Yesterday Apple announced some new social networking features for iTunes as part of a new service called Ping. If you choose, you can show your friends what music you’re listening to.

Bad idea.

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“It’s as though when you order a sirloin steak, it comes with a side of maggots.”
— Gene Weingarten, writing about web comments in the Washington Post.

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Yahoo News is one of the most popular news web sites in the world. It has a problem, though. Every major story comes with a generous helping of the most vile hate speech you’ve ever seen.

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I hope you enjoyed your 4th of July weekend! I took Friday off, and had today off as a holiday, granting me a 4-day staycation here in Brooklyn. However, my weekend was disrupted somewhat by some scheduled dental surgery; I had my final two wisdom teeth extracted Friday. This wiped Friday off the map and made Saturday and Sunday an odd muddle of World Cup soccer, barbecues, beer, good times with friends and suffering from mouth pain.

Today, however, I’m feeling mostly recovered. I planned to spend the full day for a long bike ride. Unfortunately, once I woke up, I couldn’t muster the motivation to spend a full day outside in this heat. (It hit 98 today in Central Park.) Instead I rode a loop out to Coney Island and back.

On today’s bike ride, I used a free mobile application called InstaMapper to track my route on a map. I’ve tried InstaMapper before with limited success; the GPS on my Blackberry isn’t always reliable, and the program itself seemed to shut itself down randomly. Today, however, it worked brilliantly. Assuming it’s all still working, you can see an interactive map below showing my ride with pretty good precision. I find this kind of thing amazing.
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What the hell, Facebook? I understand you probably need a little 50×50 graphic for every town in the world, but what’s up with Brooklyn’s?

I mean, what is that? A shot of the old Pier 1 warehouses seen from Manhattan? Or Omaha, Nebraska, on a hazy afternoon?

It’s not like we have a shortage of icons. A rooftop water tower. A slice of pizza. The F train climbing the Culver Viaduct. The Williamsburgh Savings Bank Building clock tower. The Parachute Jump. The Cyclone. And isn’t there a bridge in Brooklyn that people might recognize?

Come on, Facebook. The 2.5 million residents of Kings County deserve better.

Today’s blog post is about using math to make writing more effective. You should read it!

A couple of months ago, I noticed a curious phrase showing up on lots of blogs.

“You should follow me on Twitter here.”

This phrase stands out for being terse, awkward, even rude. Most people would write “Please…” instead of “You should…” Yet this specific line of clunky self-promo copy spread like the flu. A Google search for that exact phrase returns 154,000 results! (For comparison, a search for “Please follow me on Twitter here” returns 1,690 results.)

We can trace this phenomenon to blogger Dustin Curtis, who used testing to find the optimal way to convince people to follow him on Twitter. “You should follow me on Twitter here” was proven to be the most persuasive sentence. You should read about his experiment here.

I have conflicted feelings about this. On one hand, I don’t want to endorse shoddy writing edited by machines. On the other hand, shouldn’t you use every weapon in your arsenal to make your writing more effective? You should!

I decided to try a test of my own. For the last six weeks, visitors to this blog have been part of an experiment.

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We can find anything we want on the Internet. The other day, I had an old advertising jingle stuck in my head that I remembered from childhood. (“You’ve got a lot to do before lunch!”) It took me about 10 minutes to find a YouTube video of the 1992 Cheerios commercial it came from.

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“I didn’t know what Facebook was. And now that I do know what it is, I have to say it sounds like a huge waste of time.” — Betty White on SNL

This is a time of fear, promise, and fidgety energy. Everyone who does what I do (marketing copywriting) is swimming in all of that as we adapt to social media.

The biggest challenge? Getting good information. Pragmatically, I need to connect with real people, not shout to a room of empty chairs or dumb robots. How do I figure out what to do?

For starters, by listening to social media experts. But here we have a big problem. Everyone with expertise in social media is also invested in it. If you’re in the business of promoting Google Buzz consultancy services, of course you’re going to rave about the tremendous potential of Google Buzz. When you’re talking about Twitter on Twitter, volume and repetition are as good as authority. And in this climate (here’s where the fear factor comes into play), any experts who betray a hint of skepticism are swiftly marginalized by their fellow social media leaders.

Those of us surveying this scene from a distance—ie., who embrace social media but don’t list it as a skill on our LinkedIn profiles—sometimes want to throw our hands up in frustration. Since I can’t count on self-styled social media experts for independent advice, I have to do research on my own. My counterparts in marketing departments everywhere are doing the same.

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A newspaper editor friend recently asked me for advice on keeping up with the latest online jargon.

First, I suggested he use the phrase “location-based social networking” at every opportunity. And second, I recommended he read two articles. Here are links to the two articles and why I recommended each one. (more…)

Time to take a nostalgia trip! I thought it would be interesting to re-post the first web site I ever built. Back in 1995, I had an extremely basic America Online home page. Alas, those files were lost long ago on the hard drive of my dad’s 486 Pentium. However, I do have copies of almost everything from August 1997 onward.

Here’s what my site looked like in August 1997.

And here’s my site in August 1998.

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Here’s one of the greatest success stories in technology: The HP 12C financial calculator. It was introduced in 1981 and is still selling. After a generation of seismic advancements in technology, this weird horizontal calculator has kept its edge. It costs $70 and people still buy it.

Name something else battery-powered that hasn’t changed since 1981. I’ve got nothing. Blackberries and iPhones seldom last two years before better ones come out, yet this calculator could bury us all. Now I don’t work in finance and I’m far from an expert in calculators, so I can’t explain in detail what’s so amazing about this device. But I know calculators are a competitive space. This one’s success can’t just be an accident of history or the result of marketing. It’s adoption isn’t a requirement; surely there are other calculators that fit with today’s business conventions.

It could only have survived this long by being good. Good enough to be deeply loved by exactly the right customers. The HP 12C designers nailed it. They achieved something unheard of in technology: perfection. If we’re lucky, once in our lifetimes we’ll work on a team that does that.