The Other Drummer

Yesterday I did a little follow-up investigating about my post on HTC and realized that all those cool features I was talking about were only promised on two HTC phones that had just been announced – no word on whether the new HTC Sense and HTCSense.com products would be available for “older” handsets.

The HTC Incredible is, apparently, an “older” handset because it was launched a whopping five months ago (despite the fact that the processor in this phone is the same as the phones just announced).

So I went to HTC’s website and asked them about it. I was pleasantly surprised to find a response from them this morning. So kudos for 1. responding quickly and 2. actually addressing my question.

The only qualm (and that may even be too strong a word) is how much marketing-speak they included. For your convenience, I’ve included the email and have color-coded it in blue (marketing speak) and red (answer to my question).

Dear David,

We at HTC are excited that you are interested in our products. The HTC Incredible is an amazing phone. With a blazing-fast 1GHz Snapdragon™ processor, it’s sure to get your daily activities performed quickly. It boasts an eye-popping 8-megapixel resolution camera and built-in editing, it’s not a camera phone. It’s an amazing camera that happens to be an amazing phone. When you Capture those special moments you can post it instantly on Facebook®, Flickr®, or Picasa™. Mail it, message it, or send a peep to all your peeps. With the Friend Stream app, you always know what’s going on on Facebook and Twitter™, without actually going on Facebook and Twitter. Additionally, by choosing the Android™ OS with HTC Sense you have a multi- purposed phone that delivers easy access to thousands of apps and games available at the Android Market. HTC is working hard to launch our new http://www.htcsense.com . With the new HTCSense.com service, people can simply manage their mobile phone experience from their HTC phone or personal computer. For example, people can easily locate a missing phone by triggering the handset to ring loudly, even if it is set to silent, or to flag its location on a map. If the phone’s been lost or stolen, users can remotely lock the phone, forward calls and texts to another phone, send a message to the phone to arrange its return or even remotely wipe all personal data from it. HTCSense.com makes it easy to setup a new HTC phone or access archived mobile content such as contacts, text messages and call history from a PC browser. People can also customize their phones with exclusive HTC content like wallpapers, HTC scenes, sounds or plug-ins. HTC plans to launch this with the new HTC Desire HD and HTC Desire Z in Europe during October. Both of these phones will later be launched in late 2010. At the present time we do not have more information about the availability of htcsense.com for existing HTC phones. I would suggest staying tuned to http://www.htc.com/us for more information about this in the future.

Yes, you counted correctly: 328 words pitching their product and 20 words dedicated to answering my question. And it was really a non-answer. I’m going to respond and see if they can drop any more hints. I’ll keep you posted.

I’m new to Pandora. I was enjoying the service with the exception of a few skanky American Apparel ads. I’m not sure what they were advertising exactly, but it must have been some kind of shirt because the girl in the ad wasn’t wearing anything else.

Ahem.

So I shot off an email to Pandora to voice my concern/complaint about the ads.

Shortly after I got a “Thanks for your feedback, we’re looking into it”-type of response. Unsatisfied, I wrote back and asked when I should expect to hear back on how the matter was resolved. Less than 10 minutes later:

“I believe our team is working on removing this ad as I type – we serve network ads at times that sometimes slip through…that don’t meet our standards.”

Impressive. Fast. Responsive. I gave them a shout-out on Twitter. Later that day I got this:

Wait. Hang on. I complained about your company, you did the right thing and took down the ad and now you’re sending me a t-shirt? Basically.

And it came in the mail today. Along with some stickers, a hand-signed letter from the founder and, oddly, a CD* opener/cleaner contraption:

Pandora did a great job of taking what could have been very negative (this post would have been very different) and turned it into a situation where I’m telling random coworkers about Pandora’s awesomeness.

*CDs? Really? Pandora is two steps removed from CDs (CD -> MP3 -> streaming music) so it seems odd to send out a tool to help you open and clean them. But thanks just the same.

Dear Movie Studios,

When I can’t skip ahead, access the main menu or even hit “stop” during your stupid trailers and ads on a movie I paid to rent, you’ve gone too far.

It took me literally 10 minutes to finally get to the main menu so I could start the movie – and that was with the crippled, 2x fast forward that stopped every five seconds so I had to keep pressing it again and again and again as I hobbled through ad after ad.

What really pushed me over the edge was disabling the Stop button. You won’t let me stop watching something I paid to see, on a DVD player I own, in my own house? Incredible.

Want to know why people pirate movies? Because of crap moves like that.

If you’re so far removed from the real world that you think this is how your customers should to be treated then you deserve to be struggling.

I hate you.

Oh, Zuckerberg. You said you heard us. You said you’d change. You said, “There needs to be a simpler way to control your information. …We will add privacy controls that are much simpler to use.”

Today those changes began to roll out and, at first glance, “simpler to use” didn’t quite make the final cut. Here’s a screenshot (two, actually – even rotating my 24″ monitor sideways couldn’t fit the entire 1,091 word instruction manual into one shot). Click for larger images:

1. I don’t know how anyone defines something as “simpler to use” when they have to take almost 1,100 words to describe how to use it. How many people does he think will take the time to read, comprehend and act on all that?

2. Videos. They’re all the rage online these days. Zuckerberg, try making one the next time you want to explain how “simple” something is to use. It’ll come across better. (Edit: there’s a video here which talks about the changes. It’s not a how-to though, just a lot of PR speak…posted after a 1,189 word blog post on the topic.)

Aside from the length of the document, some of the language is still a bit concerning.

“This section controls what information is shared with websites and applications, including search engines (applications and websites you and your friends use already have access to your name, profile picture, gender, networks, friend list, user ID, and any other information you share with everyone). You can view your applications, remove any you don’t want to use, or turn off platform completely.” (Emphasis added.)

So when my friend uses an application, that application still has access to all my information? Yes, I think that’s what I’m reading.

On the other hand, there are a lot of good things in this update as well. For example, once you click your master switch to only make your content available to your friends (for example), it retroactively goes back and changes everything as well as keeps that setting moving forward.

I’ll dive in, tweak some stuff and let you know if I find anything else noteworthy.

What do you think of the new changes? Are you concerned about your privacy on Facebook? Let me know in the comments.

Hilarious.

Someone has decided to create a mock BP PR Twitter account and, dang it’s funny.

Horribly satirical, biting and dark but really, really funny.

Needless to say, BP isn’t happy about this. Maybe it’s because the fake BP Twitter account has 40,000 more followers than the legit one.

The person behind the fake account is still a mystery but gave Mashable an email interview (in character) which is worth the read.

Here are a couple of @BPGlobalPR’s tweets pulled from said article:

What do you think? Has the mystery tweeter taken it too far?