Here we go again. A while ago I blogged about how stupid this "new invention" called Branch is because there is actually nothing new about it. Dude, you freakin’ invented forums, which have been around for over 10 years. Now, we have an article in The New York Times about how Cindy Gallop just invented the realm of amateur porn sites. This is freakin’ ridiculous. Another "brand new" thing that’s been around for ten years.
Coming soon: The invention of the computer mouse.
I have a smart phone. Sometimes my smart phone is a dumb phone. Mine’s a Motorola Droid, and it’s mostly cool, most of the time. People are usually impressed when I just talk into the phone and it gives me information like turn-by-turn driving directions, the nearest Mexican restaurant, or the definition of a word, etc. What’s more impressive is that my phone is two years old and has lots of cool features that many people think make it a brand new phone.
Here’s this morning’s brief tale of how my Droid wasn’t so impressive, but fun anyway. It’s my weekend with my girlfriend’s dogs that she has shared custody of. (That would make them my pseudo-step-dogs.) We got up nice and early to take the dogs for a walk (a Toy Poodle and a Maltese) at 7 am, and the brisk walk (not really, it was kind of slow. The pups are little and have tiny legs.) helped us work up an appetite for breakfast.
My girlfriend is a coupon queen. She brought over some coupons for Einstein’s Bagels. Where I live in Downtown St. Petersburg, there are a lot of amazing restaurants, bars, clubs, shops and museums, but no fast food chains and the like. So I pulled out my handy Droid to find the nearest Einstein Bagel shop. When I proceeded to use the voice recognition I received a prompt encouraging me to use the new upgraded personalized system that will recognize my own voice even better … so I did.
Ironically, it doesn’t work better. Every time I said; “Einstein Bagels”, the Droid responded: “I’m Stein Bagels” … over and over and over and over.
So, for the rest of the day, I am introducing myself as “Stein. Stein Bagels.” “You can call me Stein. Or you can call me Mr. Bagels. Either way … either way.”
The closest Einstein’s is at Gandy Blvd., which is 6.5 miles away. I found this out after manually typing the search query. It was too far. I drove 2-miles to get McDonald’s Hot Cakes & Sausage for her, and a Big Breakfast for me. It tasted really good. Maybe we’ll have bagels tomorrow.
The Latest Web Start-Up That is Not Needed & Doomed to Fail
My inaugural post was about a new web start-up named Branch. Yesterday evening I was watching the Bloomberg Business cable channel when they had an interview with one of the co-founders of Branch. Unfortunately, my Hauppauge WinTV software wasn’t working, so I couldn’t get a direct digital video, so I resorted to an analog recording by putting the camera in front of my TV. It still came out ok, You can see it at the end of this post.
Evan Williams and Biz Stone, the co-founders of Twitter are backing Branch, which is probably why they are getting so much media coverage for such a stupid idea. Evan Williams was also the co-founder of Blogger, which never made any money, lost all of it’s employees, and nearly went out of business before he lucked out when Google bought Blogger in February 2003 for an undisclosed (probably ridiculously huge) sum.
We don’t really know if Twitter is profitable since they are still privately owned, but the rumors from supposedly leaked data, reported on Gawker aren’t surprising.
Bloomberg interviewed Josh Miller, who dropped out of Princeton to co-found Branch. He says he would read a newspaper and felt he had nowhere to express his opinion. Really? Apparently, he couldn’t figure out how to blog, participate in forums, post on Facebook, or Tweet. Josh states; "We’re trying to replicate the types of conversations that happen in the real world, online."
Whoa! Like that’s totally never been done before.
Who’s in charge of "Usability" and "Customer Experience" at Facebook? Can I kick them in the balls? Please?
Look at the top of the right sidebar here and notice, Kevin’s Quote of the Day. Today’s quote is: "I wish I could get invited to more Facebook events that are nowhere near where I live." The sarcasm is obvious, of course, but the situation is far worse than that.
It is stupid enough that Facebook makes it easy, and in fact encourages people to invite every single person that is on their friends list to an event. I know there are some virtual events that people want cheerleaders for (which annoy me too), but the vast majority that I get invited to are actual live events happening in a real place … nowhere near where I effen live! The real place is usually hundreds to thousands of miles away. Even if I had my own private jet, I probably still wouldn’t go, either because I didn’t have the time, or I just don’t really care that much about your boring event. Aside from the time-wasting notifications I get every day, this wouldn’t be too much of an annoyance if I could just ignore them, but I can’t.
Define Irony: A guy that makes a decent living on the Internet that also thinks 90% of the Internet is colossally retarded.
I’ve had this domain for 5-years, since 2007, but I have only used it for email until now. I have finally decided to be a "blogger" even though I think it is ridiculous to say that you are a blogger—like when someone says, "What do you do?" and you say, "I’m a blogger", I think really!?!? Are you effen kidding me? I’ll have more on the stupidity of blogging later. What actually inspired me to finally just set up a personal blog—well, it was 2 or 3 things, but the final straw that broke the camel’s back was reading about this new website named Branch in today’s New York Times.
I finally found something so completely idiotic that I just … I just … *twitch* *twitch* couldn’t contain myself any longer. I have a ton of real work to do today, and I really shouldn’t be wasting time on this crap, but Jesus!
In the future, I promise to tell you the myriad reasons why I think Facebook, Twitter, Social Media, and Social Media Marketing are really, really freakin’ dumb (and why I use them all for my own purposes anyway), but today, I’m just going to make a brief, simple commentary on this new website that is such an amazing breakthrough that it warrants coverage in The New York Times. (The NYT is one of my favorite daily reads by the way, in digital format—yeah, I pay the 15 bucks a month. You’re welcome NYT.)
Ok, so here it is. Are you ready? Are you sitting down? … ’cause this is gonna blow you away. Up until now, we have never been able to have a group discussion online. (That is of course, excluding Forums, Blogs, Chat Rooms, Yahoo Groups, Google Groups, Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and back in the old days, Usenet.)