my email signature, welcome. This is for those of you who don’t think it’s worth your time to respond to my emails*

Some people say they’re too busy and others say they forgot and others say that my email just got lost in the mix but I’m sick and freaking tired of friends not replying to my messages. Yes and it’s intentional and don’t blame it on your inability to stay organized because if I email you with a sales lead or Paypal you $25, you’ll reply instantly either thanking me or replying in some way but when I actually need something from you it’s pushed to the side and I’m tired of it!

On average, 15 emails every single week that I send out go unanswered and no I’m not asking for handouts nor am I cold-emailing random people. I’m emailing friends that should care enough to reply to a simple question or offer feedback on something OR just simply reply back saying that they’re too busy and sorry they couldn’t help. ANYTHING AT ALL!

My lawyer who is a great guy, as are most of my friends replies to every single email. Of course, I’m paying him for that but when I email people that I know personally and see on a weekly basis asking for anything or simply emailing them offering feedback on their site, product or blog post, I don’t hear back either. No I don’t expect replies to EVERY SINGLE EMAIL but when I specifically ask a question and you don’t reply, that’s just rude.

Before you delete, mark as read or “archive” this message, reply back please and offer some kind of answer that you even received my message.

MY NEW PLAN: Every week, I’ll run a script that shows what emails didn’t receive a reply (based on subject line) and if you haven’t replied, I’ll resend the message with a link to this post. I’ll continue to do so every week until I get a reply.

The level of unprofesionalism toward email really pisses me off and I’m inclined to start a list below that includes names of people who have SCREWED ME and not replied to my very important & sensitive emails. Why do I have to call you on the phone or hound you at social events just to get a reply to my email. You’re not that busy. I receive over 150 emails a day, half of those require 2 paragraph replies and every night I end the day at inbox zero. Email is part of your job and you’re sucking at it.

Fix your email work flow or find a new line of work!

Oh and have a great day!

Earlier, I tweeted:

Seriously. Everyone that keeps adding a period or brackets when you @ someone so it shows up in my timeline. It’s dumb and I hate it!

Some people weren’t quite sure what I was talking about so let’s break down how replies work. Oh I’m sorry “mentions” is what it’s called now. I’m not in the habit of calling it “mentions” but it makes sense given how the system is setup now. Anyway, before the #FixReplies debacle last month, there was a preference on Twitter Settings that gave you control of what you saw in the timeline.

• You would see everyone’s tweets that you follow. You follow 500 people and every single tweet they make will show up on Twitter.com or your favorite Twitter application.
• The second way was to only show tweets from people you follow that don’t contain replies. Basically, I would only see tweets from people if the tweet DOESN’T start with a reply (@johnsmith…) wouldn’t show up. However, an @JohnSmith somewhere in the tweet didn’t affect this rule. It was only tweets that started with an @.
• The last setting showed replies from people you followed ONLY if you’re following the person they’re replying too.

The third option was my favorite because I like seeing people I mutually follow interacting with other people I follow. Twitter added this around 6 months ago (guessing) and the preference was actually removed. You can read more about it here on this Mashable Post.

Lately, people are getting around this feature. My preference still remains that I don’t see anyone’s replies IF they’re replying to someone I don’t follow. Now people are getting around this setting and it clogs up my stream making Twitter less useful for finding information. Here’s how you can beat the filter and annoy the hell out of your friends who don’t want to see all of your replies to other people.

• Put a period before your reply. The person you’re replying to still sees it and so do ALL of your followers. .@JohnSmith
• Put brackets around the person’s name you’re replying to [@JohnSmith]
• Put quotes around your reply “@JohnSmith”

Basically any punctuation character will work to defeat Twitter’s system. Honestly, it’s annoying to those of us that specifically told Twitter that we don’t want to see your replies and maybe it’s something Twitter will fix soon. For now, I’ll just have to un-follow people that do it too often.

Twitter is only 3 years old but in Internet years, it’s been around the block a few times. A lot of people join, follow the “suggested users” and then they might invite a few friends via Gmail or Yahoo! Mail. After that, it’s that time to send out the first tweet and it usually contains something like, “Um… I’ve joined Twitter and I’m going to try this out. Anyone out there?” I love reading the first tweet from users because it’s entertaining and they’re always similar.

Let’s fast forward a month and now that user has 50 followers which consists mostly of their friends and family or some old schoolmates and maybe a co-worker. They might have a few followers that are accounts operated by companies or spammers but most users that aren’t joining Twitter as a celebrity will probably have 50-200 users after the first month and they are following some people that have thousands of followers so what gives? Well, the next step is asking Twitter, “How do I get more followers?” Someone replies back saying to go to a website to get thousands of followers and of course the new user clicks because they’re very interested.

This reply could be considered spam but they did ask for more followers so I guess it’s relevant, but I’m not going to dive into what’s ethical regarding spam. So this website promises 16 thousand followers and the first week FREE if they sign up and pay $35 a month. So the user signs up and instantly receives 50 new followers and that count continues. (What does that mean, “count continues”?) Pretty soon, they have 16 thousand people following their tweets and the “following” section looks like this.

Additionally, this is what their following / followers section looks like this.

As you can see, this person has nearly the same amount of followers / following and they’ve only updated a few hundred times.

I’ve done research and realized that none of these individuals are celebrities and 200 updates is nothing compared to some of the people I follow. Strike 3 is the fact that this user has a near equal amount of followers and following. At this point, it’s clear that they’re using one of these services.

What’s wrong with these services that allow you to get thousands of followers? It’s simple actually and it’s not an issue for some people. Not all of these pay-to-play Twitter hacking tools explain how you’re going to get thousands of followers but it only takes a few days to realize you have just followed hundreds of new people. I received an email from a friend last night who signed up for one of these services:

“I wanted to see if you knew of anyway I can purge all my users and then add people I actually know/want to follow. I had signed up for something that auto-added.”

I linked him to a few sites like this one.

“Way too much garbage. As a Twitter novice, I made the mistake of signing up for one of those get more follower services. The ratio of simple garbage went WAY UP. I am going to close my account and then re-invite people I actually want to see. The whole idea of mutually following people or following people that just post garbage is silly.”

Our conversation got me thinking. I hadn’t put too much thought into how these services work because they all looked like scams but then I did a Google search for “gain Twitter followers” and saw this.

It looks like these services are doing so well that they are able to afford Google ads to sell their product. But as far as organic Google page-rank, they don’t have any because blogs aren’t linking to them.

What a great tactic though. A new user is trying to get more followers and searches Google and is greeted with dozens of ads on getting more followers. Many of the services are free and a quick submission of your Twitter credentials and you’re in!

This ruins Twitter as my friend realized. Twitter is as much about listening and absorbing than it is about telling the world what you’re doing. The economy and beauty of Twitter is that it’s a two-way country highway with friends passing in the opposite direction. You both share some ideas, links, thoughts and mind-share and then move on as opposed to most social networks that resemble an 8-lane highway with exits, detours, road construction and accidents. I love Twitter’s simplicity but it’s only valuable if you’re receiving updates from people you are interested in.

Twitter is all about being organic and these services take the fun out of Twitter. It’s like having 1,200 channels on your television but the TV is always scanning and never sitting on one channel for more than 5 seconds. Sounds pretty painful, right? That’s exactly what it’s like when you realize that you’re following 16 thousand people that you don’t care about and the stream of “friends” is useless.

There is an alternative where you can use this service and still follow only your friends. There are web and desktop based applications that allow you to configure groups for Twitter. TweetDeck and Seesmic Desktop come to mind. I have been against groups since the beginning and neither Twitter.com or its API support groups but people seem to really love them. I’ve asked why and it appears the answer is they follow too many people and just want to read the posts from people they really care about, like family, co-workers or celebrities, in one timeline. My opinion: you’re following too many people.

Let’s say you want to be able to read your Twitter stream and still have thousands of followers using one of these services. The answer is setting up one of these applications with groups for people you actually care about and just looking at the group all day. Now you can have your cake and eat it too but there is still a fundamental flaw that many users haven’t realized.

How do you know those 16 thousand people that follow you actually care what you have to say or if they’re putting YOU in a group of people that they don’t want to read? The final problem might be that they joined Twitter, signed up to a service to get more followers and after their Twitter stream turned into an 8-lane highway, they just quit and moved on. Your 16 thousand followers looks a hell of a lot less now that we realize half of them aren’t reading your tweets, 30% of them have stopped using Twitter and the 20% that are looking at your stream are probably also following 16 thousand people and the likelihood of reading your tweet is so low that you might as well be screaming the password to your gmail account to a herd of elephants. Elephants might be known for “never forgetting” but how many times have you seen an elephant use a computer? Exactly.

At the end of the day, your brilliant idea of getting thousands of followers looks a lot different, doesn’t it? You have a Twitter stream of people you’re following that is barely usable due to the amount of tweets and lack of interesting posts. You are tweeting links to thousands of people that aren’t around, are following too many people who just don’t care about your thoughts and now you have an account that will probably be suspended by Twitter for following too many people too quickly. Oh, and let’s not forget that you probably paid for this service at around $40 a month. Congrats, you’re a Twitter expert and it’s useless.

What have we learned? The organic tips for gaining followers like this one are the tried and true methods for truly making your mark on Twitter. If anyone is asking you to pay money to get ahead on the Internet, just remember it’s all ones and zeros and true social networking happens face to face. If you can get your followers to meet you offline and build lasting friendships, you’re on your way to mastering social media because when Twitter, Facebook and MySpace fade away, there will be other services that pop up and the cycle starts all over but the friendships you made offline will last forever.

SFGate.com is the online destination of The San Francisco Chronicle and I’m pretty sure all of their print stories are put on the website but it’s a known fact that the comments on SFGate are only a step above YouTube in the category of ignorance, grammar mistakes and trolling. For those that don’t know, Trolling is, “Being a prick on the internet because you can. Typically unleashing one or more cynical or sarcastic remarks on an innocent by-stander, because it’s the internet and, hey, you can.” You can find alternative definitions here. Now that we’re all caught up on the definition of trolling, I’d like to provide a few quotes from a recent SFGate article.

The article was posted today and you can read the entire post on SFGAte.com and the story is called, “Comments on news stories a double-edged sword”. The post explains how SFGate’s traffic has exploded since they began allowing comments on news stories back 2007. Page views on the comments grew from 30 thousand page views to over 4 million so comments aren’t going away anytime soon but SFGate along with other publishers admitted that comments aren’t always of the highest caliber and racism, idiocy and trolling is rampant on the site and sometimes the comment wars (AKA flame wars) go rampant and erupt into serious arguments.

As you know, I’ve been a recent supporter of breaking anonymity on the Internet and using systems like Facebook Connect or Amazon to verify the identities of your commenters to help raise the quality of comments and breed a community that serves the reader and doesn’t look like hundreds of simple minded people bickering back and forth. Below are some excerpts and I’m going to comment and offer my thoughts.

The over-the-top declarations and playground humor often spring from the ability to comment anonymously. Most sites have required registration for their commentators, but they’re able to hide behind screen names without punishment, at least until they get booted off for objectionable behavior.

That shroud can be empowering for people who are emboldened to speak up, as if addressing a crowded town square. Or it’s like an invitation to open mike night at a comedy club.

Exactly. Asking for an email address isn’t acceptable and often times, people use fake email addresses or email account reserved for “junk”. Think of a community member as a member of your family. You’re allowing them to post content on your site and this serves to spark conversations and increase pageviews but your first experience with that person is asking for an email address and a username (which can be anything they want to use) and this “family member” doesn’t have the decency to give you an email address they check regularly. It’s similar to allowing my sister’s boyfriend to stay at my place while he’s in town and the first thing he does is give me a fake name and phone number. I think we’d all agree that this relationship is off to a bad start. Let’s continue.

Michael Lee, a vice president for Bank of America in San Francisco, enjoys both options. He often takes to SFGate and the Green Bay Press-Gazette’s Web site (he follows the Packers) to present his views, usually from a more conservative perspective. Other times, he tries out a one-liner or two to lighten the mood.

He said he looks forward to the challenge of facing an often-hostile crowd and getting his thoughts across on news as it’s happening.

“If you’re a conservative voice in a liberal environment, it takes a certain amount of courage and mettle to stick with it,” said Lee, 34. “But in the same vein, it’s easier to take a stand online than in real life.”

I think it’s great that Michael is honest about this and he raises an excellent point. I’ve spoken to HUNDREDS of people who spend hours a day engaging with other people on blogs, forums and chat rooms and when I ask them if they would use their real name, they instantly object despite the fact that they are very responsible users and their comments and interaction with others is always free of foul language or trolling. I feel that most people think they need to hide behind a facade but the truth is, it’s not really necessary. Michael is about to post a comment that reflects Bank of America and I understand why an anonymous voice is important to him but I say to him that you don’t have to comment. If you’re a member of the PETA but think a CGI commercial of a duck being hit by a car is hilarious but you don’t think it’s appropriate to comment then you don’t have to. In my opinion, commenting as “steve from PETA” is a great idea! You can be a little official but also recognize the hilarity of an animation involving the duck. The issue of covering your ass and watching what you say stems from a corrupt society and my opinion of, “who gives a crap” but we’ll save that for another blog entry because this is the society we live in and you have to conform or you’ll be out of a job.

Basically, I don’t think you need to comment on every post that you read and if it’s not appropriate given your job, location or political views then don’t comment and tell your friends later over beers what you think but the few people that have to conceal their identity is only a “few people” compared to the millions of people trolling boards, blogs and chats looking for their chance to dump nonsense into the mix with their hatred, foul language and stupidity. I don’t mind giving up a little privacy if the community as a whole improves and benefits from exposing the first name and last initial of its community.

For many, the draw is to just run a thought up a flagpole and see who salutes. JonSmith, a 49-year-old San Mateo technical writer, is often embarrassed by his many comments, which he dashes off in a minute or two, rife with misspellings and bad grammar.

But he looks forward to communicating and connecting with people, finding validation in both the acknowledgements and attacks of fellow readers.

So Jon likes being anonymous because he’s a technical writer and enjoys the fact that he can say, “whatever” to his grammar and typos and quickly spout off opinions about a subject matter. He then loves “shooting the shit” with other readers who either agree or disagree with his opinion. That’s great Jon and I’m happy you’ve found a place to be lazy, give some commentary and participate in a community. However, SFGate is owned by a newspaper that carries itself to a high caliber of editorial integrity (or at least you’d assume that was the case) and your comment that’s full of errors, misspellings and whatever you feel like saying only causes the quality of comments to degrade to the point where people like myself just don’t bother to read them. People that read SFGate to learn something ignore the comments because it actually leaves us with a bad taste.

You being a technical writer can probably find dozens of issues with my grammar in this blog post but I do my best with a limited education on writing but you would be doing everyone a service if you tried your best to be formal with your comments so everyone benefits from a comment that’s easy to digest and understand.

Jon Continues:

“We do this for the response, and if you get a reaction either good or bad, it’s more worthwhile than if you get nothing,” Nadelberg said. “The disappointing moment is when you write something and no one hated it or liked it. That’s when you fail, when no one gives a damn.”

Jon, this is considered trolling (in my opinion) and if you’re saying something to get a positive or negative response from someone, then join a fight club or create an Argument club on Meetup.com where you can meet up once a week to argue with people. What I find interesting is how childlike this sounds and how no one realizes that these tendencies are so animalistic and basic. Maybe some of you have younger siblings or children and I’m sure you have realized that once the kid figures out what gets a rise out of you, they’ll keep doing it because they get attention. Some kids become starved for negative attention and they keep doing all of the wrong things just so you’ll yell at them. What do you do about this? Ignore it and they’ll stop and go away.

I’ve been ignoring trolling for years and it’s not going away. The issue is becoming more widespread but now that we have the tools and software to combat trolling, it’s time to take a stand and force our users and commenters to hand over a valid E-Mail Address, upload a real photo of themselves and use their real name. If we continue supporting anonymity then the Internet will become worse than reality television and I fear it may be too late.

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The Time 100 voting is open where we get to submit and vote people in as the top 100 people in the world of 2009 or something like that. It’s a very serious contest organized by a large media corporation and the results are published in Time Magazine and hundreds of other publications also cover the people who make the list.

Some anonymous cowards on a popular site, 4Chan have decided to “hack” the results and vote up 4Chan’s creator “moot” as the top of the list and completely ruin the top 20 finalists with fake voting. You can read the full report at TechCrunch. First of all, 4Chan is one of the primary sites that is fueled by anonymity and their mob hacking isn’t funny or cute. I blame Time for not implementing Facebook Connect or OpenID to reduce the anonymity. Sure Time would be narrowing the voting to users of Facebook only but it’s a solid 200 million people which isn’t too shabby. Furthermore, I’m sure Facebook would be happy with the news and help Time promote the voting on Facebook.com.

If Facebook isn’t the answer, Time could use systems that call the voter and the vote has to give a verbal confirmation code that they saw on the site. Each number was logged and an even better method is auto-mailers that go to homes with a code that the voter enters on Time.com. All three of these would reduce voting but I think the Time 100 can deal with a 15% drop in votes because it would barely make a dent in the amount of people that do vote in this if this system meant that there was zero anonymity to the voting process.

Time basically screwed themselves by allowing this system to be used so I don’t blame 4chan. If you put a piece of candy in front of a child and close the door, he’s going to eat it because no one is looking and that’s just human nature. The web is crawling with children that feed their egos because no one is looking but if more and more websites expose the children and put them under a microscope, it will reduce a ton of this tom foolery on the web. Take a stand, unmask the cowards and let’s kill anonymity on the web.

UPDATE: Blogging pays off sometimes. I received notification from someone at YouTube that my account was disabled by error. They have resolved the problem and my YouTube channel is back in action! Subscribe Here.

I need some help with this one. A lot of people ask me why I don’t use more cloud based services. Why I don’t use Wordpress.com or store all of my photos on Google or MobileMe or why I don’t use Gmail exclusively or even why I don’t use Google Calendar, Last.FM or Google Reader. it’s simple. I come from a background where everything is stored locally or at least its synchronized with the cloud on my computer so in the event that a service dies, is bought or suffers from a natural disaster, my data is still protected. I’ve never had to experience the horror of losing data because a web based service deleted it but today I did.

I was going to favorite a YouTube channel that I thought was pretty hilarious. I logged in to YouTube and received an error, “Account disabled, please use a different email.” That’s odd but I ignored it and spent the next 25 minutes, resetting account passwords with the thought that I had just forgotten my password. When I simply tried to go to my YouTube page directly (http://www.youtube.com/adamjackson1984). I received the notification embedded above. What?

For some reason, my YouTube account and channel was simply deleted. All of the videos I’ve edited and placed on YouTube or simple videos shot with my Qik camera and even things that were recorded directly to YouTube via my MacBook’s webcam were completely deleted. I even have Qik setup so when I stream from my iPhone, those are transferred to YouTube via the cloud automatically. Only 10 of my 40+ videos are saved locally because I trusted YouTube. Why would my videos suddenly vanish or be deleted and if I did do something that broke copyright, wouldn’t they simply remove that video?

I checked for any emails received from YouTube within my spam folder and saw nothing. This is incredibly frustrating because all of my comments, friends, uploads, favorite channels and more are just gone. I have all of my Flickr uploads stored locally and I even download all of my Twitter posts weekly to ensure I have every last one of them but the one service I trust just takes it all away.

My only guess is that one single video caused this problem. It was Twitter’s spot on Nightline and it was even embedded on this popular blog. The video was viewed nearly 7 thousand times and now it’s gone.

I’ve had a YouTube account since early 2006 and I’ve been linked to hundreds of times and now those links are broken. My page rank for “adamjackson1984” is also ruined.

I have a video where my friend consumed a gallon of milk and a 24oz. energy drink back in 2006. It amassed over 30K views and it’s gone as well.

Starting over on YouTube is going to be very challenging and I hope I can remember the dozens of subscriptions and hundreds of favorites that I’ve collected over the years. YouTube. Fuck you.