Category: Rants

Categories
Rants Technology

Google Wields the Startup Axe of Death

In a sadly predictable turn of events Google has binned Jaiku, a service they bought just over a year ago for a huge chunk of change ($12 million). Dodgeball too, has eventually suffered the cruel fate that has been looming over it ever since Google bought them back in 2005. Apparently it’s part of a Google cost cutting and re-focusing exercise, but I can’t for the life of me understand why they went ahead and bought duplicate services in the first place and then didn’t build out on those products.

I’m worried its becoming quite the modus operandi for Google to buy out small exciting startups, starve them of resources and then discard them when they fail to bring in any real revenue. Not cool, Google. In fact, it’s rather evil. In future this should surely make any startup think twice before flipping their passion to Google for a sum of cash.

Why do I care? Well, apparently I told you so.

Categories
Rants Technology

How Vodacom, MTN and Cell C make big money at our expense.

Cell site
Image via Wikipedia

I just came across an interesting article on the New York Times where Randall Stross decided to investigate the actual costs a text message has for a cellular network operator. Finally someone did the research I’d been too lazy to do for a while.

As I suspected, a text/sms message is basically free. They are sent to the nearest tower over a control channel – a channel that exists in order for the phone to communicate with the network, and so stuffing that channel with a message bears very little overhead, if any. This also explains the stupid 160 character limit that texts are subject to.

So yeah, another blatant rip-off. Go ahead, send your R10 messages to 35050 now!

[Article Link: New York Times]

[Update: A slightly more in-depth technical discussion by Tom Limoncelli at EverythingSysadmin.com]

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Categories
finance Rants

Discovery Card Interest Rate Hike

Although I try to be pretty credit conscious and pay my outstanding balance every single month, occasionally I do slip up. It happens, and I have to pay the penalty. And that’s how money lenders make their money. But this time Discovery Card have overstepped the mark. Without so much as a hint of a notification, from October to November they’ve hiked their interest rate a whopping 3% from 19.50% to 22.50%. (And somehow this despite me being a “Platinum” account holder, for whatever that’s worth).

Sorry okes, I’ll go back to gym next month – maybe that will help?

Categories
Blogging Rants Technology

AdGator Copies Text Link Ads [Blatant Design Piracy]

The single most irritating thing about South Africans, the interwebs, and web 2.0 is that nobody can dream up a single original idea and build it. (Except for, I’m hoping, this guy). We copy muti from digg, amatomu and afrigator from technorati, Synthasite from [choose-your-lame-site-builder], Blueworld “social network” (ahem!) from myspace, AmaGama/iBlog from WordPress.com/Blogger, Zoopy/YouTube, the list goes on, and then we slap some really stupid justification like “we are localising it for a South African audience“.

Yeah, localising it for what South African audience? The one that uses the *other* internet that we have in SA, not the *real* Internet? Come on.

Yes, you all suck on originality, copycats, and that pisses me off.

But there’s a new one. And oh, how the mighty have fallen!

After bitching and whining and moaning and circle-jerking in a great hoohaa about how Regator kinda sorta maybe looks a bit like Afrigator, yes I’m looking at you Mike, and Stii, and Justin, and co, you have the nerve to launch Adgator on the site design of Text Link Ads. That’s pretty low. And Lame. You couldn’t even change all the text…

Did you honestly think nobody would notice? Or was I surfing on that *real* Internet that doesn’t have an audience in SA and this is a better more “localized” version?

Sorry to be so blunt guys, but you just fucked yourselves. How do we take you seriously now, when you’re being hypocrites and copycats? Even worse, I don’t want to be angry – I like you guys!

Go on! Click the image below: See for yourself.

(BTW, I’m not against a South African ad network – that idea does make sense. Yes I do want to use Adgator to sell ads on my site, I think its a great thing, but it’s risking being horribly spoiled by some designer laziness.)

Of course I’m looking forward to the entertaining comments and excuses… 😉

[I’ve just seen that Chris M spotted this a couple days back…]

Categories
Blogging Computing Rants

Blog Titles With Underscores and SEO

Over the past few days I’ve been messing around with Google Webmaster Tools in an effort to make sure that all the little bugs and issues from my major blog upgrade, from b2evolution to wordpress, a few months back are ironed out.

As always, there tend to be silly little things that are the real pest – misspelled words, poor grammar, obscure comment links and the odd stray feed needing a redirect, all of which were quickly sorted out. After first digging into a few Apache mod_rewrite rules, of course.

I was reading through some tips on the Google Webmasters Help pages when I stumbled on this gem: “We recommend that you use hyphens (-) instead of underscores (_) in your URLs.” Say what? I looked through my archives, and discovered to my dread that all my old content used underscores in the titles. “Eish. Oh well, this is Google, they can probably figure it out anyway – it’s a simple character substitution in their algorithm. It probably doesn’t matter that much.” I thought. But then I picked up in a guest blog entry by Vanessa Fox on Matt Cutts site that there is a distinct difference in the way Google handles underscores and dashes:

‘”african-elephants.html is seen as two words: “African” and “elephants”. african_elephants is seen as one word: african_elephant. It’s doubtful many people will be searching for that.’ This statement alone indicates a huge difference in exposure because of this one trivial character.

That made up my mind to try the big change, but it would require jumping through a few hoops:

1) Changing all the old urls to new urls with dashes instead of underscores. That’s a lot of editing.

2) Redirecting any existing requests for underscore-urls to the new dash-url. That’s a lot of redirecting.

3) Hoping like hell that it worked.

Fortunately problem 1 could be solved by a simple mysql command:

mysql> update wp_posts set post_name = replace(post_name,'_','-');

And problem 2 was easily resolved with the Dash Redirect WordPress Plugin.

I suspect the Dash Redirect Plugin can actually fix both issues at once, but I only discovered this after I’d already changed my urls.

Today I’m feeling good karma from the synchronicity of my blog.