Wednesday, April 22, 2009

Spock Turns Pay Only

Looks like Spock.com is most likely in its death throws. In a last gasp to remain afloat it has turned to charging users for its services. The change wasnt even made in a way that makes sense. When clicking on a users profile you are asked to pay $19.95 or to "skip". Both buttons however link to the same PayPal page. So there's no way to remain on spock.com at that point unless you hit your back button. I'd expect this from a website that was made by a teenager in high school, but not from a well funded silicon valley startup like Spock.

Update: Actually, it appears that Google just made Spock useless by letting people control search results about themselves.

Wednesday, April 1, 2009

This is Wierd

So I get an email from SlideShare this morning:

Hi carlton.northern,

We've noticed that your slideshow on SlideShare has been getting a LOT of views in the last 24 hours. Great job ... you must be doing something right. ;-)

Why don't you tweet or blog this? Use the hashtag #bestofslideshare so we can track the conversation.

Congratulations,
-SlideShare Team

I only have one SlideShare presentation and its nothing special. It's just a presentation I did for school on Atom and hAtom. It's currently showing 30,000 views. The last time I checked (which was probably a few months ago) it had like 500 views. I am assuming from the email that I got most of my views in the last 24 hours. I checked google's backward links and nothing shows up. Any ideas how my presentation became popular?


Update: I checked SlideShare today and found that my presentation was back down to 328 views. I can only assume that SlideShare had some kind of internal error. Wonder if anyone else reported these problems?


Update: Ok, I got pwned. Apparently this was an April fool's joke from SlideShare. Hardy har har.