Rant – Walt-O-Matic

Advertising Is Killing Distribution Platforms

Agressive and intrusive advertising techniques seem like they are the road to profitability, but there is a wake of evidence showing how it systematically destroys the very platforms intended to generate revenue.

If revenues are the golden eggs, and media/apps/websites the goose, then aggressive, intrusive advertising practices are the hatchet that killed the goose.

The evidence is everywhere.

Broadcast television used to have commercials between shows, then during shows, and eventually digressed to the point where the frequency of continual viewing interruption made it so that certain channels weren’t worth watching anymore. And, oddly enough, to make up for lost revenues, those channels increased the amount of advertising.

From this cable television was born, based on the the idea that if the consumer paid for content, the majority of it would be advertising-free. Although within not much time, advertising leaked in again, and eventually people were back to the old model that used to work: advertising between shows; only this time paying for the privilege.

Then a new consumer product arrived on the market, TiVo, which helped customers skip past commercials; but this early feature was all-to-quickly neutered to fast-forward-only so you’d still have the opportunity to at least see the commercials in the event you wanted to watch one.

While more modern TiVo units now have reintroduced the skip commercial ability, the once clean graphical interface now is littered with dynamic menu choices for products, shows, and offers that appear when you pause to view a frame or try to avoid the commercials.

In response to all this, broadcasters started injecting banners and overlay graphics during the show so you “had” to watch, consuming screen real-estate to announce other shows, products, or news changing the entertainment into a dashboard. Meanwhile producers started injecting product placements into actual content. In the process it means all the display pixels you paid for aren’t being used effectively, it’s distracting to watch, and can lead to some rather embarrassing sexual mishaps between show and ad for the network.

Overall, entertainment quality has gone down, presentation quality has also gone done, consumer costs have gone up, and it’s no wonder we now see a whole generation of cord cutters who have found other means to go straight to content.

The DVD market suffered a similar fate. There was a time when you bought a DVD, you got the movie and possibly special bonus material, and that was all. DVDs started inserting trailers and other commercials at the start of the movie. For a while, consumers would skip to the actual content. Then that capability was removed, and consumers fast-forwarded, which itself was challenged by the now famous “option not available” notice.

In response, streaming services appeared and consumers stopped stocking their media collections at the rate they once had. But now we see pay-for streaming media starting to inject previews and advertising in front of shows. We know where this leads: service termination and few barriers to exiting the moment a new technology surfaces. And it will, it always does.

YouTube’s success led to advertising, not surprisingly at the beginning of a video. And as viewers skipped as soon as possible, a new trend appeared: advertising pop ups over the video. (See a trend?) So while watching content, one is constantly distracted, having to dismiss dialogs; while dealing with that, one isn’t digesting the content. And like we’ve seen before, this leads to platform abandonment.

Other competing video streaming services have started to give rise. It’s surprising, but consumers will often take less content and less quality in exchange for less advertising. YouTube Red emerged as an advertising-free subscription service, just as the cable companies did before. We know where that goes next.

Netflix, Amazon Prime, and HBO were quick to discover that developing high-quality original content would lure viewers, but as more familiar advertising tendencies start to surface, enthusiasm for these platforms dwindles. At some point one starts to ask is the subscription cost justifying actual usage patterns, as consumers are slowly being pushed away. Consumers are becoming more picky while businesses look for augmenting recurring revenue.

Homes all used to have land lines, and as cell phones became cheaper and popular, house holds got them in addition to their highly reliable land lanes. However, with telemarketers invading at all hours, land lines became a dumping ground for calls we didn’t want to take. Services like Caller ID appeared, as well as the national Do Not Call list. However, due to no security in how caller ID works, numbers can be spoofed. Meanwhile, law enforcement has been ineffective at dealing to those breaking the law regarding the no call list, and advertisers for the most part ignore it. Politicians have self-servingly made themselves exempted and are often some of the worse offenders. The result, consumers have disconnected their land lines and are now mostly cell based.

However, it doesn’t take much any more for a new cell phone number to get out into the wild and make it into a robo-caller list. The net result, if someone doesn’t recognize a number, they tend not to pick up. Our cell phones are becoming spam dumps, and once direct access to someone is now fading. Meanwhile, advertisers having grown wise that people are letting content drop to voice mail, and so leave automated recorded messages, which at the end of the sales pitch, one might have the opportunity to be removed from that list (which never gets pressed), although that merely confirms the number works for other endeavors.

This has in turn led to a shift in how we even use phones to communicate, and text messaging is rapidly replacing phone calls. Even now, we’re starting to see advertising start to break into text messaging, initiated by none other than the very carriers of the service.

The home mailbox, originally intended for correspondences and packages, soon became the primary methodology of mass advertising. Consider the signal to noise ratio of your actual mailbox content between what you want verses unsolicited advertising that you have to sort through after each trip to the mail box. The difference in pile size is growing.

With so much volume introducing delay, it’s no wonder that there isn’t a measure of care during processing, and goods often arrive damaged, which in turn devalues most people’s impression of the U.S. Postal Service, their trust in it, and consequently their use.

To avoid postal mail, most people have switched to email and electronic billing; aside from the occasional package from Amazon, there’s relatively little reason to check a postal mailbox on a daily basis anymore.

We will never see postal mail delivering more than once a day as it used to not that long ago with morning and evening deliveries. And because the service is become so bad and fewer people using it, its led at least to discussions of not delivering on weekends.

Services once reserved for over night or over sized deliveries have taken on more casual load once entrusted to the post office. At the moment, advertisers find the service too expensive, so the rate structure is keeping things in check. Should that change, we know what will happen.

Email used to be a way to send messages to one another, and as the population with email addresses grew, advertisers saw it ripe for exploitation. It’s lack of encryption meant that anonymous senders could forge false from addresses and perform automated bulk mailing on a scale of unprecedented magnitude. Worse yet for the unaware receiver, the spammer can often detect if the message was read and use that information to cultivate a list of active emails. If the sender could employ social engineering successfully, it was actually possible to install advertising software on the receiver’s machine — often without them knowing. And best of all for the advertiser, under this model, the receiver pays to receive and store the message!

At this point, it is estimated that 80% of internet traffic is spam. Not emails. Internet traffic. That’s a lot of bandwidth that you’re paying for with 80% of it being used to help other people advertise at little to no cost to them. And the problem is only getting worse.

Despite spam filters, firewalls, and anti-virus software email has gotten so bad that most people have several email accounts, and use one for highly likely spam and another for personal communication. However, the moment one of our contacts shares the personal email address with some bulk email list, it’s relatively little time before it gets compromised and we’re on to another new email address, where the process starts all over, just like folks eventually changed their phone numbers for a little peace.

Websites, attempting to capitalize on traffic, started presenting advertising on the sides of their pages, and later interlaced within the articles themselves. Screaming for visual attention, ads became more gaudy, employed blinking, animation, sound and video, and pop-up dialogs, pop-under dialogs, which soon overwhelmed the value content. Visitors responded with ad blocking tools.

Websites responded by waiting a little bit and then putting a pop-over that blocks out the content below, this obnoxious behavior usually leads to site abandonment as it’s just not worth it. Sometimes, abandonment can’t be avoided: say you’re using the Flipboard app to get your news on an iPhone, it takes you the ScienceNews website, they invoke a non-mobile friendly pop-up, and you can’t see the content nor can you dismiss it. Such websites become dead to visitors.

Admittedly, this may be some interaction between 1Blocker and their advertising code, but seeing that 1Blocker can dramatically speed up load times -and- save on carrier data usage, between it and visiting such a site, 1Blocker wins hands down.

A number of websites have taken the approach that if you don’t let the advertising through, they won’t show the content. Sounds reasonable until you realize they aren’t vetting the advertising content that’s being shown. And malicious advertisers are exploiting that. The consequence of opening a rectangle of any-old content makes solid brand names incidental parties into delivering malware straight to your system. GRC provides a recent list of sites, who just by visiting, have been found to infect machines via advertising services: The New York Times, the BBC, MSN, AOL, Xfinity.com, NFL.com, Realtor.com, TheWeatherNetwork.com, TheHill.com, Newsweek.com, Answers.com, ZeroHedge, and InfoLinks.

A more disturbing practice involves hardware manufactures installing advertising malware in the hardware to make a little extra profit per unit sold. We’ve seen Dell and Gateway load up cruft on new Windows systems, but laptop maker Lenovo built mechanisms into their systems to bypass the end-user’s ability to keep the system clean, even on a pristine reinstall. This practice took them from being one of the most sought after name brands to one to be avoided, all thanks to aggressive and intrusive advertising practices.

Software is no different. Oracle got busted for making the Java installer schedule a background task for a few minutes after installation and then install advertising software; this way the end user wouldn’t notice anything wrong and presumably think it was caused by something else. Both have serious ongoing damaging effects to the Oracle and Java brands in professional circles.

Likewise, many software installer products use deceptive wording to get Ask and Yahoo toolbars installed, all for their own piece of the pie. Both search engines, once considered at least respectable, have lost significant ground to other players from both reputation damage and public mistrust, as well as firewall and ad-blocking rules to prevent installation of such nonsense. Browser owners are encouraged to remove Flash, Silverlight, QuickTime, and Java extensions from their browsers, as this will greatly reduce the attack vector as well as many malicious “advertisement” payloads.

iPhone apps have the ability to show a small banner on occasion or produce a pop-up in the middle of the app. Not only are these practices distracting to the end user, but are reinforced because the more they’re shown, the more revenue made. That makes advertising apps seemingly more profitable than fixed priced apps, which in turn is driving down the amount a professional app can earn.

All of this is changing consumer behavior, and we see app abandonment on the rise, diminished purchasing habits especially in impulse buying, and a noticeable dip in quality and creativity in the available selection.

Even Windows 10 has started to put advertising in its Start Menu and screen saver, and that’s not even counting the aggressive multi-gig push, annoying notifications, deceptive wording on dialog boxes to get you to install it. Such things can not be helping platform adoption.

The evidence is everywhere, aggressive and intrusive advertising practices actually hurts the very distribution platforms that are trying to benefit from it.

We need responsible advertising, not necessarily no advertising.

The Pattern is Clear

Worthwhile content is created, a distribution channel is developed for it, the audience grows. At some point, someone gets the idea that a little advertising will generate a little bit of revenue, and in the short-term it works.

Then the fallacy of if-a-little’s-good—then-a-lot’s-better kicks in, and either the distribution channel gets saturated with ads, the content gets damaged, or the ratio between the two gets so disjoint that the over all value tanks.

Desperation and greed can push the state of things beyond recovery, and what was once a sustainable system no longer has the following it once did, and usually by this time the audience has moved on to other technologies.

Synopsis

It appears we’re great at repeating history, but neglecting consequences.
Consumers are willing to pay for great content without advertising.
Consumers do not want to be distracted by anything else while engaging with content.
Advertising requires a balance, more isn’t better. It must be done responsibly.
Intrusive and aggressive advertising leads to platform abandonment.

List iTunes Apps by Purchaser

I finally developed a way to list all your iTune applications by Purchaser, and even better, I can do it from the command line.

Last year I was helping a friend who has pretty poor internet connectivity upgrade his iPad to the latest version of iOS. To do this, I connected his iPad to my system, performed a backup in iTunes, then synchronized to update the operating system. This had the side effect of beaming some of his applications to my iTunes, which in order to continue, he authenticated against. His iPad updated great, and he was on his way.

Things on my machine seemed okay for a while, that was until some of the apps he purchased that I didn’t have wanted to update. Not having his password, I wasn’t able to update them, but even worse, Apple wasn’t announcing which apps needed updating with his account so I could simply delete them as I wanted to.

Instead, for over a year, I was greeted in iTunes by a numerical indicator saying I needed up update my apps, but when I went to do it, I was up to date. Every once in a while I’d recognize an app that I didn’t purchase (in a haystack of nearly 1,000 iPhone apps) and delete it. Only then did the number drop, but later rise again when some other app needed updating.

What I needed to do was list out all the apps by Purchaser.

One of things that really annoys me about Apple is that stuff that is trivial to implement, like putting an optional Purchaser column in iTunes, they don’t do. The feature is half heartedly there, though. Press Command-I for Info, and you can see the purchaser for an item.

Only now you have to click and inspect your whole app list. And with the number of applications I own, this doesn’t scale well at all.

Searching the web reveals that others are in a similar bind, and that Apple seems to really care less about the few handful of users with this problem. Like much on the Apple Support Site, it’s unhelpfully silent.

Frustrated, I decided to solve this problem once and for all. Open Terminal and cut’n’paste the following in:

for f in ~/Music/iTunes/iTunes\ Media/Mobile\ Applications/*.ipa; \
 do (echo "$f" ; unzip -p "$f" "iTunesMetadata.plist" | \
 plutil -p - | egrep -i "\\"(itemName|artistName|AppleID)\\"" ) | \
 perl -e 'while (<>) { if (m!^/!) { chop; $fqn=$_; } if (m/"(.+)" => (".+")/) { $e{lc($1)}=$2; } } print "\\"${fqn}\\",$e{\\"itemname\\"},$e{\\"artistname\\"},$e{\\"appleid\\"}\n";'; \
done

Hidden Preference File

Check your ~/Libarary/Preferences directory, do you have this hidden file?

I’m not keen on applications that leave cruft or secret files on my system when there’s no need to do so.

I ran into a file on my laptop called ~/Library/Preferences/.bridge01.dat as well as .bridge3_01.dat — why a preference file is hidden, I don’t know.

Suspecting the file might be part of Adobe Bridge (it wasn’t), I copied it to the desktop, and looked at the file with less from the command console. It was clearly a binary preference file.

I renamed the file to bridge01.plist and started to open it with Xcode, although seeing BBEdit could open it, thought I’d give that a shot and was nightly impressed it detected the file type and presented it as a regular XML file.

Inside was slightly cryptic, but I recognized a sequence of text starting with ESC- and it looked like a serial number. Using Spotlight I was able to find another file that had a matching string, my purchase notes for Flux 3, by The Escapers.

Again, I’m not thrilled about hidden .dat files that ought to be public .plist files in my user’s preferences directory. But at least it was a mystery solved.

TheFlip: files in the root directory? Come on….

Were you aware that the Flip video camera you have is writing stuff to your root directory?

I’m using a Flip UltraHD on OS X 10.6, and while I’m happy with the device, I’m not so happy with FlipShare, the software that comes with it.

While the device when mounted (/Volumes/FLIPVIDEO) has a DCIM directory that has the standard video subfolder(s) 100VIDEO. Inside there are all the .MP4 files that work as-is with the Mac.

While the FlipShare seems to be over kill for accessing files in this directory, I encourage anyone with this device to go open Terminal and take a peek at your root directory. Yes, your root directory.

$ ls /

You’ll find a file, /logFile.xsl there, which appears to take an XML file for FlipShare and convert it into an HTML file.

My question is this: Why is FlipShare installing user files to the root directory? This is a horrible practice, most certainly a violation of Apple recommendations, and it’s down right tasteless in Unix parlance.

Cisco, you know better than this. Come on…! Fix this.

Apple’s Discussion Boards

An amusement – notice how many of the Apple discussion threads report “2 Helpful, 1 Solved” and not only is the issue unsolved, but often there aren’t even three messages in the thread. Something’s broken, and apparently Apple doesn’t care.

I find it annoying that many of the the Apple Discussion Boards that I browse show “2 Helpful, 1 Solved” as the status to the message threads.

And it’s not that just it has this status wrong, but that often there aren’t even three messages total in the topic.

I’ve reported this problem to Apple in the past, but it’s been ignored for years.

Updates, please don’t do that…

Using a MySQL DOT-Net Conncetor and getting these error messages? Shared Memory Provider: No Process is on the other end of the pipe. Error 0. Unable to find the request .NET Framework Data Provider. It may not be installed. Or your login not working, but your password is right? Try this solution.

Using Visual Studio 2010, it’s possible to use MySQL databases. The trick is to use the MySQL DotNET Connector.

Everything was going swimmingly until for what appeared to be no reason, until one day I went to work on my project and I started getting a strange error message for what appeared to be no reason.

Shared Memory Provider: No Process is on the other end of the pipe.
Error 0.
Unable to find the request .NET Framework Data Provider. It may not be installed.

Exploring the exception shows that a connection to the database is made, but the login has failed for the username. However, the username and password work when logging in using the MySQL client. No drivers have changed, and MySQL works with all other applications just fine, just not the Microsoft development IDE. The connection string validated in a test environment, as did a raw connection with the MySqlConnection. EntityFrameworks, not so much.

Attempting to use EntityFrameworks from VS2010 results in an error dialog box that when dismissed goes back to the database wizard that brings up the dialog box again; the only way out is using Task Manager and violently killing the IDE’s process.

Attempting to use the .MySQL .NET/Connector installer to repair the installation doesn’t help, either. Yes, it updates the .dll files, yes it tweaks the registry, but no, it doesn’t help.

Making a new project and creating a new ADO.NET Data Model reveals something interesting: the MySQL providers are not listed anymore in VS2010.

The solution is to UNINSTALL the DotConnector and then re-INSTALL the same MySQL .NET/Connector.

The full installer indicates that it updates the VS2008 and VS2010 development environments. Trying the IDE again works perfectly. The ADO.NET Data Model shows the MySQL Data Provider, the Entity Frameworks doesn’t get stuck in an endless loop, and my code worked again without change.

What happened to cause all this? Turns out I had installed a minor VS2010 hotfix service pack at the end of the weekend. The result? The update silently uninstalled all non-Microsoft data providers.

Updates, please don’t do that…

Clearly, I’m not happy about that. Especially since it did it silently. If it told me that it was going to, or if it asked me to reinstall after the fact, I could live with it.

Uninstalling Intego Software

I’d rather eat an orange then brush my teeth with peppermint toothpaste than deal with cleaning up my system after using Intego’s software. If anything can bring the Windows reboot experience, coupled with the leaving of software cruft, to the Mac platform, this software does it in my opinion. Here’s how I finally got rid of it all. I hope.

I recently purchased a Mac bundle with software and it included software from Intego, consisting of the Personal Antispam and Personal Backup applications. I installed them, and from that point forward it was an experience I’ve regretted and have been trying to undo. Only now do I think I’ve made some progress toward that goal.

Frankly, I didn’t get what the backup software did for me over many of the free solutions out there, and while the personal antispam look intriguing, it was intrusive as well and I decided to fall back to Apple’s spam filter included in Mail.

Even if a product doesn’t make it into my main line of recommendations, I often will keep it around in the event I suddenly have use for it. This, for example, is how TypeIt4Me eventually won me over.

Intego went out of their way to annoy me straight from the start. How so? Every time I went to install a package from them, they felt the need to do what appeared to be a gratuitous reboot. It was like being on frickin’ Windows. And they had to install their own update manager, which had to take a glory spot in the menu bar. And it had to do updates, which required even more reboots. I was done with them at that point, but don’t even get me started on the subscription scheme that rode on top of the atrocity.

So I wrote to them asking them how to uninstall their software. Here’s the reply I got:

Proper removal of the software package requires using the Installer package located in your software bundle or disc. If you have manually attempted to remove the software, you will need to first, reinstall the software again, then use the same Installer package to properly remove the applications.

If you need to, you can re-download the installer for Internet Security Barrier X6 using the link below:

http://www.integodownload.com/en/isbx6.html

Open the installer and select to uninstall all software. Restart your computer.

Great, another reboot. Lucky for me, I hadn’t tried to go off on my own path, plus I had the original installation utility. I tried it, and it appeared to work.

Notice I said appeared?

One week later, LittleSnitch pops up and reports my system is spontaneously trying to access Intego’s update service for the very set of applications that, for all evidence I could tell, I removed and forgot about. Apparently, no so.

LittleSnitch also reveals it’s TaskManagerDaemon who’s trying to deal with Intego’s NetUpdate buried in /Library/Intego. Thank you LittleSnitch, curse you Intego.

Intego leaves cruft. Running cruft. Seems this isn’t new of them, according to Apple archives.

Part of the Mac culture is being a good citizen. In my opinion, I feel they aren’t.

After uninstalling the software in exactly the manner they prescribe, enter this this command at your terminal:
sudo find / -name Intego -print

I suspect you’ll develop a similar facial tick as it starts returning output after scanning your disk.

Go grab a root shell, you’re gonna wanna also wipe out:

/Library/Intego and everything below it.
/Library/Application Support/Intego and everything below it.
/Library/Preferences/Intego and everything below it.
/Users/wls/Library/Application Support/Intego and everything below it.

Oh, and you’ll want to Reboot as well.

…it’s not like I had other applications up or was doing anything important.

After the reboot, you’ll notice tons of console messages from launchd. Now you need to do this.
$ launchctl
launchd% remove com.intego.task.manager.notifier
launchd% remove com.intego.netupdate.agent
launchd% exit

And, you’ll need to remove some .plist files:
$ sudo rm -v /Library/LaunchAgents/*intego*
$ sudo rm -v /Library/LaunchDaemons/*intego*

And preferences, frameworks, keychains, and widgets:
$ sudo rm -vrf /Library/PreferencePanes/NetUpdate.prefPane
$ sudo rm -vrf /Library/Frameworks/IntegoiCalFramework.framework/
$ sudo rm -v /Library/Keychains/Intego.keychain
$ sudo rm -vrf /Library/Widgets/Intego\ Status.wdgt/

Reboot again.

UPDATE (12-Dec-2010): I’ve been in contact with Intego Support, support@intego.com, and they were kind enough to provide this extra information:

If there is anything left on your computer, you can remove it manually.

Can you please go into the following areas on the computer and delete any traces of Intego or VirusBarrier:

/Macintosh HD/Library/Intego
/Macintosh HD/Library/LaunchDaemons
/Macintosh HD/Library/LaunchAgents
/Macintosh HD/Applications
/Macintosh HD/Library/Preferences
/Macintosh HD/Library/Logs
/Macintosh HD/Library/Receipts
/Macintosh HD/Library/Startupitems
/Macintosh HD/Library/Widgets

Home Folder:

~/Library/Application Support
~/Library/Preferences

They were right, there’s logs, too.
$ sudo rm -rf /Library/Logs/NetUpdate/

Review: Walt gives Intego software installation TWO thumbs down. The reasons are obvious.

Policy Backfires

Ever wonder how a well-intentioned policy turns into a horrible nightmare for the very people it was designed to serve? I found the perfect example at Apple’s WWDC where going to the restroom isn’t permitted for adults.

Ever wonder how a well-intentioned policy turns into a horrible nightmare for the very people it was designed to serve? I found the perfect example.

Let’s take the case of Apple’s technical WWDC ’09 conference in San Francisco. Brilliant talks. Amazing speakers. Fantastic audio and video. It’s good stuff.

Now Apple is a company that is on the forefront of user experience, they pioneer usability and design, and their big presentation this year is on efficient resource and queue management. You’d think this innovative thinking would hold over into how they actual manage crowd control, but you’d be wrong. Apple has totally missed the mark. I know, it seems impossible.

There’s an absolutely stupid policy that’s being enforced, and while the best of intentions are there, the policy isn’t helping anyone. It actually makes things worse. Follow this.

You’ve figured out your course tracks for the day, bunkered down to do some work on your laptop, and are watching a series of presentations being held in that room with your development buddy. It finishes, and so you tell him “Can you watch my stuff, I’m going to hit the restroom before the next presentation.” He says ‘sure’ and you leave. After all, being a convention center, the restrooms leave little to be desired in terms of personal space.

On the way out, you’d tell the Apple guy at the door “be right back” and empty handed you walk across the hall to the restroom, return in minute, and reclaim your equipment-occupied seat. At least that was how it was at the start of the conference. All was fine. Things ran like clockwork.

Mid-conference someone revised the policy. Instead, if you leave, you now have to go wait in line to return.

Why did Apple do this? I asked. Two reasons.

First, by only letting people out and not back in, this is supposed to make things easier for the presenters to set up.

Second, it’s supposed to establish an order of fairness for those people coming into line.

On the surface it appears to make sense, but what this policy really does is prevent grown adults from being able to go to the restroom. Instead, you’re standing there with a full bladder and Apple’s staff is literally telling you that you’ve got three options:
a) Hold it until the session starts.
b) Abandon your equipment (as you might not have a buddy to watch it), and then wait in line to see if it’s there when you get back.
c) Go get your equipment and hold it while you do your business, and potentially miss the session (although you already had a seat).

Let’s examine this.

1) Does the policy improve seating fairness?
No. There’s equipment, and most likely a person, reserving the seat until you return. No one standing in line is going to benefit whether you reclaim it now or later. And, realistically, every talk that has been “filled to capacity and people were turned away” had plenty of chairs mid-row, plus people are willing to stand.

2) Does this improve the line?
No. It actually makes them longer, meaning Apple has more to manage. And, as the lines wrap all over the halls, it makes them more cramped, confusing, and uncomfortable.

3) Does it make conference attendees happier?
No. It’s annoying, bordering on rude, telling someone they have to return to their seat and wait for the presentation to start in order to relieve themselves. It’s a frequent conversation topic to overhear, Apple is putting a lot of people off.

4) Does it make Apple look corporately smart?
No. In fact, even its own employees are mocking the policy behind Apple’s back, all the while blindly enforcing it (most of the time), at the door. Even their own realize how ludicrous it is. This makes Apple look bad in a very self-aware Dilbert way. Of course there’s an insulting double set of standards, as the guy managing the gate preventing people from using the restroom calls on his buddy to take his place while he goes to take a piss.

5) Does it make the presentations go smoother for the presenters?
No. In fact, worse. Now one has to wait for the presentation to start, interrupting the speaker, and by going in and out letting more light in the room. It causes distractions. Plus I’ve seen one attendee fall over a chair during a presentation, and two people trip during a presentation, all trying to temporarily exit.

6) Does it make viewing the presentation go smoother for the attendees?
No. Being seated in the middle, one now has to navigate over other people who are trying to watch the presentation. I’ve had my equipment kicked as well as my foot stepped on by someone telling me “whew, now I can go.”

7) Is it safer?
No. There is now less room to get out, where before the row was empty. Plus, there are power cords, laptops, cases, drinks and other obstacles to navigate, crush, and trip on.

8) Does it provide accurate metrics for seating?
No. In re-entering you get counted a second time. This messes up Apple’s counts and artificially makes room seem more full, turning away people who could be viewing.

9) Does it make it easier for the presenters to set up?
No. The presenters are up on stage, a good distance from the audience. No one is trying to interact with the presenters before the talk.

Got more reasons it’s a bad idea? Let’s hear them.

So, what starts as a “good idea” ends up impacting far more people than it should. Compare this to a simple first-come first-serve policy, which would allow everyone to get settled before a talk begins. If seats are full, stand; if you don’t want to stand, sit; if you don’t want to sit, find another session; if you don’t want that to happen, get there on time or before, just like everyone else does. It’s acceptable to leave a session during Q&A in order to find a good seat at the next session.

Unfortunately, as with most failed policies, the solution usually is to add more policies (rather than correcting the root problem). Kudos to Apple for not going this extra step. The slippery slope would be to kick everyone out in order to have them stand in line again; that however would be truly idiotic, especially given the equipment people carry and set up to attend these things.

Connecting Models and Photographers… why so hard?

There are numerous sites that proclaim to connect models and photographers, however based on the design and business models I’ve seen, I don’t think it can work in present form. Here’s why.

As a photographer that photographs models, there’s two primary goals that any website that tries to connect models and photographers should aim for:

1. Assisting a photographer in finding the right model.

2. Assisting the client in finding the right photographer.

All else is peripheral.

The idea is that if you’re a model looking for work, you post your portfolio online and photographers approach you with gigs. Conversely, if you’re a photographer, you post your portfolio and jobs start coming out of the wood work. The reality is that few sites can deliver on the promise adequately, not to a fault of the site’s objective, but due to design, business model complexities, or subtleties pertaining to the problem of brokering.

Naturally, for any such site to work you’re going to need a critical mass of both kinds of users just to have a wide enough selection to make this happen. As such, it’s important not to alienate users — something that is very easy to do with bad design or practice. It’s not enough that a site be free.

The closest site that I’ve come across that seems to have the right idea is www.ModelMayhem.com. It’s search capability is right on target. You tell it that you are looking for models in your local area that are some number of miles from your zipcode, that are between the ages of 18-24, female, 5’2″ – 5’7″, olive skin, with shoulder length black hair, green eyes, and poof — out pops a number of candidates.

This is the way it should work. You tell the criteria about what you need, and it finds people with those attributes.

The problem is the interface is klunky, the portfolio space limited, the navigation is horribly disorganized, and pretty much anything other than models is left wanting. Yet it’s still usable.

I wish it had a way to describe the kinds of services photographers offered and made them in a searchable fashion as well. Oh well, at least finding models isn’t problematic.

Such locator services are not a social network, nor are they a dating service. They’re supposed to be resources that connect professional with professional, with the added bonus of having a reasonable idea of what you’re getting. It frustrates me when a site is designed around chit-chat and messaging. Simply put let one professional find another, preview their work, and then get in contact with them by email; don’t obscure things. A site that works gets traffic, it doesn’t need fudging to get visitors.

Conversely, I just deleted my account over at www.aMuseBook.com, a web site that professes to do the same thing: connect models and photographers. I’d argue not only that it doesn’t, but that it physically can’t in my personal opinion — it’s a business model problem gone awry.

While better organized, and certainly much prettier, it’s search capabilities are downright awful. The best geographical resolution is state-level. So, if you’re looking for a model in Texas, that’s all of Texas. Additionally, providing search criteria for attributes just isn’t possible, which means locating a specific model by looks isn’t doable. And if you can’t find candidates, you aren’t going to be hiring.

Here’s another bad design choice that just seems obvious. If you want to find a model, you typically are looking for an age bracket, yes? Well, the site doesn’t let you search by age, instead you have to search by a specific birthday, which is stupid. Oh, and that’s a Day – Month – Year birthday at that. Even searching by year alone isn’t helpful, because simply year subtraction doesn’t give age.

Now while aMuseBook does give you more space to store your photos, it unlocks features using a point system. You gain points by commenting on people’s pictures and telling your friends to join. What becomes transparent very quickly is that the site is not structured to make contacts, but to get you to churn through pages so that Google Ads get thrown in your face generating an alternate revenue stream. I quickly got tired of being told in every email I have to “use” the site and it will ‘work’ for me.

Hogwash. If I can’t locate a model or post a comprehensive portfolio, then neither I, nor the models, are getting any serious value out of the site.

Adding insult to injury, the site gives you the ability to provide URLs to your own site; this sounds good at first, until you realize that many models and photographers keep their photos on Flickr. Why? Because Flickr is great for managing photos. But what does aMuseBook do for those sites? It blocks them out, showing up as www.*****.com, and when I questioned the site admin about it, I got back a response stating they didn’t want their site for depositing competitor URLs and not another portfolio site.

Wait a second. The service is there to help me find people by showing them my portfolio but they don’t want me to show them my portfolio if it’s elsewhere? Plus I can’t post my portfolio unless I leave comments that I wouldn’t have otherwise. That’s stacking the deck and gives unrealistic feedback. And when points are rewarded for clicking on ads, I’m pretty sure that’s against Google’s terms of service for AdSense.

If people are churning pages leaving “Nice smile” comments, how is one to know which comments are real (and therefore useful) versus people just trying to collect points? The information itself becomes devalued. Thus the business structure and the design alienates users in the short term, while the lack of utility alienates them in the long term. It can’t be viable.

And that’s why I deleted my account over there: It wasn’t usable or productive.

No wonder it’s so hard for models and photographers to get connected. I wish there were a simple directory that focused on doing one thing and one thing well, connecting professionals. It’s a hard problem, but the person that cracks that nut can steal a whole lot of business from all these other sites without trying too hard.

Fundamentally, the problem is that a brokering agent has to provide and organize information. Limiting it, not being able to search it, or failing to have a positive user experience drives away the very assets that are needed to make the site work. This appears to be a case where a well simple organized directory could be a winner-take-all.

UPDATE: I have found an awesome site for models, photographers, and makeup artists. It’s call Miss Online and it allows unlimited photo uploads with no point limitation schemes. It also includes discussions, groups, blogs, and email. The site is very active and quite attractive to use; advertising is at a minimum, and you aren’t coerced into clicking through tons of pages. Plus, and here’s the real proof: as a photographer I’ve had more exchanges with models with this one site than all the other sites combined. It does get you connected.

Ugh, wimp.com has video ads

Here’s a case where mini-ads just killed the experience for me, and as a result became a deterrent from visiting a once popular site for me.

I used to be a pretty big fan of wimp.com, a site that collected links to all kinds of interesting videos. Not having much time on my hands, this was the perfect aggregation of interesting content.

Now, when I go visit a link, an ad usually pops up. I have to close it. Then the video starts. And, again, another ad slides up from the bottom, and I have to that add. Then all the while the video is playing, I have a little “AD” box overlaid hoping I’ll press it.

The new face of wimp.com — why I’m done.
While I don’t begrudge wimp.com, or other sites, from having advertisements, I really dislike intrusive ads in the video stream.

As such, wimp.com, you’ve just gone from being one of my favorite sites to one of my least visited sites (which means no ad clicks, no ad views, by the way).

The simple solution would have been placing an ad elsewhere on the page, even under the video.

Want to know where the ads should have gone? To the right of the directory listing of links. That’s the page I’m always coming back to.

Another great part of the internet just died for me.

UPDATE 12-Mar-2009: While showing this horrible predicament to a friend the site acted differently; it played the video with no ugly overlays or pre-ads, but displayed an advertisement when done. That is perfectly acceptable! Fantastic compromise guys!

UPDATE 18-Mar-2009: Ugh, now it’s worse — ads pop up while you’re watching, even after you’ve dismissed them.