How did Apple nail so many features of the iPhone and yet get picture messages so horribly wrong?

Right now when you receive a picture message via SMS on the iPhone you get an alert that looks like this:

But since there’s no copy/paste feature, you’re apparently expected to hold the 9 character MessageID and the 8 char password in your head, switch over to safari, go to viewmymessage.com and type these in the form fields. I guess that’s realistic if you’re this guy but us mere mortals don’t have that kind of mental swap space.

AT&T should just put a link in the SMS to retrieve the picture. It’s no Treo experience like getting the pic immediately but it’s a one-click retrieval step at that point since the iPhone automatically creates links for valid URLs in messages. And this method would be no less secure since they already put these tokens as text in the SMS now.

If getting AT&T’s cooperation to fix this isn’t an option, Apple could still solve it by the having the SMS app recognize and parse the MMS alerts that AT&T issues and create a dynamic local page that posts those variables. Either one of these would make multimedia messages tolerable on the iPhone- it’s basically unusable now. I don’t know how Apple is prioritizing their improvements - I know they probably don’t expose that anywhere but it would be good if they allowed people to vote for fixes. BTW, Matt Assay has a good discussion of other iPhone brokenness. It’s such a beautiful device but has some things that are conspicuously annoying. It’d be great if their calendar worked more like the Treo’s and I still haven’t figured out if/where it syncs data from the notes app to the Mac.

Ahhh just need to vent here- does anyone using AuthorizeNet share an utter frustration with their support? This is a chat transcript after waiting on hold on their support line for over 2hrs and finally getting through only to be disconnected with a “your call cannot be completed as dialed.” I tried their live help system yesterday leaving a chat window open (of course needed to use a different browser because it continuously popped over what I was trying to do to tell me i was #53 in the support queue). Both times their support rep terminated the session due to inactivity when I finally got through because the window was in the background. Today this lovely exchange - and all I want to do is activate AMEX by giving them our AMEX merchant ID:

Matthew B: Hello Sean! How can I help you today?
Sean Tierney: hi Matt, we need to implement AMEX on our acct. i have a merch
id from them but your knowledgebase says to contact you guys to set it up
Matthew B: Right however,
Matthew B: you would have to call us so we can verify secure information to do that.
Sean Tierney: hehehehh your call queue is even longer than the 30min wait time on
your live help. can you call me at 480.967.5897 and we’ll do it now?
Matthew B: Unfortunately I can’t call you sorry I wish it was possible.
Sean Tierney: wow. okay. will get in line and wait on hold for an hour again-
hopefully it doesn’t disconnect again at the end like it did last time. Sorry to
rant but you guys have some major support issues. should focus less on bringing
in business and more on delivering reasonable support… thanks for your help
Matthew B: You are welcome I apologize for the inconvienience. 

I don’t blame Matt but I don’t buy the “I can’t call you” line either- that would have been the fastest way to resolve the issue and me calling them is less authenticated than them calling the number on the account. Would take all of one minute to resolve in that situation. If anyone at AuthNet is listening- your support is very frustrating. Seriously consider halting all new business until you can figure out how to deliver a reasonable support experience to your paying customers.

Thus concludes my rant.

This is normally a pretty interesting feature but I thought this particular one was funny given how void of meaning it is.

I heard an interesting privacy/Facebook Beacon story last night that I hadn’t heard before. Apparently some guy recently purchased his girlfriend an engagement ring in a 50%-off sale on a web site and it immediately popped up in his Facebook feed (which his girl reads) unbeknownst to him advertising the fact that:
a) he had bought a ring and
b) it had been 50% off.

Ouch. I would think the girl would be stoked about that situation - more money for the honeymoon… apparently not though. That story here.

And talk about privacy (or lack thereof), I met Jody Gnant last night at the Phoenix Social Media Club. This is the singer/songwriter who traded one year of rent for a record contract in the “One Red Paper Clip” quest. She’s now doing what’s called “life casting,” broadcasting every moment of her life via her website to promote her record sales. Apparently she hit record viewer numbers last night when we were sitting there as Chris Pirillo and his band of followers meshed in somehow. It was an odd thing to see- she has a following of 50-250 people at all hours of the day such that if she gets lost or needs help with something, she just looks into the camera and asks for help. Really weird to see in person and the chat responses from all the faceless individuals she’s never met but have her back. Her CD is not bad (a little Sara McLaughlin-y for me but well-made). See this “life streaming” wackiness on Ustream here.

F$%# you Real Netwojerks. You killed a gem of a company this week when you forced Yottamusic to close its doors. This was a company that offered a free service that stood only to help you guys sell more accounts by making up for the inadequacies of your crappy web-based player. They made your service tolerable for people on Macs and also accessible for anyone working on multiple computers. The only flaw in their player was that which was introduced from the buggy Real player engine component that would occasionally crash the browser- and they probably would have figured out how to fix that too if you had just acquired those guys. How about instead of killing off the companies that are solving the inadequacies of your products, you focus your shareholder’s money on making your own stuff work?

I’ve taken the liberty of rewriting your mission statement to bring it a bit more in line with the behavior you actually exhibit. One can only guess how many scarcity-minded middle-managers, SCO-trained lawyers and committees were behind this mistake. The smart move here that would have added value to your service and gained favor with your Mac user base would have been to acquire Yotta, put Luke in charge of your product dev team and replace all the crappy aspects of your service with the good stuff they created. You offer an API so presumably you’re interested in encouraging developers to extend your service and make it more useful? Way to send the exact opposite message to any potential developers who were thinking about doing so… instead you killed the guys that were using an API (albeit private) to create value. Rockin’ start to ‘08…

I will be canceling my Rhapsody service and shorting your stock first thing in the morning. I would do both now but the market is closed and apparently you offer no way to cancel service via your web site. Nice barrier to exit there - introduce enough friction to leaving by forcing your users to call your CSR’s and wade through an automated phone system to cancel (can’t wait to run that human hamster maze tomorrow - F$%# you again Real Networks). Apparently I’m not the only one who feels strongly about how poorly you guys handled this situation.

I can’t in good conscience continue to give money to a company that behaves this stupidly. Actually stupididity isn’t the word to describe this because that implies benign uninformed-ness and this is just plain evil. I have been hoping that Real and Apple would work out a deal to extend Rhapsody integration to Apple TV and the iPod- now Rhapsody has instead taken a colossal step backwards making it almost entirely unusable on the Mac. Idiocy. For anyone who plans to remain a Rhapsody user, here’s an option to make their service usable again by averting the repeated disruption of applications crashes: place-shift your service so you can listen to your Rhapsody music on an iPod or your Apple TV or your iTunes. Here’s how:

1. Buy something like the Replay Music client that allows you to record streaming music.
2. Rip your Rhapsody songs to your hard drive (complete with ID3 tags).
3. Bring them into iTunes and tag with a playlist called “Rhapsody.”
4. Evaluate the music in your car, at the gym, on your Apple TV, wherever and then decide what’s worth buying. Delete it when your done evaluating and purchase using iTunes or Amazon (not Rhapsody).

This tactic of course opens up the potential for abuse and requires that you do the right thing and purchase the music you plan to keep and delete the stuff you’re don’t when you’re through vetting it. I don’t advocate stealing music. If you want to steal music it’s probably easier through Bit Torrent and Pirate Bay if that’s really your thing.

Your welcome, Real, for educating your subscribers on how to make your service truly usable again and compensating for your inability to deliver a technology that doesn’t crash every 5 min. Now resume your nastiness and put some of that over-zealous legal staff back to work doing something detrimental to your business so I can make some money off your stock. Yahoo music here I come… it’s half the monthly price of Rhapsody and they have a risk-free 14 day trial apparently. Some useful reviews from people that compared the two services here, here and here if you’re thinking of switching.

in place of their currently dysfunctional hybrid of class tracking and sub-accounts.

The goal: I would like to know how much we spent on various marketing and advertising initiatives with a breakdown by individual occurence so that I can see we spent a total of $X on conferences this year and be able to drill down on specific amts for each conference. The same goes for online adspend across various channels like pay-per-click, sponsored banners, direct email, etc broken out by vendor. Likewise with outsourced efforts like PR, directory submission services, SEO. Ditto physical collateral broken out by literature, t-shirts and schwag, etc- you get the point. This would be so much easier if we could tag every transaction with multiple tags (provided tags can have a parent tag).

The current failing:Instead we have this strange way of doing things whereby we assign each transaction to an expense account (okay, necessary GAAP stuff) but then we have an optional class tracking feature where we can assign it one (and only one) class. There are recommendations on how to best use class tracking but unfortunately you can’t track multiple dimensions (ie. I can use class tracking to track by geographic location or business department or marketing initiative but not all three). Seems like allowing ad hoc tagging and having the ability to do multiple, hierarchical tags would solve this and allow people the flexibility to track across any number of dimensions… grrrrrr quickbooks…. And Intuit has a lovely policy of sunsetting their products every two versions and forcing you to upgrade- we’re coming up on our sunset period. Let’s hope they add this capability to this year’s edition.

For that matter, is anyone aware of a viable open source alternative to Quickbooks? Some brief research reveals one called GNUcash which looks interesting. Is there a de facto winner out there though that everyone uses or are OSS accounting packages still too primitive and we’re stuck with Quickbooks for the time being?

Get back to work.

I’ll say it again: some of you have literally made a job out of preventing other people from doing theirs. Stop, go back to work and do something useful. You busy yourself with the task of harassing people who are coming to this country and busting their ass with insanely hard work in order to make a better life for their families. Granted, they don’t have the appropriate papers to be here but instead of wasting your time trying to keep them out, why not embrace the reality of this situation and find a workable solution to cope with what is happening? Somehow along the way you have confused citizenship with what it means to be American. What these people are doing is in fact the very essence of what it means to be American. Remember that we came uninvited to this country to escape a crappy situation at home and build a better life. We certainly didn’t get our papers from the Indians when we arrived. And yet because the illegals that come over now lack official documents stamped with official symbols, you decide to waste ungodly sums of money raised through the efforts of those of us who are working in a futile attempt to prevent them from being here. And the worst is that they’re doing jobs that nobody wants to do anyways. Frankly, those people are way more American than the ones that are born here who choose to sit on a couch and collect welfare.

I’m an Arizona native of thirty-two years. I’ve had the privilege of watching Phoenix evolve to become the fifth largest city in the US. It’s a place of incredible potential and yet we are home to some of the most right-wing, close-minded curmudgeons imaginable. We have a sheriff that makes his prisoners wear pink underwear because he can. We have wacko, sanctioned vigilantes at the Mexico border called “minute men” who are armed with rifles and pistols volunteering to pick off anyone who comes across. I love this State but we are famous for our “Rambo-style” idiocy and legislative blunders like the conversion natural gas debacle. About once a year we seem to fall on our face with a new piece of ill-conceived legislation from our government. And in keeping with that tradition this year we now have this latest disaster-of-a-law (House Bill 2779) that is supposedly the magic cure for stopping illegal immigrants. Let me explain why this is not going to work.

I am not a lawyer but from what I can understand from reading this bill, this law which becomes effective 1/1/08 proposes to attack the problem of illegal immigration by giving the State government teeth to go after businesses that hire an illegal. Sounds great on paper, right? Consider though that one infraction from a company doing business in AZ made unknowingly can result in suspension of their business license. A second infraction discovered (not committed) during the probationary period results in the permanent revocation of their business license. Companies headquartered in AZ that have employees in other states? All employees layed off. Companies with thousands of employees where two somehow slipped past HR’s eligibility screening? Goodnight. Critical infrastructure companies like hospitals, public transportation, utility companies? Not exempt. The obvious flaws with this legislation that somehow escaped those signing it into law:

So what we end up with is the same number of illegal immigrants entering the country now with zero chance of doing anything productive for society once they’re here. They’ll still have the same starving family at home so either they’ll turn to crime to raise the money necessary to feed them or you’ll see them begging on the median at the highway on-ramp. All this law does is guarantee extra headaches for employers, added taxes to fund more beaucracy and paper-pushing in government, and the displacement of illegals from constructive jobs to crime and destitution.

I love Arizona but I’m afraid this is shaping up to be another faceplant in our tradition of ill-conceived legislative moves. This bill is not the product of trying to come to a realistic solution, it’s clearly the re-election tactic of a few politicians wanting to win votes by pinning the hard-ass immigration star on their lapel. Were they to be responsible for actually implementing this (beyond signing the parchment) there is no way in hell this would fly. We need to take a Freakonomics perspective here and ensure incentives are at work at every juncture of solving this problem. We need to establish a scorecard for how effectively the bills passed by each Senator actually performed at accomplishing their objectives- basically a fantasy league for Senators that tracks what they did. Campaigning becomes dramatically less important at that point- just look at their scorecard for how well they did last term.

So to summarize: yes I realize we need some kind of mechanism to deal with illegal immigration but this law is not the way. Piling up sandbags to prevent a flood works in situations where there are acute and infrequent downpours. But when it’s the ocean that’s steadily encroaching, sandbags aren’t going to help- you need to rethink the problem and figure out how to work within the reality of the new terrain. As cheesy as the acting in this movie is, it has an interesting premise: what would happen if all the illegal immigrants suddenly vaporized? Think about it: agricultural industry would grind to a halt, restaurants would be left with nobody in the kitchen, good luck finding a gardener, the construction industry would collapse… These people perform jobs that nobody else wants to do. Who is going to tar a roof in a 120deg Arizona summer? Certainly not the guy sitting on his couch collecting a welfare check, he’s busy watching Jerry Springer. Rather than wasting immense resources to “vaporize” these immigrants, we need to figure out how to utilize them. Think amnesty programs. Think multi-lingual centers for processing new entrants and having probationary “parole office” arrangements whereby these people check in, contribute taxes on their earnings and are accounted for. Contrary to belief, reduction in the supply of menial labor jobs does not take away gainful employment from American citizens, it frees them up to do more interesting, fulfilling and skilled work.

I’ve already wasted too much time in writing this letter. And you as well in reading it.
Get back to work.

sean