confusionI don’t eat meat because I wouldn’t want to ingest an animal weak or dumb enough to enter a life of slavery under another species, that the only meat I would eat would be that of an animal which a human cannot actually kill.
Tim Rogers in Japan: It’s Not Funny Anymore [kotaku.com]
Oh that’s a good one… I’ll have to use that. Better than the classic I’m not a vegetarian because I love animals, I’m a vegetarian because I hate plants
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According to Google Analytics, the top content on my site is /categories/goodies/ [confusion.cc]. Which I guess is better than the second place /2004/09/26/four-floors-of-whores/ [confusion.cc].
Then again, the top entrance keyword — in fact the only entrance keyword with more than 1 hit in the past month — is “1280*768 fucking”.
What?
I have no idea why this is. But if you do a Google image search for “1280*768 fucking” [images.google.com], you don’t get much porn…
The third and forth images are porn related but nothing else on the first page is naughty. Three of my images make the first page though; “Simian Eyes” [confusion.cc], “Yellow Jacket” [confusion.cc] and “Have you seen my keys?” [confusion.cc].
Now, I understand the “1280*768” keyword, as all the images in “goodies” are available in that size. But… While I have a potty mouth, the word “fucking” does not appear on the goodies page at all. So how is it that Google has associated “fucking” with my photos of monkeys, yellow jackets and my lost keys?
Came across this quote on Gizmodo [gizmodo.com] yesterday:
My expectation is that there’s not going to be a lot of people out there looking for another subscription.
We’ll it’s how Gizmodo quoted him… not quite what he said, see the Gizmodo article for the full text of the quote.
This apparently is how the CEO of AT&T covers for the fact that there is no subscription for 3G data on the iPad. I agree with Gizmodo — it’s more likely that Apple dictated it this way. But on the other hand I think it would be easy to get people to sign up to pay more each month just not a totally new contract.
See, one of the best things that my operator here in Singapore (that’d be Starhub [starhub.com]) has going is it’s Dual-HLR option. Without going into GSM network design this is what the consumer gets out of the dual-HLR option: a second SIM card, with the same phone number that works at the same time as your current SIM. This works because you nominate one of the SIM cards to be your “primary” and that is the one that rings (in Starhub’s case it rings first then, if you don’t answer the call rolls over to the second SIM where you can answer or let it roll over to voicemail.) All the features of your existing contract are active on both SIMs, both can consume data from the same data plan, etc. This is actually the reason Starhub launched the service. There are a lot of business types who have a Blackberry and an iPhone, but don’t want two contracts. This costs the consumer SG$10 a month as opposed to the cheapest two year contract here for about SG$35 a month. All it costs Starhub is a some configuration and whatever additional data the user would not have consumed otherwise, but I doubt that’s a big cost.
Of course you can do this with two SIMs that have different numbers — “family plans” have shared resources for years. But this makes more sense for a single person with multiple devices.
I think that for US$10 or US$15 a month to have this dual-SIM option users would agree to add this to their existing contract. Not just for the people with an iPad but for anyone with two data devices. US$10 or US$15 is low enough compared to a whole new contact that it’s almost an impulse buy, and as it is tied to the existing contract there would be, I think, less psychological aversion.
I’ve seen a lot of AdMob [admob.com] ads in iPhone applications over the past two years. But recently I downloaded two free — i.e. ad supported — applications that appear to use a Google ad server (of course Google purchased AdMob but I don’t think it’s just a re-branding I think it’s a different service.)
I noticed this for two reasons. First; for the past few years I have been working in the mobile advertising space, so this stuff stands out. Second; the ads were odd.
Why odd? Well, as I mentioned these were ads in iPhone applications. Keep that in mind and take a look at the ads:
The issue, I think, with these ads is they are all for competitors. I can excuse the SingTel ad, I’m a Starhub customer but this is an add for enterprise services and the ad was served while I was on a WiFi network, so there is not much chance that Google could have determined my operator.
However, the ad for Android and the two ads for the Ovi store — which sells applications that work on Nokia handsets are not useful to me as a consumer and most likely a waste of the advertisers money. The odds that I am going to patronize either of these services from my iPhone is next to zero.
And there is little excuse for this. When I was working on requirements for a mobile advertising system the product team was adamant that it include basic relevance filtering. Now relevance filtering is complex and the simple business rule “the advertisement should be relevant and useful to the consumer” actually breaks down to a lot of technical requirements. The technical requirements of significance here are:
User-Agent header from the HTTP request. The header should be used to reduce the pool of relevant banners by removing banners that:
(Obviously there are a lot more details and other requirements that need to be clarified before you can actually implement this.) Here’s a use case that would prevent the issue of the Ovi banners being shown to me on my iPhone.
*nokia* in the Manual Filter textbox and clicks the Case Insensitive checkboxSo now the Buyer (in this case Nokia or an agent acting on Nokia’s behalf to setup the ad campaign) has created a campaign level whitelist (i.e. all banners in the campaign will be filtered by this whitelist) which includes a filter of *nokia* that is case insensitive. This means that, based on the requirements enumerated above, that no ad request that includes a User-Agent string that does not includes the word nokia in it will be served any banner from this campaign. The effect? Ovi store ads will only be shown to users who are using Nokia handsets (or who’s requesting user agent does not include a User-Agent string or is using an incorrect User-Agent string that includes the word nokia.
Lets look at two use cases for requesting an ad. One where the requesting handset is Nokia N95 and one where it is an iPhone 3GS.
Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_0 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/528.11 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.1.1 Mobile/7A238j Safari/525.20)New and pushes the Ad Request onto the Inbound Ad Request QueueNewUnfulfilled*nokia* (case insensitive) in the Device User-Agent String;Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_0 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/528.11 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.1.1 Mobile/7A238j Safari/525.20UnfulfilledA few explanations/notes:
The looping nature of the Ad Request Processing Thread makes it hard to write an efficient and clear Use Case but I’m not getting paid to do this (any more) so I’m not going to spend the time to do the work to make it clearer.
This use case leaves out details of filters other than the Whilelist filter, such as Logged In/Logged Out Ad Queue selection, Ad Unit size, etc. for simplicity.
There would be multiple Ad Request Processors/Threads running, so when the first thread that retrieved the Ad Request and found the request was in the New state it pushed all the ads in it’s internal Recycle Ad Queue back onto the Active Ad Queue because those banners still need to be served and may be suitable for this Ad Request. The second time the Ad Request Processing Thread finds the Ad Request in the Unfulfilled state it does not empty it’s Recycle Ad Queue to avoid endlessly looping over the same unsuitable ad. (Writing this I think I need to think more about this—there could be a condition where a thread only ever sees Ad Requests in the Unfulfilled state and would therefore never empty its Recycle Ad Queue…)
I’ve included a lot of stuff that would actually go to other use cases and just be referenced as Include X Use Case, again I hope this makes it clearer (at least to the techies) what is happening.
Anyway… Here is what would happen when an Nokia N95 made a request:
Mozilla/5.0 (SymbianOS/9.2; U; Series60/3.1 NokiaN95/10.0.018; Profile/MIDP-2.0 Configuration/CLDC-1.1 ) AppleWebKit/413 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/413)New and pushes the Ad Request onto the Inbound Ad Request QueueNewUnfulfilled*nokia* (case insensitive) in the Device User-Agent String;Mozilla/5.0 (SymbianOS/9.2; U; Series60/3.1 NokiaN95/10.0.018; Profile/MIDP-2.0 Configuration/CLDC-1.1 ) AppleWebKit/413 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/413PendingThis type of White- and Black- list filtering would prevent me from seeing ads for the Ovi store on my iPhone (assuming the people provisioning the ads or campaigns used, and used correctly, the filtering options mentioned above — but that’s a business problem not a technical one.)
The ad serving space is complicated but have been surprised to see a number of examples like this on my phone over the past few days. In fact most of the ads I receive in the applications that use the Google system over the AdMob system seem to fall into this category. I have notices a lack of relevant ads in general for Singapore in the Google Web system. On some sites I see very relevant ads; global companies doing brand building or selling online. But on a lot of sites, and I mean a lot I see the same ads for the same service—a Singapore specific company so at least the location filtering is working. Or I see public service ads (invariably for Kiva [kiva.org].) So either there are not enough relevant ads for Singapore or these local guys are spending a lot of money to spam everyone.
The people at Google are a lot smarter than me, so I wonder if there is something I am missing in all this? Were my product people wrong? Are the users who are creating the campaigns not using some feature of the Google system that would filter these ads from me? Am I completely nuts? Do I have too much time on my hands?
Catching up on my RSS reader I ran across this post from Gizmodo titled Windows Phone 7 Interface: Microsoft Has Out-Appled Apple.
Oh. Provocative. Go read it. I’ll wait.
Back? Ok then. Now, opinions are like ass holes; everybody’s got one (well, not not everyone [wikipedia.org].) but I want to poke fun at the author, Jesus Diaz, opening opinion:
Windows Phone 7 feels like an iPhone from the future. The UI has the simplicity and elegance of Apple’s industrial design, while the iPhone’s UI still feels like a colorized Palm Pilot.
Jesus Diaz, in Windows Phone 7 Interface: Microsoft Has Out-Appled Apple [gizmodo.com] on Gizmodo.
Yea the Windows Phone 7 UI looks cool, and it remains to be seen if users will actually like it when it gets into the hands of all those people with ass holes opinions. But I’m going to bet on the oh-so-boring Palm Pilot-esque grid layout the iPhone uses.
Why? Same reason I don’t think everyone will be sitting on a Feel Seating System Deluxe [animicausa.com] sofa. The tired old sofa that your parents have might be musty and hold too many memories of the 70’s or 80’s to be healthy but there is a reason it looks like almost every other sofa in every other normal house in the world for the past, oh, I don’t know, 1000 years or so.
The basic design of the sofa —as used in the real world outside of the Milan furniture fashion show world— hasn’t changed much over the years. That’s a testament to one thing: it works. And while every furniture designer out there wants to do something new and original, so they make crazy sofas [freshome.com] (or crazy chairs, tables, etc.) their designs don’t change our platonic ideal of the sofa because they just aren’t practical in the end. Um, that’s why we call it fashion, different doesn’t mean good.
So, unless the Windows Phone 7 UI breaks down to a grid layout (or list layout) in the end, with some funky cool icons, I’m betting it eventually will by hook or software update.
Then again, this is just my ass hole opinion, feel free to ignore it. Oh yea, and I’ve been itching to use that sofa metaphor in a blog post for about a year.