Two of my personal pet peeves were AOL’s cd spamming and Plaxo’s email spamming efforts in the early days of both companies.
While I’m certain they could’ve found better ways to grow their respective customer bases, the sad truth is probably that their efforts had both net short and long term positive effects.
Sometimes it’s not only a matter of making a trade-off between short and long term, but also making a trade-off between easy/obvious versus challenging/creative tactics, or even between a certain amount of growth/revenue and just doing the right thing. You know?
I think this is an important way for people to tell a company where they’ve gone wrong.
I haven’t really done it to FB myself because that BEacon thing doesn’t show up for me. Or does it and I just don’t know about it?
I stopped buying Sony CDs and other products after it came out that they embedded a rootkit in a CD I had bought. A lot of people grounded them on that one.
What I wish I could do is ground AT&T for spying on us for the government.
Thanks for letting me know, Erno. I don’t know if any readers actually display video or which formats they will display, but I’ll ask a few of my video blogger friends.
Now it comes out that Facebook has been tracking their users even when they aren’t using it. this makes me consider canceling them altogether because they seem to have no ethical compass at all. Makes me even wonder if they did in fact rip that guy off at HArvard who says it was his idea to begin with.
I know that’s a stretch – I was kind of PO’d when I wrote that. I know that some of you think that privacy is either a lost cause or not worth arguing over, but I think it matters. I do believe that any company that spies on you – takes your private info beyond what they say they will do, or use obscure language to make it look like they take or use less than they actually do – is unethical.
December 1st, 2007 at 9:53 pm
Video blogs are so fun!! Keep it up!
Two of my personal pet peeves were AOL’s cd spamming and Plaxo’s email spamming efforts in the early days of both companies.
While I’m certain they could’ve found better ways to grow their respective customer bases, the sad truth is probably that their efforts had both net short and long term positive effects.
Sometimes it’s not only a matter of making a trade-off between short and long term, but also making a trade-off between easy/obvious versus challenging/creative tactics, or even between a certain amount of growth/revenue and just doing the right thing. You know?
December 2nd, 2007 at 1:12 am
Tara please look at the effect of video posts on your RSS. In Google reader I see nothing, not even a link to the video…
December 2nd, 2007 at 2:38 pm
I think this is an important way for people to tell a company where they’ve gone wrong.
I haven’t really done it to FB myself because that BEacon thing doesn’t show up for me. Or does it and I just don’t know about it?
I stopped buying Sony CDs and other products after it came out that they embedded a rootkit in a CD I had bought. A lot of people grounded them on that one.
What I wish I could do is ground AT&T for spying on us for the government.
December 3rd, 2007 at 1:40 pm
Thanks for letting me know, Erno. I don’t know if any readers actually display video or which formats they will display, but I’ll ask a few of my video blogger friends.
December 3rd, 2007 at 7:16 pm
Check this story: http://news.yahoo.com/s/pcworld/140225
Now it comes out that Facebook has been tracking their users even when they aren’t using it. this makes me consider canceling them altogether because they seem to have no ethical compass at all. Makes me even wonder if they did in fact rip that guy off at HArvard who says it was his idea to begin with.
December 4th, 2007 at 10:28 am
I know that’s a stretch – I was kind of PO’d when I wrote that. I know that some of you think that privacy is either a lost cause or not worth arguing over, but I think it matters. I do believe that any company that spies on you – takes your private info beyond what they say they will do, or use obscure language to make it look like they take or use less than they actually do – is unethical.