Random smattering of thoughts for you today:
Scamville
A lot of people seem to have misconstrued the purpose of my last article. It wasn’t to give anyone, be it the promoters of “scammy” advertisements, the offer systems who bring them to Facebook customers, or the apps they do so through, a pass. As I said in my entry, I agree it is a problem. The only acceptable number of scams is zero.
The point of that segment of the article (which seems to be the only one a lot of people read) was that Arrington was overestimating by a large margin the amount of dollars coming from scams. He specifically said “The games that scam the most, win.” and that is totally untrue, as they’re a relatively small portion of developers’ incomes, and thus the whole “ecosystem of hell” idea was overblown.
Spam vs. Ham
I’ve also noticed lately that many people in the software industry overlook the nuances of words like “spam” or “scam”. Everyone wants to eliminate these, but the problem is that one man’s spam is another man’s ham.
For instance I’ve read dozens of people calling Farmville and Farm Town invites spam. I can’t say I totally disagree, I hate those things. But my wife, when she was playing loved the free chickens. And overall the platform median acceptance rate nearly doubled to around 60% as a direct result of them. Clearly most do not consider them spam.
Someone also mentioned Free Credit Report as a scam. I’ve used that site and ones like it and never had a problem. I think we can all agree that loss leaders and free services given in order to advertise a premium service are a pretty standard and, assuming they are not misleading, ethical business model.
It says what it does pretty clearly on the homepage:
From what I can tell they had a settlement with the FTC back in 2005 (long before there were Facebook apps) about some deceptive marketing practices, but I had personally used them well before that when I was cleaning up my credit. They were very helpful in that, and while I’m not the sort of person who reads the fine print, I was aware that if I did not cancel within a few days I’d get hit with some monthly fee. If I remember correctly they made cancelling as easy as a phone call back then, and while I was fairly annoyed that I couldn’t simply do it online, I still got it done with just a few minutes of effort.
So despite the fact that clearly some people consider them a scam, some people clearly consider it a valuable free service. And to get some extra Farm Bucks too? Bonus.
The point I’m making here is that it’s not always so black and white what is good and what is bad, and to simply dismiss everything you don’t like or think unethical as such is intellectually lazy.
Politics
I was watching last week’s elections intently, as Ohio had a casino issue on the ballot that looked pretty promising. It passed, and soon there will be legalizing gaming an hour from my house. Presumably they will have a poker room as well, so I may actually visit occasionally. Welcome to the 21st century, Cleveland.
I made the mistake of reading general political articles and blogs around the same time and had forgotten how dumb they are. Most tended to focus on what the Republican Party winning a few key spots means for Obama and the Democrats. The answer is, of course, nothing. Chris Christie (a name I could never vote for, regardless of competence) beat the extremely unpopular Jon Corzine. All of the political blogs are talking about how Obama’s inability to get one of the least liked Governors in the country reelected means he is losing political clout. If anything the fact that someone that incompetent got 44% is impressive. Without Obama it may have been a blowout.
But regardless, as always, it came down to the independents. Republicans want to paint Obama as some vapid cult of personality, and it’s easy to do because so many of his supporters are obviously drinking the Kool Aid. But in the end he won, like Bush before him, because he captured the independent vote. He convinced them he was the more competent candidate, as did a couple Republicans last week. That really says nothing about national trends.
Obama
Love him or hate him, you have to admire the guy for his balls of steel. He’s dealing with an economic meltdown, a growing environmental crisis, winding down Iraq, a worsening quagmire in Afghanistan and everything else that comes with the War on Terror, and he’s still trying to get health care legislation pushed through. Most Presidents are afraid to tackle that in good times. You might argue that the proposals he supports there on a mistake, and I’d even somewhat agree with you, but you have to give the guy credit for trying. It’s a stark contrast when compared to the laziness (intellectual and otherwise) of his predecessor.
Also Word 2007 tries to correct Obama by changing it to Osama. That may explain half of what’s been said on Fox News in the last two years.
Health Care
Just kidding.
