Seriously, I have no other words for Ping, their new “music social network” available through iTunes. But I can at least try to explain these words, as I have a post to write about it.

Okay, yes, mean - but no one made this poor fell pose for this picture!

To be fair, the only comparison between this Ping and Google Wave is that Wave was a pretty good idea – it was just something most people didn’t have the time to learn.

Ping, on the other hand, is largely a way to promote buying music from iTunes. Anyone following this stuff already knew they had a yen to do more with music. They did also announce the new iPod touch, how they were going to eventually get everyone to make video calls, and plans to keep Apple TV from finally dying.

And as I mentioned, Ping. While I’m sure it’s going to work out great for them, as a social network it is a bust for us, the ones who will presumably be using it.

Here’s what sucks:

1. It is only accessible through iTunes.

   That kills mobile for those of us who have successfully resisted the iPhone juggernaut.

2. No RSS feed.

   Without this, I can push what I’m doing here to the sites where my real friends are – Friendfeed, Twitter, Facebook.

3. Suggested people to “follow.”

   These suggestions are all recording artists. In particular, currently popular artists who I’m assuming their labels paid Apple to promote in this way. The thing suggested I follow ColdPlay for God’s sake. It obviously doesn’t take into account the music I do like, just the music I should like. (Coldplay! COLDPLAY!!!)

4. It is only accessible through iTunes.

   So it has that annoying Mac-like user interface that only Mac devotees love. The rest of us just think it’s annoying.

5. The only “socializing” is done through sharing reviews.

   <sarcasm> Because I really, deeply care about what you think of Lady Gaga. No. Really.</sarcasm>

6. Apple must okay your profile.

   Unclench, Apple! Only dating sites have a good reason to approve profile pictures. And if I swear at you in my bio for suggesting I make friendly with Coldplay, don’t do that annoying s**t with the * marks. I have no idea who gets protected by that.

7. No profile names.

   Believe it or not, I don’t like sharing my real name widely. It doesn’t take much to find it, but most spam marketing scum won’t put in the time to find out who “Ciaoenrico” really is. That’s why I use it everywhere. It’s also why I lied to Apple about what my name is – to protect what little privacy I still have left in a Web 2.0 world.

8. And did I mention it’s only accessible through iTunes?

   Meaning there’s an extra step to use it, so people won’t just pop in to use it the way they would a web based social network. That means fewer people to follow. I found three. (And I looked a LOT.)

Normally I’d say something like this needs a lot of work – which this does. But the problem is less one of technology decisions that weren’t thought out than one of philosophy. The idea behind this site is to get people to not talk all about music, but music Apple sells. It abandons what makes social great, namely socializing with other people.

Instead they hope I’ll do their work for them, steering people towards great product. The Yelp! of music it ain’t.

I don’t doubt Ping will be around for a while, since Apple has deep enough pockets to keep anything going no matter how bad it is. I also don’t doubt the Church of Jobs who love anything Apple will do what they always do: Post far and wide about how Ping is, “Sleek. Elegant. Powerful. Changes the game for social networking.”

Here’s an old joke for you: Steve Jobs shits in a paper bag, slaps an Apple logo on it, and sells it in his stores for $400. Five minutes later, Techcrunch (the Pravda of Apple) writes, “Sleek. Elegant. Powerful. Revolutionizes shit in a bag.”

In this case, though, the shit in the bag has been named Ping.

As a personal feel-good, that’s fine, but as a metric of success it’s shoddy. Businesses tend to measure the success or failure of their Twitter accounts by things like follow counts because they can’t accurately measure how it has increased their conversion rate. This has never been easy to see, since social media generally catches people when they aren’t ready to buy something – they’re there to play. It’s like advertising to people at the park: If they see the ad they may buy the product later, if they think of it, but for now they’re just there to walk the dog or push the kids on swings.

It’s hard to know how many people read tweets, then follow through and buy something. But a follow count is easy to measure. If that jumps up fast, your company and product must be popular, and this must be working, right?

Maybe not – maybe a sharp increase in followers is really a sign that everything else you’re doing, you’re doing right. Look at the stats for Old Spice’s Twitter account, via TwitterCounter.com:

Boy THEY sure got popular in a hurry, didn’t they? They must have really done a lot of following of other people, and posting #FollowFriday shout outs, even paid some company to put their profile on ads saying, “you should follow OldSpice,” right?

That, or they made a TV Commercial that no one can stop talking about.

OldSpice’s twitter follows show the success they’re having elsewhere. It also gives them another venue to catch people who are interested in them because of the commercial. Maybe someone who’s entertained by the commercial doesn’t instantly go out and buy Old Spice. So interested people follow them on Twitter, where they continue to receive messaging from the campaign, and eventually, maybe, give their product a try.

In this case, Twitter isn’t the first or the last stop in the conversion funnel – it just keeps people in it.

So if you want Twitter to work for you, the moral here is to have a larger campaign that kicks off the interest. Unless what you’re posting is so miraculously brilliant you bring in followers who’ve never heard of you before, Twitter is best used in conjunction with a larger campaign.

It’s why social media IS NOT more important than media buys. Television, print, radio, etc. have the widest audience, and are the best means for getting people moving towards your product.

The thing is, I haven’t observed a lot of people going around following people because they get mentioned in an #FF. A few people have mentioned me in #FollowFriday posts over the years, and I’ve never seen a huge spike in new followers as a result. It’s certainly a nice gesture, and makes me blush a little. If the purpose is to spread the follows around, though, it doesn’t appear to be working.

So last Friday, I tried something a little different. Instead of putting together a clump of names with “#FollowFriday” in front of it, I made several posts – one for each individual I felt should be looked at, and more importantly, why. This is a better way of doing things for a couple of reasons.

First, the people you mention understand what they do or did that you like so much – and afterwards become better friends. Rather than sending you a quick, “Thanks for the #FF,” they’ll be more likely to respond to a post of yours, or engage you in a back-and-forth conversation. They’ll do this because you’ve shown them you’re actually listening.

Another reason to do this is it makes someone following them more likely. You’ve listed reasons these people are exceptional, so anyone actually searching this hashtag gets a better understanding of who you’ve offered up.

Finally, honestly, #FollowFriday is a concept that is no longer useful. Since Twitter created Lists, finding people that other people like are very easy to find. Not that anyone really gets a lot of followers from being on lists either. I’m on 179 of them as of this writing, and I doubt a lot of people are following me because they found me on internet-nerds. (Thought I do think that’s a bitchin’ list to be included on. Thanks, @Loreli!)

But if you want to follow the people your Twitter friends like, the lists do that already. People don’t care who everyone else is following though, apparently anyway, so the whole exercise is really just a way of thanking friends for being real friends.

And if that’s the case, I say let them know why, one by one, in posts all their own.

One suggestion, though: If you’re going to individually #FollowFriday people, space them out through the day – maybe one every hour or so. When I gave big ups to my friends all at once, all these posts clogged up my other friends’ Twitter pages. Not fun.

So what is 4G? The easy answer is that it’s the “fourth generation” mobile wireless standard. 3G being the current smart phones, 2G being that garbage you had in 1998, and 1G being those analog phones that were the size of toasters.

I know, scary.

The longer-but-still-short answer is that 4G lets your phone download information much faster than 3G phones. 3G will download on average somewhere between 600 Kilobits per second (Kbps), and 1.4 Megabits per second (Mbps.) 4G grabs information at between 3 Mbps and 6 Mbps.

Sprint has come out with their 4G plan this year in select cities. Verizon and AT&T have both announced their own plans would be available in 2011.

T-Mobile has taken a slightly different approach, and it’s confusing a lot of people. Rather than invest in 4G technology, T-Mobile is bragging that they will deliver “4G speeds” with their current network.

In short, they’re using the marketability of the 4G brand without actually having to give 4G. It’s their version of “genuine fake leather seats.” They can reproduce these speeds in their labs I’m sure. If they don’t deliver at speeds as high as +3 Mpbs, however, they can always shrug their shoulders and say, “hey, we never said you’d get 4G.”

What I can’t tell is if there is any reality to the speed of HSPA+. There are reports that it runs faster than Sprint’s WiMax 4G network. Also, if you are already on T-Mobile and have an Android phone, you won’t need to change out handsets. Maybe. I say “maybe” because T-Mobile is also leaking details of their coming HSPA+ handsets – which suggests you’d need one to use this improved network.

If nothing else, this is a smart marketing move by T-Mobile to keep their customers from leaving. They are already in deep trouble as a company, with many wondering if they will still be around by next year. Since they don’t have the money to invest in a 4G network, they’re offering upgrades to what they already have. I’m sure Verizon, AT&T and Sprint would have loved to offer “4G speeds” without the cost of actually building a 4G network.

That they haven’t suggests to me that it doesn’t really work.

Listen for the kid 10.5 seconds in:

“I don’t see any hope?” In a commercial for Happy Meals and Ronald McDonald House? That’s so brilliant! How someone could have snuck this past so many committees and reviews without anyone catching it… I just love it. The image of a copywriter hidden in the back of the Creative Department, drunkenly giggling at sneaking this in does my heart good.

And for the record, it worked – after seeing this, I swear to God, my Girlfriend and I went to McDonald’s. That’s two conversions, McDonald’s! Mark us down!

And give that smart ass at your agency a raise!

The phrase they use, which I think is a bit suspect, is:

“These updates are designed to simplify navigation for users, reduce complexity for developers, and enable us to build the next generation of tools for growing your business with Facebook.”

Growing your business with Facebook? Can they really be planning something that would, for once, help all the people trying to advertise their businesses? It seems hard to believe. Facebook has always acted as though their users were sheep, and businesses were wolves come to eat them up.

Many of their decisions over the last couple years seem designed to restrict businesses: No phone support, draconian ad buy limitations, breaking technology… and how many businesses had to change their print materials to say, “Like” instead of, “Become our fan?”

The change in width is more likely clearing space for larger ads – so they really should have said they were building the next generation of tools, “for our business.” The increased width seems consistent with their plan to roll out video ads two years ago.

I hope I’m wrong, because this would actually be a deadly game of advertising creatives playing cat and mouse for all businesses, if their fan pages were running ads administered by Facebook. Can you imagine seeing Pepsi ads on the rail next to one of Coca-Cola’s fan page tabs?

I can’t believe Facebook would allow that, so “more ads” may not be it. So what could these, “improved tools” be that would require 240 pixels of width all their own? Perhaps a vertical navigation bar?

That would be something! Many companies have limited tab space. A vertical tab structure actually would make things easier for developers and businesses alike.

What do you think is going to go into this space?

T-Mobile

I’ve been with T-Mobile for about a year or so, having gotten a G1 a couple of months after it’s release. It was a good phone at first, but there were a lot of problems with T-Mobile. First, they stopped supporting it – so the version of Android the phone uses is the one I’m stuck with now.

Then the battery died horribly. It was fun to hear a T-Mobile employee explain to me that, “yes, your phone is still under warranty, but the battery isn’t.” Which is an interesting sort of philosophical discussion: I am Ciaoenrico, but my finger is not. Therefore, if I lose my finger, I’m still me, so how important was that finger anyway? Personally, there are a few things I would like to chop off the T-Mobile lawyer who came up with this loophole since they discovered G1 batteries fail in large numbers.

Finally, they’ve been dropping calls and service a lot – to the point I’d get e-mails from people asking me why they couldn’t call me. Then there’s the touch-and-go data service, and GPS coverage that – I swear to you – thought I was in Manitoba, Canada last week.

When I tried to upgrade my phone to a newer T-Mobile handset for the remainder of my contract, I read that doing so requires starting another two-year contract, or else I buy the phone at cost. So rather than give them more of my money, especially since they’ll be going out of business very soon, I’m going to gladly pay the $200 to be rid of them.

AT&T

So my first thought, like any red blooded American consumerist stooge, was to get an iPhone 4. They’re sexy, everyone has them, the whole “dropped data” problem has supposedly been solved… let’s go!

Also, my Girlfriend needs a new phone, as her dealings with Virgin Mobile are almost as bad as mine were.

The first thing I must say is, if you’re thinking about an iPhone, don’t get it from an Apple store. The millennial douchebag (sorry, I meant “genius”) working there quoted me a price of $170 per month for phones for the two of us. Since she only wants a good enough phone, not a smart phone, the plan we needed had a much lower quote – roughly $144.00

I then looked at what everyone says about AT&T as a provider, and the baleful consensus is that they suck. Data runs very slowly, though the phone call quality is good. Well, we all use data networks now, especially if you’re investing in a brand spanking new smart phone. So that was definitely a problem. I also remember AT&T stories this year where they couldn’t handle the load from before the iPad, and how things would only get worse now.

This is to say nothing of the disappointment my Girlfriend said she would have in me if I actually became one of those Apple Fanboys. I agreed, so the search continued.

Verizon

Signing a contract with Verizon is not unlike signing a contract with The Devil. The possible difference being that with The Devil, you know up front a hell is in your future.

Most customers will tell you Verizon sneaks hell up on you.

I’ve heard both sides of Verizon from people who sign with them, and it breaks down something like this:

“Verizon has the BEST coverage!”

“Verizon is so EXPENSIVE I had to get a second job to pay for it!”

For all their talk of their coverage area, they do make you pay for it. Their plans for calls and data are more expensive than everyone else I looked at, and other users talk of being nickel and dimed to death on phone extras and apps.

What’s more, when I went into the Verizon store, they actually had me take a number and wait for a salesperson. Wait – I’m considering giving you my money, and you think your shit is so stink-free I’ll happily wait for you? It reflected pretty badly on them. And I had to go back three times in total for more information Each time they had me wait, even when there was no one else being helped.

It is with great pleasure I have decided Verizon was out of the running. Whew!

Sprint

Finally, there’s Sprint, the company I bought my first cell phone from. Sprint offers the Evo, which I’d already heard from a lot of people who had them that it is a dream. There are a lot of things I like about the phone, but this is about carriers, not handsets.

Sprint’s big advantage over the others is that they are cheaper than AT&T and Verizon. Their coverage network for voice isn’t as good as Verizon’s or AT&T’s, though, as they roam between networks for their coverage area. This is why calls get dropped, because the phone is jumping from one carrier’s tower to another. So that’s not good. On the other hand, their data network is very strong.

Sprint also allows for free “mobile-to-mobile” calls, regardless of carrier. Wha!?! If I’m calling anyone with a cell phone it’s free minutes? When you think of how few times you call a land line, that’s a pretty good offer. I’m still waiting for the other shoe to drop and for someone to tell me what it’s not entirely as good a deal as I think it is. If you know, leave me a comment.

And what about this 4G business? For starters, Sprint’s 4G is really WiMax – a way of juicing up a 3G network. Real 4G will be available from Verizon late this year, and from AT&T next year. Still, with all that infrastructure to build out, it will be a while until it’s really in place and usable. Sprint’s own 4G isn’t available here in Phoenix, and no one seems to know when it will be. So as long as no one has it, I don’t care.

So my decision is made: I’ll be getting the HTC Evo on Sprint. My Girlfriend found a phone she wants from them as well – also an Android phone, with a ton of features just not available from Virgin Mobile.

The one drawback here – and believe me, all of these plans seem to have advantages and drawbacks compared to each other – is that the on line Sprint store doesn’t have any Evos in stock. It has been reported that Sprint has been trying to build up their stocks of Evos, and that they are having trouble getting the aforementioned 4G network up and running. It makes me wonder if their long-term future isn’t all that bright.

Of course, that’s what I said about T-Mobile last year, and I did manage to get a lot of mileage out of my G1 up until now. Given the fast pace of changes in any electronics product, we’ll all have to go through this roughly every other year, so even if I’m wrong about Sprint, it won’t be long until I have to change up again.

So I’ll just have to wait and see!

@SarahPalinu5a was the most brilliant kind of parody available on Twitter, where few are who they actually say they are. One would have thought that the actual Sarah Palin account’s “Verified Account” status would have been enough to save anyone else. After all, if SarahPalinu5a didn’t say, “Verified Account,” then obviously anyone who got there should be able to figure out it wasn’t actually Sarah Palin.

Which leads into the first reason the profile may have been pulled, that Twitter doesn’t want someone pretending to be someone else. I find that hard to swallow, given the number of “fake” personality profiles there. Surely no one actually believes Betty Draper, a fictional character on the show “Mad Men” is really posting tweets. People are capable of reading content and discerning for themselves whether or not something is from the actual person.

I doubt anyone thought these posts were actually from Palin:

“I’m so heartbroken about this spill in the gulf situation. All those animals. They’re polluting our oil.”

“Some days I just wanna stay in bed and play with my boobs.”

“The liberal media wants us to believe a volcano in Iceland is disrupting air travel. Everyone knows Iceland is too cold for volcanoes.”

“Keep fighting the good fight [insert republican candidate]. Don’t let [insert democratic opponent] win the election in [insert November]!”

The complete brilliance of SarahPalinu5a can still be found here.

My hope is that this is the result of an overly aggressive protection from parody on Twitter’s part – but I have a feeling the cause was much more sinister.

Because the other possibility is that the Palin camp caught wind of what was going on, and moved to squash it. I don’t doubt enough lawyers making enough phone calls threatening lawsuits could get a site like Twitter to buckle under and do what they’re told.

I really hope that isn’t the case. I don’t know which would make me feel worse: That Palin has a legal hit squad out to make sure no one tarnishes her name worse than she does herself, or that Twitter would give in to anyone making this kind of threat. I won’t go into how Larry Flint got the Supreme Court to rule on just this sort of thing, because as I say, I don’t know that things went down this way.

But if they did, it’s a stark reminder of how little ownership we have over what we do on social media sites.

Which shouldn’t surprise us either. We are involved in an agreement with sites like Twitter: We’ll provide you with our content, you provide us with your network of potential readers.

If social sites start buckling under to pressure from wealthy and powerful users who just can’t take it, though, they should be abandoned. I emplore whomever actually wrote the @SarahPalinu5a account to continue writing those posts, but using some other site – Facebook seems an obvious second choice, though even Jaiku or identi.ca would work. It isn’t about the network for you, @SarahPalinu5a, it’s about your content. That would be the draw.

Hell, I’d gladly start using my Plurk account if it meant I could read those posts again.

"Julia Miller" - Your number 1 source for bullshit.

The story starts out like any belligerent, TV news “we’re on your side!” type of consumer report. But then the “reporter” goes on the diet to see for herself if it works. And guess what? It does! For joy! Then the story ends with instructions about how you too can get a free sample of this wonder product, where this person lost 26 pounds in four weeks.

But look at the site a little bit closer. The header of the page has a typical local news look, with two intrepid reporters posing out, and what looks like at first glance, “Channel 5 News,” indicating some local TV affiliate. This was really smartly done, because the banner actually says, “Channel Health 5 News,” or rather, “Health 5 News.”

Well what the hell is that?

It’s an attempt to make you think this is a real news outlet, while they still let you know this is only about “health” – or their loose interpretation of it. Then they have a picture of their “journalist,” a screen cap of some young woman from a TV broadcast who doesn’t look like she has an extra 26 pounds to lose anyway.

They even went so far as to design in a toolbar to other locations on their supposed TV news channel site – with all of the links going to the front page of NewsVine.com!  I’m in awe of such brilliance, frankly – most people wouldn’t bother to navigate around a site like this, and the designer of this page knew that. So the toolbar isn’t there to get you to anything in particular, it’s just there to further facilitate this fantasy.

I know I sound bitter – mostly because this is the kind of marketing that gives marketing a bad name: Lying to people in such a way that the advertiser can always say, “we didn’t lie to anyone – where do we ever say this is from an actual news organization?” In truth, I’m rather impressed. They managed to ape the look of a local news site so well, you wouldn’t know it was a fraud unless you were particularly skeptical. Skeptical people aren’t customers for a weight loss product that relies on berries to loose 26 pounds in four weeks. Desperate people need to loose 26 pounds in four weeks, and if some pseudo-news organization says this will, then it must.

The larger story here is that we trust these types of sites and their recommendations so well, the people out to make a dollar off of us have taken to using that information against us. Whomever crafted this campaign is definitely not stupid – they know what we are willing to read through and believe. If this same text had been used on a standard landing page, no one would have read past the first paragraph.

Instead, this starts out with the supposition that they are against this product’s claims. Well, sort of – they actually say they will test the product from one company in particular, which they say is the “most credible and trustworthy suppliers on the market.” That company, of course, is the one sponsoring this misleading piece of online advertising.

See how they did that? They mention the company, but still make it sound halfway snarky, like none of the other companies could be trusted more than this. Because we presume they’ll be trashing a company that sells snake oil, we read on. When we get to the conclusion, if we’re not paying too much attention, we take in the real pitch (there’s a “special offer,”) and we become customers.

Is it sneaky and underhanded? You betcha! But I’m willing to bet the conversion rate on this article is also through the roof. I found it as what looked like a supplemental news link on someone else’s blog. I now know that wasn’t a news feed I clicked on, but a paid placement also designed to make me think I was getting an unbiased news report.

In short, if you want to fool people into buying your product, and you can’t get the media to tell the public how great you are, fake it. We no longer teach skepticism to our children, so it should be easy pickings for you.

So what happened to Utterli? I was going to include a link to them, but the site is now unloadable. No one has posted to the Utterli Twitter account in almost a year. I can still find a listing for my utters on Google, but there’s no cached version. Translation: Google remembers there being something there once, but can’t find it anymore.

What’s ominous is that there is no news on what happened to them – no press release from their owner RPM Communications, Inc., no former employees, nothing. It’s like a Stephen King novel – one day, the residents of Utterli simply vanished.

Of course, there were problems for Utterli during their tenure, and the combination of all of them easily could have done them in. What happened to them has yet to be released by the company. But it doesn’t take a lot of imagination to figure out why they aren’t around anymore:

1) The name change. You spend all that time establishing a brand, then you do a flip? Not advisable. Sure, the original name brought to mind cow teats. So what? Own it and move on!

2) Inception of the smart phone, so people didn’t need an easy solution for mobile posting. When I was stuck in the Virgin Mobile ghetto, all I needed were text posts to BrightKite and phone posts to Utterli and I was set. Once I got an Android phone, though, my options opened up – everyone’s did. With that added competition, a simple site like Utterli couldn’t last.

3) Twitter clone perception. Not long into it’s life, people started using Utterli the same way they’d use Twitter – quick text posts. My reason for joining – hearing what people were up to – got swept aside. Personally, I would have prefered it if they’d limited people voice only posts in order to keep the initial idea pure.

4) Discontinuing International dial-up number. This probably didn’t represent a great deal of traffic, so fine. I surely wasn’t affected. But it didn’t look good for them, and signaled to many of us that they were hurting.

5) The recession. This killed a whole lot of businesses, as recessions are supposed to. They separate the wheat from the chaff. Since Utterli wasn’t a well managed site, and offered little in the way of technological improvements over its lifetime, you don’t have to be John Deere to see it was chaff.

The short answer on what happened to Utterli? It faded away. Unlike other social sites that died in the last year or so, Utterli didn’t make an announcement or show of their departure. In fact, except for those of us who discovered them in their heyday, I wonder how many people would have cared if they did announce they were done.