Posted on: December 4, 2008 by Syzlak
This morning I was greeted with a treat from my good friend Hilker. The gist of the morning surprise was that WOWOW is giving you the power to direct a video of Radiohead’s song 15 Step through a dedicated page. You can choose from 12 different angles to edit your video of 15 Step, played live during last band’s Japanese tour.
Holy shit right?
Wrong. After you’re done editing your video, you can register with the site and then they give you a badge to embed whereever you please.
Wait…Holy shit right?
Wrong. The badge simply takes you to here, where you can see Teen Beat style photos of the band and look at Japanese characters while wondering where things went wrong.
This is a massive blunder from two entities that rarely make massive blunders when concerning technology. Radiohead has been at the forefront of music distribution and Internet/Web savvy for a long time. Japan has given us the USB necktie. Clearly, these two should have pulled off something better than this.
While it irritates me that I cannot share my directorial debut, and it pains me that yet again someone drops the ball on using the Web to spread both culture, technology, ideas and joy; I must say, go make your own video, because it’s still really fun. 
Just be sure to call everyone over to your desk when you’re done.
Posted on: December 2, 2008 by Syzlak
Do you hear that? The last 15 people that used Pownce as their social media profile are crying. Meanwhile, the rest of us were confused when we opened an email from Pownce today. My morning went something like this:
Wake up
Check email
Notification that Pownce is shutting down
Ask aloud “What the hell is Pownce?”
Yes, it seems that everyone’s favorite robust Twitter has gone the way of the bison. Why? Well, like the bison, Pownce was a bloated version of Twitter. It didn’t have the quick and easy updating options of Twitter’s multiple apps, mobile apps, etc. In fact, I knew more people that updated their Pownce via Ping.fm, thus catering their Pownces to their Tweets. Kinda how those of us in PPC advertising have always written ads catering to Google’s format.
Why does Plurk survive when Pownce dies? One reason is that Pownce was purchased, and thus didn’t really die so much as get absorbed by another company and deemed irrelevant (which it was). I’m sure if you were to (harkening back to Physics classes here) put them in a universe with the same condiditions, no competition but each other, et cetera that Pownce would win. Which may actually be the crux of their failure. Because they are better, they will fail. The cost of supporting users outweighs their investment.
Another reason is Karma. Many of us don’t give a shit about that little tally at the bottom of the Plurk profile, but enough teenagers (hypothesizing) do that they can remain popular, yet not too popular. Shit, they’re no Twitter.
And thus we see one of the endless amount of social media profile whore machines die today. Be sure to export all your Pownces so you can upload them over on Twi–oh yeah, you use Ping.fm, you’re fine.
