Archive for the ‘facebook applications’ Category
If I Die…Please Leave A Message
File this one under the “Things To Do Before I Die” category.
There’s a new website where you can leave a message that will only be published after you die.
Seriously.
“If I die” is the name of it, and no, I didn’t find out about it because someone who was dead left me a message.
This is just one of those Web phenomena where you can’t decide A) Why didn’t I think of that? or B) What WERE they thinking?!
Here’s how it works: You install the “if I die” Facebook app on Facebook, with all the concordant permissions to use your data (including, presumably, longgg after you’re gone).
Then, you create a video or text message (I’m thinking video. If you’re going to have to deal with me after I’m dead, I want you to see my once living visage live and in the flesh!).
Then, you must choose three trustees among your friends, who also presumably will confirm A) That you kicked the bucket and B) Will validate your “if I die” message so it can be made public.
But the best part of the Web site was the campaign they ran to get people to sign up for the App. Apparently, the hesitancy wasn’t that people were worried about their privacy after they were gone (although it’s inevitable Facebook will change their privacy policy AGAIN long after I’m gone).
No, it’s that nobody wants to believe or think about the fact that someday, when they least expect it, they’re going to die.
So the campaign used the API of popular location-based services like foursquare and Gowalla to identify still real, living breathing humans when they checked into a place, and then called to the place of the check-in to ask if they could speak to the person who checked in so they could explain that someday they were going to die, and that they really ought to think about leaving a message well in advance of said inevitable demise using this nifty new Facebook app.
Wow, who would have thought that the campaign to drive adopters of the app could be any creepier than the app itself?? Is there some kind of new “Do Not Die” list so I can be spared such interruptions when I’m simply trying to get a Double Latte at the Starbucks?!?
You can watch the video below to learn more. Me, I’m off to start my death preparations in a more old school manner: making out my ‘bucket list!’
Office In The Sun
Happy New Year!
That seems to be especially the case for Facebook, which according to Dealbook, has raised $500M in additional funding from Goldman Sachs and Russian investor Digital Sky Technologies, a sum which would now value Facebook at $50 billion.
Of course, if it’s true that Facebook is about to move into Sun Microsystems’ old 150,000 square foot office space in Palo Alto, Zuckerberg’s going to need as much new scratch as he can get to remodel the place and bring back that new IPO smell once so prevalent in Silicon Valley, but which has been eroded these past eight years with the taxing shadow of Sarbanes-Oxley.
What Zuckerberg won’t need is any overhauling of the privacy mantra still haunting the hallways of the old Sun.
Remember, it was former Sun CEO Scott McNealy who informed us “You have zero privacy. Get over it.”
It seems, perhaps, he was right.
And prescient, considering he said that way back in the Jurassic age of the Dot Com boom. I wonder if his soothsaying also envisioned a 26 year-old kid taking over his campus someday??
Nahh, probably not.
While the Facebookers have been busy raising their valuation, Bloomberg is reporting that tech takeovers could pick up bigtime this year as firms like Intel, HP, and yes, even Big Blue, set off in a race to “harness surging demand for cloud computing and security services.”
That same said story has Gartner estimating global IT spend this year at around $3.4 trillion, a 3.5 increase from last year.
Me, I’m just hoping to catch a glimpse of some of the cool stuff being released at the Consumer Electronics Show this week.
Though my New Year’s resolution is still in the process of being resolved, one thing I did promise this year was not to go out and buy every new new thing the first week it’s available.
That, instead, I would demonstrate some resolve…and wait at least until the second week.
Turn Out The Lights
Been a busy no-blogging Monday, but it’s towards the end of the day and I wanted to stop by and check in so I don’t get “blogstipated” at the start of the week.
First, another sad goodbye, this time to “Dandy” Don Meredith, former Dallas Cowboys quarterback and “Monday Night Football” announcer.
Meredith passed away at the age of 72 this past weekend in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and for those of us who remember his Southern wit from “Monday Night Football,” it’s sad to think that the lights this time were turned out on Meredith.
He was not only the groundbreaking quarter for Dallas, but also a groundbreaker in bringing sports coverage to primetime when MNF debuted in 1970.
Referring to turning out the lights, Meredith used to start singing Willie Nelson’s “Turn Out the Lights…the Party’s Over” when he saw no hope for a fledgling Monday night team.
He also paved the way for no end of celebrity sports endorsements, when he early on pitched for Lipton Tea in a series of TV spots.
Meredith was from Mount Vernon, Texas, the same vicinity of East Texas where much of my family hails from. Our thoughts certainly go out to his.
Otherwise on the sports front, it was exciting to see Tiger Woods almost win his first tournament of 2010.
Ironically, it was his last chance, but Irishman Graham MacDowell took the Chevron trophy away from Tiger in a nail-biting playoff after an even more nerve-wracking several holes of the final round.
This weekend witnesses “The Shark Shootout” in Tiburon, and then the end-of-year lull before the 2011 golf season commences in Kapalua.
Completely changing subjects, anybody see the interview with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg last night on “60 Minutes?”
Leslie Stahl gave him a pretty good grilling, but compared to his abysmal first interview there three years ago, Zuckerberg passed this Q&A with flying colors and introduced a new Facebook release that began rolling out today.
Inside Facebook tells us it’s all a “natural way to get users to share more.” What, you mean they didn’t already know everything about me?
You can see what a new and revised profile looks like here.
Brilliant a ploy though it is to elicit more information from us all, I like the design and (mostly) had no trouble making the updates.
Feel free to comment and tell us about your own experiences making the update (should you decide to accept that particular mission).