Facebook
Facebook allows you to search for friends by plugging in their email address. Email addresses that aren’t registered with facebook will get email messages telling them that So and So has invited them to Facebook. If you’re already on Facebook, you can link your accounts.

There’s one hitch – you can’t look at the person’s profile without logging into facebook, and if you search for them, well, odds are you’ll get a good couple hundred of results. So here’s the scenario:

1. I have multiple email addresses.
2. I don’t know immediately who this person is, but I can’t view their profile to confirm one way or another
3. Facebook keeps sending me reminders that this person has friended me on their site.
4. I can’t stop this email from sending without blocking all future emails (from people I may in fact want to be friends with for sure).

Now, I don’t arbitrarily have multiple email addresses. I have multiple email addresses for an excellent reason, namely that I use them on different sites and they help me preserve my anonymity. My facebook profile is public in one sense, but I don’t want to link it to say, an old forum account where I was a site administrator for a few years. While all of these profiles are public, they aren’t all tied to me.

What pisses me off is that Facebook doesn’t allow for the possibility of someone wanting to keep their online identities separate. Facebook is arrogant enough to try and force me to connect all of them. I don’t have any desire to do that. I can’t identify who’s trying to friend me on that email, but it doesn’t really matter – I’m pretty sure I don’t want to be friends with that person. Still, there’s no way for me to contact them outside of Facebook, and Facebook won’t let the subject drop and stop emailing me about it.

If I block the Facebook notification emails, I block all emails of that variety, even from people I might know and care about and want to reach out to on my existing account.

Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, Facebook.

Get a coupon and a hilarious mad-libs style mash game at http://www.qdobacraftyourlife.com.

As an American, a consumer and someone who spends far too much time thinking about such things, I could have told you two years ago (and, wait, I did tell people two years ago – they laughed), that the day of the Brand was coming to an end.

We’ve seen the folly of Brand management, where the brand identity is all-powerful and all-important – to the exclusion of all other things. Protecting the Brand is priority number one, whereas the customer and his/her experience is not really much of a priority at all.

One day, companies like Starbucks will get off the crazy wagon, and stop trying to mass produce genuine individual experiences. The fact that they’re sending thugs to real corner coffee shops to try and figure out what makes them so appealing is creepy as hell. It also demonstrates that Starbucks has entered the panic phase of brand insanity.

“The new names are meant to give the stores “a community personality,” said Tim Pfeiffer, senior vice president of global design. Starbucks’ logo will be absent, with bags of the company’s coffee and other products rebranded with the 15th Avenue Coffee and Tea name.” – Starbucks Tests New Name for Stores, The Seattle Times

Is a Starbucks without the branding still a Starbucks? Will this endeavor to create a more genuine experience – one with local, personal flavor succeed, or will it smell like what it really is: rebranded bullshit? Leave your thoughts in comments.

In Dan Neil’s LA Times article, he talks about just how bizarre these ads get – you’ve probably seen some of them:

Consider the new Quiznos ad for Toasty Torpedo sandwiches (Nitro). This one’s a little hard to describe but it appears that Scott, a Quiznos baker, has had some kind of dangerous liaison with the oven, which speaks to him: “Scott, I want you to do something,” the oven says in a husky male voice. “I’m not gonna do that again,” Scott says. “That burned.” “We both enjoyed that,” the oven answers.

The oven then demands that Scott make a foot-long Toasty Torpedo and — I quote — “Put it in me, Scott.”

Weird. Gross. The idea that Scott the Quizno’s guy is diddling the sandwich oven doesn’t inspire me to go out and buy a Quizno’s “toasty” sandwich. It makes me seriously consider calling the health inspector. Neil goes on to offer some theories as to why this is a current ad trend:

For one thing, these ads target a young audience, digital natives who have had their normative values defined by life online, which is generally pretty risque (I have no doubt there is a man-on-toaster website out there). For another, humor is about the only defense advertisers have against the commercial-skipping fast-forward button on the DVR. And sex is, on a cosmic level, pretty hilarious.

True, sex sells, but there are some things you just don’t combine. My lunch and your penis are two of those things. As a young audience member and a product of our Rule #34 culture, my threshold for what I consider funny and what I consider gross is considerably higher than say, my mom’s. I can certainly understand how Carl’s Jr.’s ads might be passable as funny, and to a degree they are, but they’re mostly just stupid. Much in the same way Axe Bodyspray commercials are stupid. But Carl’s Jr. knows what audience its targeting, and I think it does so successfully. There is a pretty significant douchebag demographic, and they do spend money on douchebag things. So yes, if your product appeals to douchebags, don’t fight it. Embrace your inner douche. That’s the Carl’s Jr. lesson.

Other restaurants, however, are family establishments, or appeal more to the lunchtime business crowd (I’m looking at you, machine-fucker-Scott). Or in the case of Burger King, someone, (I’m not naming any names, crispinporterbogusky), thought a great way to market to children and their parents was to get Sir Mix Alot to update his homage to the bodonkadonk. For children. I can see the brain trust meeting now – “but that song is so much a part of our culture, it’s no longer about butts, it’s an anthem. A buttthem.” Yes. It is. For college douchebags. I don’t see many four or five year olds rocking the popped collar, oh wait. (Photo: men.style.com)

Neil tries to make sense of this madness by suggesting that by sexualizing its products, the fast food industry is making a last ditch effort to salvage its distinctly unsexy product. But in our economy, is that a big threat? Are people going, “you know what, we’ve really struggled to make enough money to buy dinner and we can afford to get more food at McDonald’s. Screw it, though, those dollar menu items aren’t sexy enough. Let’s go get an organic head of lettuce and some locally produced mayonaise.”

I doubt it. No, I think this, like many trends, is just a poorly thought out way of keeping up with the Joneses. It works for Carl’s Jr. because Carl’s Jr. is a douchebag with a douchebag product. It cannot work for Quizno’s or Burger King.

I’ve set up the new blog site for the boyfriend, and at every opportunity, I nudge him and say, “Blog.”

He’d make a great online celebrity. He’s had some experience with it before. I, by contrast, don’t do too well. Take this blog as a for instance. I’ve been blogging for eight years. I’ve had ‘blog’ type websites for over twelve years. My street cred alone should have earned me a serious fan base by now. Instead, I turned the most interesting of my fans into friends, and deleted blogs. Repeatedly.

In the recent move from one directory to another, I deleted all comments from this blog. So you’ll never really know how popular this blog was, and I can tell you that the majority of comments were lectures from my mom, and you’ll think I’m kidding.

The point is, if one of us is going to make big bucks from the blogosphere, it’s him, not me. Go get ‘em, baby.

He will never make a criticism unless he has … a resolution. And that’s a fucking promise. I’d love to know what his pickup line sounds like. Probably a lot like this pitch.

Thanks to Max for the first video.

I love this, because it captures my feelings about diamonds exactly. Not even getting into the political or economic issues with the diamond industry, this video brutally and perfectly mocks the idiotic-yet-frighteningly-successful marketing strategy of the diamond industry.

I like silver, sapphires and emeralds. Because I think they are pretty. I don’t think my value as a person, a woman, or a potential life mate can or should be equated to a gemstone. I think that’s demeaning – to me.