Greg’s San Francisco Blog

@VKlaus And that’s when he realized Susan would never go to a… on Twitpic.

As some of you may know, I have been greatly enjoying a Facebook game called Rock Legends, produced by a local SF company called Serious Business. Less than one percent of my friends like it, and that’s fine – I have no desire to inflict it on you.

But Serious Business wants me to – REALLY wants me to. You see, “groupies” are people who are your friends, and then you get them to sign up and they help you in the battles of the bands. At the level I am (66) you can have up to 300+ groupies accompany you into battle – this is the equivalent to 3000 points, or about a level 50+ player. Up until today, this could be worked around. But now they’ve changed it.

Some of the change has to do with a very intriguing application of  ELO ranking systems to competition. That part is great. But they went further, and have limited the number of other bands you can see to what they determine you SHOULD be able to see. As a result, in half an hour of looking I could find precisely TWO bands I could potentially beat. In comparison, I could find 30+ yesterday in the same amount of time. If I go ahead and load up with groupies, then I can find bands I can beat…. oh, you say, it’s a stick to beat you with if your friends don’t like the game. Or you can add a minimum of 300 “friends” just to be groupies for the game. Now, I’m not asking you to join the game and be my “groupie” – in fact, I really hope you don’t.

Getting someone to pressure their friends is not viral marketing, no matter what they tell you. Asking people to evangalize at gunpoint is idiotic, and reduces your evangalist’s credibility within his or her group. And most people – be they school kids in the Philippines or college students in France or nurses in Qatar – get that. So what do they do?

They publish lists of email addresses of facebook users that you can add as “friends” and then convert to groupies. Spam, much? They post “please be my groupie” on any discussion thread and kill it. Spam, much? So the strategy – be viral to grow – is a good one. The *tactic* of forcing people to add their friends if they want to advance is massively counterproductive. It does not increase the unique views nearly as much as it creates churn and unnecessary resource usage. It makes the game unpleasant. And I seriously doubt anyone will be buying credits so they can advance faster, when this change makes it far more difficult to find a battle you have a chance of winning. All it can do is increase their total number of meaningless page views. Too bad – I was a happily paying customer, and I don’t think I’ll be spending any more money with them.

Perhaps they established “page views per month” as a metric when they got $4 million in April from Lightspeed. If so, then both they and lightspeed forgot the dotcom bust and are focusing on the wrong metric for sustainability. Or perhaps they don’t care.

I will also note that the player feedback on this change has been uniformly negative. I ‘m not the only paying customer whose wallet just slammed shut. The only response from Serious Business has been to say (literally) “Chill out”.

Siqi Chen is the founder and CEO of Serious Business. His bio says ” As CEO, Siqi golfs 16 under par and enjoys long helicopter rides over the ocean. And money. Siqi is best known for founding Microsoft, acquiring IBM, and most[2] consider him the greatest strategist since John Boyd.”

Yes, amusing and very San Francisco humor. He gets points for knowing who the late Col. Boyd is. Given that, he possibly might even understand this:  Sigi – if you happen to read this or find it on your desk through your Google Alert feed, or Lightspeed’s – increasing the length of time it takes your customers to process their OODA loops means you’re treating them as your enemy. It’s not the path to success in a networked open-source bazaar.

It is very civil of the SPLC to not phrase it another way… “Since the election of G W Bush as president, the number of rightwing hate groups in the us has risen 54%”. If we are going to ascribe causality, the social climate encouraged by that neo-conservative coup and the deliberate disinformation campaigns they continue to wage has led to the mainstreaming of the radical right- or at least a rational case can be made.

This article is one of the first I’ve seen that starts to go beyond the “lone gunman” scenario, in talking about the “so-called leaderless resistance”.  But there is still a near-complete failure to understand that this is another manifestation of “open-source warfare” as described by John Robb, and discussed at length (with minimal political bias) at globalguerillas over the last few years.

The last radical left attack on US soil aimed at humans was from the SLA in the ’70’s, as I recall.  It’s more than time to start saying publicly that “plausible deniability” isn’t enough for the “responsible right” any more, and that they are trying to run a de facto protection racket. It becomes harder to believe they don’t know what they’re doing every day.

The Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks white supremacists, says the number of hate groups in the United States has risen 54 percent since 2000, fueled by opposition to Hispanic immigration and, more recently, by the election of the nation’s first black president and the economic downturn.

…

The number of angry white men in America is getting larger, said Chip Berlet, senior analyst with Political Research Associates in Somerville, Mass., a think tank that studies right-wing extremists.

In particular, the heterosexual, white, Christian men in America feel they’ve been pushed out of the way….

“The idea that blacks are put in positions of power by crafty Jews is central to their conspiracy theory,” Berlet said…..

A department [DHS] assessment of domestic extremism found about 2,400 white supremacist Web sites; 72 blogs; 30 mailing lists; 213 user groups and clubs; and 25 online racist video games.

via Shootings show threat of ‘lone wolf’ terrorists – Yahoo! News.

Senator Judd Greg (R-NH) is putting together his own health care plan….

…..a plan I have proposed that sets up a system where every American will be required to purchase meaningful health insurance to ensure each family will be protected against bankruptcy if a family member becomes seriously ill or injured.

via Op-Ed Contributor: Health reform possible without growing government – Yahoo! News.

Wow – that’s fantastic! Especially since a substantial proportion of Americans are out of work, can’t currently pay their mortgages, and can’t make more than a minimum credit card payment.  Of course, millions of Americans have trouble feeding their families, too.  So they won’t get “meaningful” coverage cause they can’t – not won’t, can’t – afford to pay for it. And then they’ll be criminalized for being poor.

What this does is provide an excuse for NOT providing care – “they didn’t have their mandatory insurance, it’s not our fault”. Possibly the senator is grossly out of touch with the economic realities most Americans face, or perhaps he’s just being cynical and knows the results of his “plan”. I’d bet on a combination of both.

Apparently we need to update the old “Millions for defense, not one cent for tribute”.  I’m recommending “Billions for Waste – Not One Cent for Reality”.

Despite the huge size and importance of the contract, the main program office managing the work for both Afghanistan and Iraq has only 13 government employees. For administrative help, it must rely on a contractor.

KBR Inc., the primary LOGCAP contractor in Iraq, has been paid nearly $32 billion since 2001. The commission says billions of dollars of that amount ended up wasted due to poorly defined work orders, inadequate oversight and contractor inefficiencies.

In one example, defense auditors challenged KBR after it billed the government for $100 million in costs for private security even though the contract prohibited the use of for-hire guards.

via APNewsBreak: Major problems found in war spending – Yahoo! News.

Sometimes Jon Carroll is very funny. I just wonder if  it’s more efficient to try and buy curare at a botanica.

We all feel anger. We all want to put rat poison in someone’s stew. We all want to tie someone’s thumbs to an overhead beam. We all want to take little tiny needles tipped with curare and rig a device using rubber bands, plywood, springs from an old office chair and bungee cords that will, just as someone opens a door, swing down and hit him, ha ha, in the rear end and it will seem like a prank until the curare kicks in and then, well, the joke will be on him and we will laugh ha ha with our heads thrown back and we will quaff the nectar of righteousness from the cup of revenge.

But that is not reasonable behavior. It is not an efficient use of one’s time to try to buy curare at your local herbal-remedy store.

via I’m a reasonable guy.