Archive - The Internet RSS Feed

Be My Foursquare Friend

February 4, 2010 in The Internet with 2 Comments

I’ve been playing around with Foursquare for a bit now, and though I am not totally hooked-crazy-go-nuts for it, I do like it. It’s totally nerdy I know, but so was Facebook once upon a time. And so was the Internet, so whatever.

One thing I do know though, is that the enjoyment you are likely to get out of Foursquare would seem to grow exponentially based on the number of friends you have. So to that end, be my Foursquare friend.

You might be asking, “what is foursquare?”. Well, here is a perfectly crappy explanation from their website:

foursquare is a cross between a friend-finder, a social city-guide and a game that rewards you for doing interesting things. We aim to build things to not only help you keep up with the places your friends go, but that encourage you to discover new places and challenge you to explore your neighborhood in new ways.

And here is a slightly better (albeit way nerdier sounding) explanation on some site from the UK.

Good talk, see you out there.

Netflix Feature Idea

January 22, 2010 in Business, The Internet with 0 Comments

Julie and I have been ripping through the Mad Men series on blu-ray via Netflix lately. We just finished season 1, and were all revved up to start season 2. So on Tuesday night, when we popped in what we thought was the first disc for season 2, only to realize it was the SECOND disc for season 2, it was a bummer.

Now this wasn’t Netflix’s fault, it was my fault. They sent me the correct disc, but I had mistakenly transposed disc 1 and disc 2 in my queue, and as Netflix does, they just shipped me the next thing in my queue. Which in this case, was not the disc we meant to have shipped to us.

ANYWAYS, my thought was that Netflix (it seems) could have some basic checks in place that look for patterns in your queue, particularly with series, that can notify you when it would appear that you are getting something out of sequence. Programatically, I’d imagine that Netflix could see that our previous three rentals looked like:

  • Mad Men: Season 1: Disc 1
  • Mad Men: Season 1: Disc 2
  • Mad Men: Season 1: Disc 3

And based on that pattern, assume that our next logical rental would be Mad Men: Season 2: Disc 1. If Netflix then sees that the item set to ship is actually Mad Men: Season 1: Disc 2, they might send us an email, or pop a message in our queue saying something like:

It looks like the next item in your Netflix queue is Mad Men: Season 1: Disc 2. This appears to be out of order based on your recent rental history. Did you mean to select Mad Men: Season 1: Disc 1 for shipment? Click here to update your queue.

Again, the fact that I messed up the queue order is totally my fault and I’m not pissy at Netflix about it. However, I do see a way that Netflix could have saved me from my own stupidity here with what I would have thought was a totally awesome feature.

Bad Transcriptions

January 6, 2010 in The Internet with 0 Comments

I know I will regret this, but I think I need to start a blog that just has transcripts from speech-to-text services like Google Voice. Here is one I got today.

Let’s see, and it was sent to the her office building is the second. I’m sorry I lost ice cream. It was Signs 580 blossoming, but anyway it was find us by someone at 439 okay there. He a call. Thank you much.

Not sure which is worse, this or Spinvox.

Sneaky Unsubscribe Page

December 10, 2009 in Business, Marketing, The Internet with 2 Comments

Somehow, somewhere, I got on the email list for US News and World Report. When I finally unsubscribed today, I thought their opt-out page was pretty sneaky.

US News and World Report Unsubscribe

I have always hated the “opt-out confirm” step, and think that unsubscribe links in emails should be a single click unsub. This one though used some subtle placement and language tricks that I’d expect to see more from shady grey-hat email marketers, than big old-media magazines.

As most users probably do, I read the page left to right, skip over or skim most of the text, and my first instinct is to click on the button marked “continue”. Since I just clicked “unsubscribe” on the previous page, my mind is expecting at first glance, that “continue” will continue the unsubscribe process I have already started. It actually keeps you ON the list if you hit that button.

Annoying.

Page 4 of 9« First...«23456»...Last »