Making the Most Out of a Bad Situation.

I got an update from GoDaddy in the emails today. Apparently it isn't all champaign and booby commercials over there.

Dear [HAPLESS CUSTOMER],

On July 1, 2010, VeriSign®, the registry for .COM and .NET, will increase prices – .COM will go up 7%, and .NET by 10%.

The increase will be passed to registrars like Go Daddy and then, unfortunately, to consumers like you.

As of July 1, we will be forced to raise registration and renewal* prices for these two popular top-level domains.

If you wish to avoid this price increase, you can renew your domain names by June 30 and add another year to your current expiration dates. You have the option to register or renew for multiple years and lock in long-term savings. Of course, should you have any questions, please give us a call at 1-480-505-8821.

Thanks as always for being a Go Daddy customer.

Sincerely,

Bob Parsons

CEO and Founder

GoDaddy.com

Oh no, Bob! I can't believe that they're doing this to you! Of course I agree that you should also raise your prices to make up for an arbitrary supplier cash demand. Its almost extortion! Shameful! I mean, I bet your profit margins are razor thin as it is; I've been seeing less and less of your ridiculous, condescending and mildly offensive advertisements on the telio-vision. Hmmm... let me see if I can find some contact information for Verisign and ream them out good for what they're doing to you.

• https://investor.verisign.com/releasedetail.cfm?releaseid=431292

Oh. I see. They're raising prices to fortify, scale and secure a global infrastructure that's been 100% operational for the last 11 years. That's kinda impressive actually. What do you do again? Oh, yeah you're a middle man, taking a cut off the top for something that I could do myself fairly easily if not for the system you've positioned yourself to exploit. They also list the price increases they'll be instituting. .COM domains will rise from $6.86 to $7.34. A difference of 48 cents, or 6.99%. And .NET domains will go from $4.23 to $4.65; or 42 cents and 9.92%. Looks like your story adds up just fine.

Hang on a second... What increases will be "unfortunately" passed to consumers like me? (Consumers like me? I'm a consumer like me!) You didn't mention the changes in your rates specifically, so should I assume you'll just bump the renewal by 48 and 42 cents appropriately, like any trustworthy intermediary would? (your prices already seem fairly arbitrary; it'd be nice to see a break-down of the various fees, taxes, charges and over-charges like the phone companies are nice enough to mail me) Or maybe you mean that we'll see 7 and 10 percent changes in the prices we already pay. Lets see, before the 12 cent ICANN fee you'll renew my .COM domain for one year at 9.82, and you'll give me my .NET domain for 9.69 a year.

I really appreciate the special pricing by the way, I must be one of your best bros for you to lower them from the 10.69 and 12.99 normal rates for no apparent reason at all. Lets not even mention the prospect of you raising these normal rates by 7 and 10%. (Also, 13 dollars? You're charging 13 dollars for something that costs you $4.30? No wonder you can pay a million dollars to show people chimps jumping on trashcans.)

Okay, so if you raised your prices (and your markup) by the percents you mentioned (which I'm sure you wouldn't) .COM's would go up to 10.80, or 98 cents more and .NET would hit 10.65, 96 cents more expensive per year. Why in the world would you want to use someone else's price change to justify tagging your customers for an extra 50 cents per domain per year when you are making absolutely no changes to service and it costs you literally nothing?

• GoDaddy Regisrar Info

Oh, you passed 36 million registered domains this year and it looks like over 3/4 of them are .COM and .NET variety. So +3/4 * 36,100,000 is around 28,000,000 times 50 cents is FOURTEEN MILLION DOLLARS you could collect from your loyal customers every year while blaming the actual service provider and not contributing anything else yourself.

You've got to hand it to them, those weasels certainly are making the most out of an unfortunate rate hike. At best they're using the upcoming increase to drive long-term sales now, before the crushing hike. I really wish I could rent out Jon Stuart's "GO FUCK YOURSELVES" dancers, but taking my business elsewhere might have to make due in this case. I've had this article bookmarked since February maybe now I'll actually sit down and do it.

• http://smarterware.org/5117/how-to-ditch-godaddy-redux

Wasn't the Web Always Social? (now we just know people's names)

So facebook is launching new features. Too bad I never really bothered to learn the old features, that might make it harder to appreciate these. The jist I get so far is that sites can add a little 'like' Facebook button so that people can click on it and it gets added to their Facebook 'feed' and shared with their friends. Okay, that seems a lot like all the other sharing buttons that showed up on "web 2.0" (shudder) sites a while ago. You know: digg, stumbleupon, twitter, technorati, del.icio.us... there's more.

There's probably more to it than just pasting another share button on every site out there. I think I read that you can see a list of items on the site that your friend liked. Okay. Forgive my lack of excitement. This smacks of the same feeling I got when Apple announced its new iAd platform recently. GREAT, tremendous, revolutionary new features... for companies, but really not much change or improvement on business as usual for the users they're excited about leveraging.

I guess maybe that's not true. For people who use Facebook to share articles and web pages with their friends, this is a streamlined improvement over copying the url, opening a tab for facebook and pasting the link in their stream. But for the rest of us it seems like just another button littering the edges of every post. (at least on sites that add it)

I wonder why every site needs to code Facebook integration for this type of interaction. Its the user who wants to connect Facebook with the site, why can't they add something (maybe a plugin) to their browser that enables this for any site they're viewing. Then they wouldn't be at a loss when they happen across a site that hasn't rewritten its code to accommodate Facebook. This would also enable users to choose any service they want to share items of import with their followers; it could be a blog, maybe a twitter, a google reader stream, whatever they want. And we wouldn't need to add 200 little thumbnail logos everywhere.

But maybe that's my problem with how Facebook (or twitter) is approaching the "social web" to begin with. They obviously envision themselves as the central hub around which all information is traded. They can do this because we've all given them our social maps and they haven't given us a way to take them back (or somewhere else) so we stay. But the Internet isn't a wheel in which all spokes lead to Facebook; its more like a "web" where people and sites interact directly or through various proxies. There's no need to send everything back to a central repository.

Sometimes it seems like some people (and companies) forget that there is an Internet underneath all these social sites. They rush to create their pages and claim space on Facebook's internet, forgetting that they own real URLs and real websites that don't need to hook into Facebook. You could send an email to your friend instead of a FB message. You could use one of hundreds of instant messaging clients instead of Facebook's. You could share your 'status' and 'feed' updates via RSS, or Atom on countless publishing platforms instead of Facebook and Twitter that are dominating media coverage.

In fact, the greatest single impetus for joining Facebook is to interact with the people on Facebook. They've introduced a lot of people to useful communication concepts but kept them in a subset of the real system. A subset where we all have to be on the same site to exchange information with each other and users on a different site are out of the loop. That's great for its users, as long as everyone they want to interact with keeps joining, but its really great for growing Facebook.

This is coming across as awfully anti-Facebook, which I'm not. It is a useful-looking site for a variety of users and aggregates Facebook data very nicely. I am against everyone in the world using, or needing to use Facebook. It seems very reasonable to me that I could use one site on the Internet, where I have a profile and a feed etc, to interact with the profiles of contacts at Facebook, sharing articles, commenting on stati, sending messages and invites, whatever else you kids do on the Facebook.

It seems reasonable because that's how the rest of the internet works. You can send email from yahoo to earthlink or aol or bob'semail.com and it works just fine because they all conform to a public standard. Its not some API that links back to one giant database owned by a single company. Imagine how amazing it would be for Facebook's users if suddenly everyone using a social platform could communicate. It would be as important as connecting together telephone exchanges around the world. But as far as I can see Facebook is not interested in improving their users' experience in a way that would reduce the rate of new inductees funneling in. They're more focused on developing an API that channels social information that's happening on the Internet into their own private system.

So this is a bit of a plea, no you don't have to stop using Facebook if you love it so much. Just be aware of what's really going on behind the scenes. Technology is in the state it is today because of diversity, competition, interoperability and consumer choice. I'm wary of a company who strives for a captive user base. Make no mistake the move to place a Facebook tentacle on every website is a land grab. They acknowledge that their users frequent other sites to read and interact, but they want a way to bring it all back home to their own constantly hungry data collection centers. So far they haven't decided to monetize this information in truly userous ways, but some day they will and you'll discover that data you thought was yours is actually theirs.

• Zuckerberg: “We Are Building A Web Where The Default Is Social”

You're So Old.

Yo dog, apparently I'm not cool enough chastising the intertubes by calling them intertubes anymore.  There's a meme a week; nay a  meme a day to catch up on.  This must be exactly what happened to your grandparents.  They got excruciatingly tired of keeping up with the meaningless minutea on the twitter and lapsed into old age.  so while this Jalopnik explainer might be extremely useful, it should also be depressing.  Because nomatter how with the times you though you were, you're not.  You can't help but lag behind.  And if you're not, you need to get a life, or at least something to do between 1 and 4.   7-11 might be hiring?

• Jalopnik- yo dawg i herd you- explainer
  

Suit Up.

Ok, I'll admit it. One of my guilty pleasures is watching How I Met Your Mother. Its pretty much your standard 3 camera friends-in-city formula but I like it. The writing doesn't completely suck and not all the actors make me want to break things, but mostly the best reason for the show's existence is Barney Stinson. Played by Neil Patrick Harris, this character is pure freaking gold. If you've never seen it, I don't know what I can do to persuade you. Oh, wait. Yes I do. I found what is possibly the best blog ever (move over Creed) because it is... brace yourself... Barney's blog. Yeah, I know, how great is that? Very great, that's how great. I'm only a few pages in and I can't keep it to myself any more. What with the:

1. Phone script for dumping girls
2. Guide to licking national monuments
3. Types of party to avoid
4. List of ways women are like fish
5. Bachelor party attendee stereotypes

I'm pretty sure its all this good though, so make sure you git to clickin. Oh and I imagine the posts will continue as the show is back next Monday at eight in the pm.

• Holy Crap Its Barney's Blog

Loose Lips.

Whew, I did it. For the last few weeks I've been participating in a private beta test of a new financial web service called mint. Part of the agreement was that I would refrain from talking, blogging, or basically intimating that I knew what Mint was, what it did, or that it even existed. Luckily I managed to keep my trap shut, as the service launched today at TechCrunch40. So the embargo is off!

Mint is a swank little app that collects spending reports from your various online finance resources. So it compiles spending reports from all your credit cards and whatever bank accounts you supply. (Yeah, its a little creepy giving them all that information but once you get past that its cool. Plus I realized all you can do in my online credit card accounts is pay bills, so what the hell.)

Once you jump in Mint collects all your transactions and starts classifying them into spending groups. It doesn't get them all right off the bat, but its pretty good about recognizing most merchants. From there you can see the breakdown of where your money goes on a month to month scale, and compare your current spending with your average spending in each group.

Overall I think its pretty useful as a little introspection of where you're throwing your money. The last section of the site analyzes your interest rates, cash back and other rewards to recommend ways you could save money. This could use a little work cause it kept recommending I switch one card that I hardly use to a cash back card that I do use. So if you'd like a little clarity in your burning pocket syndrome go check it out, its open to the public.

• Mint

Ree Rawt Row Ra Reet...

A lot of times dual purpose items do two tasks half as well as they should. Which means that the usefulness of one item is compromised into two almost half items; not really a good trade-off. But I have to say this transformer couch looks pretty nice. It actually looks like a couch, and it actually looks like a bunk bed. (although I bet those bunks are pretty narrow.) Now lets see it morph into a ghetto blaster whose tapes turn into animals.

• Transformer Furniture: Sofa Into Bunk Bed (TreeHugger)

P.S. Ever thought about how you'd spell the transformers sound? Yeah, me neither. Luckily the Internet is an indefatigable wealth of knowledge. Also this couch would be 4.7 times cooler and nearly irresistible if it transformed of its own volition accompanied by that noise.

• TWCL :: View topic - The Transformers "sound"