Instead, we are all plummeting more and more into a dark state of society where the overall lack of intellect makes innovation ignored and the select fewer intellectuals drowned out by the popular majority of the ignorant. This applies to the field of technology as well as most other fields as well.

The Web

The best design that anyone visiting this site can relate to as far as representing this decline in the intellect of the general public is the whole idea of Web 2.0, as sites like Twitter display.

USENET was too “techy”, blogging was too researched and to the point, so micro-blogging comes along and makes you say what you need to say in 140 characters or less. Gone are the researched “Web essays” that tell you everything you need to know about a topic, which could range from a shoe review to how a recent privacy policy change in a major website impacts its users.

Instead, “tweets” (a ridiculous term in and of itself) with 140 characters or less are used to express what you wish the world to know while remaining within everyone’s shortening attention span.

And usually, it’s something along the lines of this prime philosophical example:

If a man is taking a dump on your chest in the middle of the forest. Can anyone hear you scream?

-Twitter user VanRiggins

Television

This gets a tad out of the scope that most of our articles are usually confined to, but I have to cover this – compare modern, cookie-cutter television with the quality shows of old times past.

I mean, the Cartoon Network TV show Robot Chicken (which I have sadly witnessed a few times) is almost less of a parody of modern TV as it is a true representation of what all shows look like to me: stale, unfunny, mass-produced smut designed to please the general public before their attention spans wear out.

And with the constant shortening of our attention spans comes a noticeable hit in quality in the eyes of the minority of society actually able to view things for what they are.

Rap, MTV and the like

I watch MTV every now and again, and what I witness frightens me to no end. I can’t help but to feel like I’m witnessing the end of the world: this is the popular culture that our future politicians, leaders, and ultimately those whom will replace and take care of us are growing up within.

Rap music is a prime example: You can argue about how complex the lyrics are and how they have a “deep” meaning once you get past the talks of rape and violence, but overall it is just a beat and fast talking.

But the very fact that it is simple and rapid-fire makes it suitable for the shortening attention span of our youth, and also helps to further whittle said attention span until all of America’s children are running around screaming in circles.

But I forgot, there’s a “medical” name for that, and it’s called being ADHD. And there’s several drugs for that made-up disease clinically proven to be just as addicting as heroin while providing the effects of cocaine.

The Blame Falls On Us

We’re the ultimate ones to blame for all this. Parents out there simply gave what they thought was a better lifestyle to their children, but as result, spoiled them in a life of over-indulgent luxury and quickly-evolving technology that has given way to the mess that society has become.

And as long as there is a profit to be made in it, this won’t change any time soon.

Too Late To Turn BAck

So while I’ve attempted to outline here a few examples of how society is slowly decaying to a gruesome version of its past structure, there really isn’t anything we can really do to save it.

Some could argue that society and popular culture has been on a downward spiral ever since the term existed in the first place, and I could sympathize with that completely.

The Internet is just yet another mass medium of communication, and with this innovation comes the obligatory ignorance that seems to follow any great advancement in history.

Just talk to any GUI or web designer – expect the target user(s) to be stupid, and that alone is a definition whom’s bar gets lowered every couple of years. Just compare early 90’s websites to the modern “Web 3.0″ website.

I’m not knocking innovation or progress in general – I’m all for the advancement of mankind, it’s just the abuse that follows any great thing that I believe is destroying our society until we make a full circle back to the grunts of cavemen and women.

So while the whole point of this post was merely to attempt to point out how society has slowly degraded from its former self over the years with the introduction of newer products and innovations, I don’t expect much to come of it.

Props to those whom realize how our society is dying, as you are quickly becoming a minority in an ever-growing sea of societal menaces.

News Flash: The General Public Is Stupid originally appeared on The Coffee Desk on August 2, 2009.

Today, that changed in what is apparently Microsoft’s effort to get in on the Twitter marketing business (as 1 out of every 2 Twitter spammers love to tell you about).

Microsoft on Twitter

Microsoft vs. Linux on the Twitter front

Where to begin – how about the lovely fact that Linux has more Twitter followers than Microsoft! 10,000 vs 2,000 – clearly a win for Linux marketing over MS, as highlighted in the above image. While they still have a ways to go before topping the corporation in desktop market share, they clearly are better off in viral marketing.

Cotags FAIL

The second thing I highlighted in the above screenshot was their usage of @cotags using the web as the client instead of CoTweet. Most have no idea what I’m talking about, so here it is: most shared Twitter accounts use cotags to “sign” tweets using the authors initials, and the CoTweet client is built just for this.

The web client isn’t, so they are typing that in every time they post. We’re guilty of the same thing, although we use cotags moreso to tell whom the author of an article is when posting links. Even worse, there is no cotags legend in their image, so you have to guess whom the author is or visit the image every time to reference it.

Speaking of the image…

We have no room to talk, but the background image used by MS on their Twitter account shown in the above screenshot was taken by a very large (37″ LCD TV) screen, yet it looks like boiled crap.

You’d think the corporate giant would have more money to hire a decent photoshopper, or did they fire those in their layoffs, too?

Verified Account?

Celebrities like Ashton Kutcher and Microsoft’s own Major Nelson have the currently in-beta “Verified Account” button on their account pages, to show that the account is owned by them and not some random person claiming to be.

Microsoft not only lacks one, but for the longest time I thought the Twitter account named “Microsoft” was really a spammer or sockpuppeteer just trying to gain a few more followers. If it still is, they’ve just gotten more ballsier in their trademark infringement.

But there really is no way to tell until Microsoft gets the “Verified Account” button, and if they had any sense – they would.

Together with Bing

This isn’t the first official Microsoft Twitter account, but it is the first one since Bing started indexing Twitter results. The coincidence doesn’t surprise me at all, since if you’re going to have a Twitter marketing account, you might as well index it using your search engine as well.

For now, this looks like one front where Bing is actually ahead of Google: “Real-time” Twitter Indexing.

Overall Score: FAIL

Clearly, so far the Twitter move by Microsoft has been a huge flop so far. That said, just this post alone could bump up their follower number, but for now it is looking pretty pitiful.

And should they get more followers than Linux after I brag on the fact in this post, then I guess it wouldn’t be the first time MS arrives late to a game only to dominate it *cough* netbooks *cough*.

UPDATE: It seems Twitter also upped their API limit from 100 to 150 per hour, as clients like TweetDeck noticed.

Microsoft Gets In On Twitter Marketing… Poorly originally appeared on The Coffee Desk on July 1, 2009.

The Middle Class: A Quick Recap

Just why is the middle class so important to us? Here’s a quick diagram to start:

Obama and the middle class

As the diagram graphically depicts, the element separating the U.S. economy from that of a third-world country is a healthy middle class, which Obama is harming with his policies.

The middle class comprises of: you and me, the majority of tax payers, small and medium business owners, medium-income employees, and more. Pay special attention to the “tax payers” and “small to medium business owners” aspect as we cover Obama’s destruction of this crucial part of the U.S. economy.

The middle class is what separates us from any third world country economy. In a poor country, you have the rich royalty that ultimately rules the land, and the poor loincloth-wearing workers and peasants that work to support the rich government as well as themselves to a “survivable” degree.

Our middle class balances this, however. These are the small- and medium-business owners, tax-payers, and ultimately the medium between the upper and lower class of citizens that every healthy economic nation thrives on. A communist government aims to make the entire nation one big middle class (on paper, at least), but we’ve seen how well that works in real life with natural human corruption and power-hungry dictators.

That said, Obama’s policies have been called “leaning towards more socialist beliefs” by people other than just Fox News, and it really shows in the “Change” he has instituted in the nation.

Now, enough of the history lesson, let’s move on to just what these “changes” are that he promised, and how they affect the already sick government economy.

The “Change” We Voted For

So far, Obama’s only “change” has been damage to the state of the middle class, the crux of the U.S. economy, making it slowly yield in size to the working class beneath it. The diagram above does a good job of showing how this evolution can quickly turn our economy into a similar model as a poor nation’s.

Obama’s health care reform has unseen side-effects for small and medium businesses. By causing them to pay out extra money (albeit for a good cause), it drains their ability to offer products at the traditional rates, causing further inflation.

And this “Cap & Trade” bill? Should be called the “starve and freeze” bill – all its going to do is further drain people and businesses or more money for the energy that we all need and use. And if you aren’t in the upper class without money worries or living off of welfare in the working class, that’s a bit of a problem for cutback-enduring middle class citizens.

I have another huge problem with the “Cap & Trade” bill – Nancy Pelosi has money invested in a company promoting lower energy consumption levels, and as speaker of the house she had a lot of influence on this bill’s passing. I wouldn’t go so far as to utter “corruption”, but there was definitely bias involved in the bill’s passing as it appears.

So with investors panicking and hurting stocks, inflation costing us more money out of our pockets, and the price of gas/oil slowly creeping up, the last thing Obama needs to do is to continue to harm the economy’s most crucial division (the middle class) via these voluntary bills.

So far, all efforts to even out the funds the upper class possesses have only caused collateral damage and indirectly harmed the middle class as well. If something is not done about this, the economy as we know is only going to get worse.

The slow collapse of the middle class inevitably hurts the overall U.S. economy as a whole, and since we have such as huge stake in the world economy it too suffers from our losses.

It seems now we need another wave of “change”, only this time for something helpful, not harmful.

Obama Is Killing The U.S. Middle Class originally appeared on The Coffee Desk on June 27, 2009.

Cybersquatting via “type-in traffic”

“Type-in traffic” refers to traffic gained by people who type stuff in directly into the address bar, usually preceded by the subdomain “www” and the TLD “com” (belligerence intended). While this is genuinely useful for very specific corporate names, e.g. Microsoft, it is a cybersquatter’s paradise for common words (examples below).

Try it: just type in a common, ideally non-pornographic or non-possibly-pornographic phrase into the address bar followed by a common TLD and see if you land on a cybersquatter’s page. Here’s some by information.com we found just screwing around before writing this article: bang.com, those.com, cool.com, chink.com, poop.com, spik.com, etc.

“What you need, when you need it” – The all-important tagline

The “what you need…” tagline is just one of many that popular cybersquatters use on their landing pages. “Your source for virtually anything!” and others in the same vein all aim to accomplish the same thing: “fool” the casual, brain-dead web surfer into believing that this is a real page.

And what does this “landing page” accomplish, exactly? A quick highlight:

The typical cybersquatter landing page, with highlights

I highlighted the search bar, the link directory, and the fake navigation bar. All of these are related to the domain name (bullet.com in this case), and are also all ads. So, when a cybersquatter purchases a domain name, they populate it with an ad-filled landing page containing a tagline, a link directory, an “ad-engine”, and a host of other links in the hopes users click them and earn them money.

Want that name? Tough.

Even if they’re willing to sell the name they’re sitting on (9/10 times they are), it is going to cost you an arm and a leg. They basically want to charge you such an amount that they earn back the lost ad revenue from the newly-sold domain name, and so they can use the money to buy more names.

What’s sad is that the web’s unregistered common-TLD domain names are slowly being eaten away by these squatters. Web 3.0 websites all use odd TLDs like .fm or .ly, so I forsee a new web with more of a service-based emphasis using newer, hip TLDs instead of the dated .com (while it still retains its proper place, of course).

But that’s a different article, or in our case, a whole topic named “Web Darwinism“.

How they get away with it

If it is not trademarked, it is fair-game. Bullet is not trademarked, so it is OK to sit on without valid legal threat from a bullet manufacturer. Xerox, Microsoft, or Google on the other hand are all trademarked corporate names and therefore cannot be squatted via domain name.

There have been multiple precedents set this in regards to both cyber- and typo-squatting.

A few years ago, however, Tom Cruise raised a big stir about a cybersquatter using tomcruise.com, and actually won it back from them. No trademark. Nothing. Just a name.

So it just goes to show how cybersquatters are taking a risk when it comes to non-common or non-dictionary words, and it has come back to bite a few of them in the past.

But, it won’t stop them from doing this, so we as users just have to learn to use a reputable search engine when looking for something instead of typing it in ourselves. And if you land on a cybersquatter page anyways, don’t click anything to bring them in revenue. They’re going to hate me for posting this, but oh well.

Of course, just the fact that you’re reading this article shows that you probably know better than to fall for this anyways, but informing the general population of these practices will bring further awareness to this fact and slowly allow the squatters to die off with a newfound lack of incoming revenue (hopefully).

Twitter-friendly URL: http://bit.ly/26nk1Q

What You Need, When You Need It originally appeared on The Coffee Desk on June 23, 2009.

There are some upsides and downsides to this decision, and there are some things you should consider regarding your privacy when choosing a username as I’ll outline below.

Facebook Benefits

Facebook themselves have several unseen benefits: now, since the site is largely unencrypted by default, email addresses are less likely to be compromised (as they are all of the time) and users don’t have to deal with the issue of several email addresses/one login.

But how this will be implemented remains, as of this writing, to be seen. With Facebook’s history of changing their site on what appears to be a weekly basis anyways, you can’t be certain about any changes, but one has to ask: will “real names” continue to be displayed at the top of pages, or will the new usernames replace them?

It would be great if Facebook were to go to a more username-based rather than email- and real name-based service for more privacy and less “employer”-friendly, which has turned into a problem for some people with “soapbox Facebook accounts” when possible future employers find their account.

Nothing is certain, but there are some things, as a user, that you must consider when picking and using a username:

Privacy

Facebook has a sad history of privacy (as we’ve pointed out here many times), so I wouldn’t trust the new usernames with a real-world firstname_lastname format, since most accounts use one’s real name anyways.

And using a username already heavily associated with your name is also a bad idea in case employers really put you under the microscope: it makes your social life that much easier to find in a regular web search, which you probably don’t want employers to see.

And while most accounts are not publicly viewable, employers’ demands can include the right to view an employee’s private Facebook account, under threat of termination (as most contracts/forms permit in larger, employee-reputation-aware businesses).

It has happened with YouTube users, Myspace users, and bloggers many times before, so don’t let it happen to you (or increase your chances of) now with Facebook usernames.

(and as a side note, did anyone notice Twitter user @facebook_rt getting “suspended for strange activity”? Makes you wonder)

Facebook Is Getting Username Support originally appeared on The Coffee Desk on June 10, 2009.