hobronto

I’m the Mayor of Nerdtown

Three reasons location-based “check in” apps suck and need to die.

1. They exalt the mundane. Are you a globetrotting adventurer exploring temples in Bali? No, you’re not. You’re a web developer checking in at fucking Starbucks. Why are you highlighting how boring your life is?*
   
   
2. The payoff is dubious. What do you get for all of your check-in efforts? A 15% discount. Who gives a shit? Is your time worth nothing to you? Are you that easy of a marketing target?
   
   
3. They make everything else worse. Run a search on Twitter for Four Square garbage posts. They’re constant - this is the crap that’s clogging up my Twitter feed - and they’re almost entirely content-free. Tweets can be funny or poignant or interesting, but there is zero chance of that happening with these spammy cross-posts.**
   
   

* I’m not saying my life is super-exciting. It isn’t. But I try not to bore the hell out of people around me by sharing the address of the Subway where I just bought lunch.

** Twitter should block them. Seriously. It’s ruining their service.

ChromeOS is the future. Oh shit.

I absolutely believe that Google’s ChromeOS, with its the-browser-is-the-OS model, represents where we’re headed in computing. Within a relatively short period of time, most users will do the majority of their work and play within the bounds of their browsers. It’s a return to the dumb clients of the past (which have been pegged as “the future of computing” a few times now) but maybe - just maybe - we’re ready for it.

Here’s by biggest problem with ChromeOS and any OS of its type:

Your Internet connection is now a critical point of failure for your OS. Your Internet connection - which your OS vendor has no control over - can kill your computing experience dead. Worse, your Internet provider doesn’t have a vested interest in providing a higher level of service to support this OS model.

Until Google provides fast, reliable, ubiquitous Internet access for users of its operating system, it’s not delivering a complete package and is offloading a key component of its OS to untrustworthy outsiders.

Bushy Einstein is a lie.

I see that Disney is now offering refunds to parents who bought Baby Einstein tapes thinking that a DVD would turn their children into geniuses. First of all: those parents didn’t do their homework and paid the stupid tax as a result. No refund necessary. Second: this is old news. In Bush’s 2007 State of the Union speech, he presented company founder Julie Aigner-Clark as an American hero, even though the research already demonstrated her product to be a fraud. Because the Bush White House wasn’t good at doing homework either.