Quick Bits: A hologram, a manifesto, a new SEO Tool and Microsoft about to get whipped by Apple – again.

Holographic Tupac: Awesome and inevitable. I just don’t understand the criticism. Its just a recording, we’ve been listening to those for years. This isn’t a big step beyond what Cirque did for MJ.

501 Developer Manifesto: A clock puncher is a clock puncher. I’m not impressed. Come and go as you please, and don’t bother coming if you don’t bring any passion for what you do.

Inbound Writer: I love the idea of this. I’m starting to use it, time will quickly tell if it has real SEO value.

Windows 8 taking a run at iPad: I think Apple has been holding out on us and have some surprises in store that will again raise the bar on the industry and leave Dell, HP and Microsoft wondering what the hell just happened. Again.

Did Apple scare Facebook into buying Instagram?

Facebook knows that many, many people use their iPhone to take pictures and share them on Facebook using iPhoto. Or worse, directly from the iPhone (and now Android phone) to twitter.

That is why Facebook bought Instagram.

Take out a middleman and flank a competitor – in one transaction.

That might be worth a billion dollars to someone who is really worried about Apple. Especially if that someone is still in their twenties, doesn’t have a sense of his own mortality and has built what could become the biggest thing the Internet has ever seen – before most of his peers graduated.

Apple still has a hard time with the Internet. Their DNA predates the modern networked era. Instagram could be a problem for Apple if Facebook plays their cards right.

The Wasting of Layne Staley

10 years ago tomorrow, Layne Staley, lead singer of Alice in Chains – one of the leading bands of the 90′s, finally killed himself.

I’m not writing about this as a fan. I really enjoy Alice in Chains but this isn’t one of those “RIP Rock Star” posts. I’m noting it because of how tragic, lonely and dark the ending was for Layne Staley.

He was truly alone – he’d abandoned himself, forced his friends and family away and even his high had left him. And Staley wasn’t a tortured artist – at least not in the classic sense. He was an addict, bound by the pathetic demands of his disease, slowly circling the drain. There was nothing romantic about Layne’s existence, or his end.

(paraphrased from Wikipedia…)

On April 19, 2002, Layne Staley’s accountants contacted his mother, Nancy McCallum, and informed her that no money had been withdrawn from Layne’s bank account in two weeks. She called 911, worried that she hadn’t heard from her son and begging them to go with her to Staley’s home.

The police kicked in the door of Staley’s apartment and there, on the couch lit by a flickering TV, next to several spray-paint cans on the floor, not far from a stash of coke and two crack pipes on the coffee table sat the remains of the rock singer. At 6’1″, Layne weighed just 86 pounds, having died on April 5, 2002 from an overdose of heroin and cocaine. At 34, Staley had achieved success that most only dream about, and lost it all to his addiction.

Wake up young man, it’s time to wake up
Your love affair has got to go
For 10 long years, for 10 long years, The leaves to rake up
Slow suicide’s no way to go
Wake up, wake up, wake up

- Mad Season, “Wake Up“

Game, set, match. Mind games with the witless.

I got this most recently via Joey deVilla and its made the rounds a few times since last August.

Naheed Nenshi is the mayor of Calgary.

Calgary is looking better and better every day.

If only they had decent skiing.

A Scanner Darkly

I recently upgraded to a new Macbook and didn’t set up Preview.app to sign documents until this morning. As I clicked the “New Signature” button, I realized that I should probably create a signature to scan in. While perfecting my scrawl, I looked up at the screen to see that the software was trying to turn my head into a signature. Rolling with it, I smiled and clicked “Accept Signature”. From there, I created a blank PDF and “signed” it with this pretty cool image of my big head, saved the results and uploaded it into this post.

Kinda neat!

Frequent Flier Programs: Not really rewarding

I just finished reading about someone’s experience with ConciergeKey, American Airlines gold-plated frequent flier reward given to customers that have flown several kazillion miles on their airline. I don’t know exactly what all of the perks are, and I imagine that they are pretty sweet given the number of miles it takes to earn the program.

Here’s one frequent fliers recent experience with the program (“CK” is “ConciergeKey”, you can figure out the rest of the abbreviations, or just insert the names of random cities ) -

My flight was delayed this morning. Got an email (standard from the website, anybody can get that, on any airline I think, and you better be doing it too). Said my SAT-DFW flight was delayed half an hour. No real problem, I had a 2 hour layover at DFW. Cool.

Then my phone rings. Some number I don’t recognize. Check voicemail. It’s CK, telling me, we know about the problem, we’ll track it, you’re fine for now, here’s what’s causing the delay.

Bloody awesome.

An hour goes by. Three more delays. Emails say, you ain’t gonna make it, son.

CK calls again. This time, I answer. Sorry for the trouble, you won’t make your connection, but we have you on another flight, and it’s all good.

So on one hand, this program is a really, really sweet reward for customers that have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars with the airline.

And at some level, I suppose it is also intended to influence the purchasing decisions of customers that haven’t yet qualified for the program.

The problem is that for 99.9999% of the population, it just isn’t possible to make these levels of miles, so it really isn’t all that influential – at least not in my thinking.

Worse still, in the earlier story, the airline can offer this level of personalized service to each person that flies their airline. Technology makes it completely possible to automatically re-book passengers and even though it might be hard to have a person call everyone on every flight, most people wouldn’t mind getting a ping from a computer outlining the problems and the options available. Hell, some of us might even pay slightly more for a ticket that included these services as an upgrade.

As is, I find these programs insulting and disrespectful. When a restaurant can’t deliver the meal I ordered, they bend over backwards to make it right. Why can’t the airlines? This is just basic customer service. Perhaps in the ancient times before automated dialers and high-tech booking systems were practical, I could understand how the costs might outweigh the benefits, but given the current state of technology it feels more like laziness and a lack of innovation.

Moreover, I think if these frequent fliers thought hard for a second about the pain the airlines inflicted on them while they pursued these luxurious “perks”, they’d probably agree with me.

For what we’re paying for airline tickets, we all deserve a better class of service.

Activism or Spam?

Funny, I’m now receiving spam masquerading as Internet activism. The most recent piece I received proudly flies the anti-SOPA flag and questions whether or not some of your favourite sites could be shutdown as well…

My first inclination was that this was spam promoting Pornhub. Silly me, that’s just a regular link – a spammer would at least include an affiliate URL or some other means to make money.

No, this is actually a Viagra spam. If you follow the link to the protest, you will end up at a Pharma page trying to sell you little blue pills. I can’t imagine that the conversation rate would be all that good, but again, spam is a volume game. Even with 1 buyer for every 10,000 spam message sent, these scumbags send enough volume to make it profitable.

Seesmic sheds staff, drops CRM, re-focuses on social

As a followup to my post earlier this week, Seesmic has laid off just more than half of its team as it struggles to find a business model. Before acquiring Ping.fm, Seesmic tried its hand as a CRM vendor, Twitter client and video platform.

AllThingsD reports that Seesmic is buckling down to focus on its social tools, which presumably includes its Seesmic Ping product, so it might yet find a winner that it can run with.

My hope is that they seize this new focus and use it as an opportunity to revitalize their customer relationships, start communicating and work with its loyal and passionate users so that we are part of the solution.

Giving up on Ping.fm

After some reading, I think the situation at Ping.FM might be worse than I realized. After Ping.FM was acquired by Seesmic, they revoked all API access a while ago and I’m not sure that they’ll be fixing these issues anytime soon. It seems like Seesmic is focused on relaunching a paid app under the Seesmic Ping banner. That’s cool… for them, I guess. In the meantime, it would be nice if they provided their users with some direction and guidance.

For my part, I’ve now invested 45 minutes troubleshooting and trying to understand the situation better – that’s 45 minutes wasted if Seesmic is going to shut down Ping.FM. And, if they don’t have the courtesy to keep me in the loop now, I can’t really expect the situation will improve if I pay them money. In my experience, companies that offer great service don’t wait to show their stripes until you’ve ponied up some cash.

I was able to find a few WordPress plugins that offer similar functionality – a total PITA to install and configure, but not much more time on top of the time I’ve already wasted trying to solve this.

Updated: Since posting this, I’ve found WordSocial, a nice plugin that handles posting to Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn and wasn’t much of a hassle to install. I pulled the earlier plugins I was wrestling with and I’m quite pleased with the results.