Monday, May 3, 2010

Mood: Silly

I'm not a big fan of FaceBook, Twitter or that other thing - what is it? Oh, yeah: MySpace. I've been designing for the web since a fast computer was running at 66 mHz. That's a long time ago, especially in Web Years. I have taken a bit of a hiatus since, oh, about 2008 but, I'm going back to the future again. Things have changed quite a bit from the coding standpoint but, it's not that hard, really. That there's a challenge factor of more than 2% leaves the field open to those who can actually think, problem-solve and apply the experience of what keeps a user at a particular site.

It seems that "social media" is important to businesses who, for some reason, think it will make a difference to their bottom line. I don't agree at all. No one wants to know whether your HVAC company is putting in a whole-whole AC system in that Victorian stunner on Dogwood Circle unless you're doing it for free. And if you are, the normal rules of PR apply - content, reporting, content. Twitter isn't really a broadcast medium. but local cable is effective for small business, certainly, and it's cheap, too. Some PR is free because it's news-worthy. Anyway . . . I digress.

I am putting together a template for a low-budget site at the moment and it seems that folks would like to collect metrics and opinions from visitors. I don't think long-winded surveys accomplish anything from uncommitted visitors anyway, but I needed to fill in my page, so, here's what I did:

Clever, huh? I amuse myself. Which is a god thing, since no one else does. Oops - I meant, "good thing."

Facebook doesn't impress me, either, except for big-budget endeavours. And MySpace is starting to even bore the thirteen year-olds who seem to exclusively inhabit it. Still, Motorola and Samsung now have "hooked in" phones that allow "streaming" updates to these "major" social media outlets. Even their advertising is unimpressive in terms of what they're touting, for instance, "This just in via text and Twitter," (so and so) "loves Pepperoni pizza." I'm sorry, but in the real world, if you have time to Tweet your pedestrian food preferences and then to confirm same tendencies by text then you simply have too much damn time on your hands.

Disclosure: I own a high-tech smartphone which I use to check the weather, e-mail, stock reports, Google stuff (not porn) and, yes, text. Works for me. ;)

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