TheWayoftheWeb

I seem to be having a strange run of luck with psychic, (or possibly obvious) predictions, with the most recent one being the buzz about Twitter.com coming from mobile possibilities.

And within days, there’s a change to the Twitter API that allows you to access you direct messages, and therefore, be able to send a direct message to any username which is just a name for a web service. E.G, text weather to username ‘weather’, and get a weather report, and so on.

And as Techcrunch’s Michael Arrington points out, it now means that mobile services don’t need to involve an expensive start up fee, and instead use the currently free API.

Now to predict the lottery numbers

As I try and convince myself that i don’t need to buy the Xbox 360 Elite, just because it has a black case.

There’s been a lot of talk about the new Google beta test of ‘Pay per action’ advertising killing off mass media.

The theory relies on the fact that advertisers will choose this option as they can choose to pay publishers each time they actually make a sale, rather than each time their advert is clicked by a user.

Add in the current vogue for ‘micro blogs’ and ‘micro sites’ and it’s easy to see why people think targeting specialised niches would be the way to go. But I think there are a few questions which haven’t been answered:

* If there are 10 Google ads on a page, how do I know which product is any good? If it’s relevant to the specialist communities I belong to, then that’s fine. If not, will i have to join a new community and spend months building up knowledge before I order the TV I want this week? Or shall i go to a mass media site of a brand I know?

* Brand awareness. Following on from that, it could spell the end for small retailers. With no-one to bring their products to a mass audience, who will be trusting enough to spend money with them.

* If sites get more and more specialised, how do I get an overview of something new? If I’m interested in a new hobby, or a new subject, I want to get an overview of everything about it, before I specialise. I don’t want to be forced to visit 20 sites to compile my own overview, particularly if I’m in a hurry.

* The new Google ads. Currently someone can click on an advert, and I get a small cut. But I can move the ads etc to get better click-throughs, change the design etc.
But what happens if the advertiser is running ‘pay-per-sale’ and it’s their website which isn’t delivering sales to the traffic I send?

* How about the risks to advertisers? If a brand spends millions launching a new website, and there’s a bug in their site preventing sales, for example, how long will it be before every site removes their ads and replaces them with a site that delivers?

I finally gave in to the 500 emails I’ve received inviting me to join Tagged.com when it was actually from someone I knew and had lost touch with.

So i thought it was worth the risk to get in touch to pass on my email address.

Biiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiig mistake.

The sign up gave me repeated errors, numerous faults, and tried to entice me to sign up for enough spam to feed Monty Python for years.

Then it repeatedly logged me out in IE and Firefox, and told me to accept cookies. When i did, it made no difference, except to the security of my work PC.

I finally log in, and get a load of messages claiming to be from my friend, but actually sent by Tagged via his profile.

Then it logged me out again.

I finally managed to browse for users, and managed to see two clones of the most common myspace pages, and then came to the conclusion that noone I could call a friend would have put me through that torture…

Tagged claims to be the premier teen networking site, but the figures I’ve seen suggest it’s the premier spam site, with less users than Myspace, Bebo, Facebook etc…And there’s a good reason for that.