OneSocialWeb
OneSocialWeb is a soon-to-be-released distributed social network based on XMPP. Reading the preliminary specification reveals that the developers have really planned this out well. My favorite feature is per-item privacy controls.
SparkFun Free Day Fallout
Today, online hobby electronics retailer SparkFun gave away over $100,000 in merchandise, limited to a maximum of $100 per person, all in just under 2 hours. An awfully generous move by any objective measure, but there seems to be much ill-will towards the company both on Twitter and in the comments section of their “Free Day” announcement.
Not surprisingly, nearly all of the resentment comes from people who did not get in before the $100,000 limit on giveaways was reached. This is unfortunate. I’ve always thought of the hobby electronics community and Makers as a niche club where people are generally well-mannered and helpful. Gracious Professionalism abounds.
The vitriol and nastiness I’m seeing from some of those who missed out today are out-of-line with my past experiences with this community. Disappointment is to be expected; resentment is not. It makes me wonder if perhaps much of the negativity is coming from newcomers to the hobby, lured in by a well-publicized giveaway event. In that case, I suppose their words are forgivable, and I welcome them to the community and encourage them to click on some of the links in this post, read some forums, share their ideas, learn some really cool things, and meet some very nice and intelligent people.
The negative commentary consists primarily of a few basic elements, none of which I feel are particularly justified (my comments in italics):
- I didn’t get anything for free, therefore SparkFun is bad.
If this is genuinely your argument, I’m fairly certain that no amount of logic will convince you otherwise, but consider: there are millions of companies who did not give you (or anyone else) something for free today.
- I wasted almost 2 hours of my life unsuccessfully trying to get something for free, therefore SparkFun is bad.
No one forced you to spend any time on this at all. Twitter contains plenty of evidence from others who decided the giveaway wasn’t worth their time and quit trying after 5 or 10 minutes of failed attempts at loading the page. You chose to gamble with your time and continued to refresh in hopes of a $100 payoff. Once the time cost exceeded the potential benefit, the smart thing to do was walk (or click) away. You may also wish to reconsider your disappointment in a broader sense: for example, in those same 2 hours, about 1200 children died of starvation.
- If SparkFun were more competent, they would have designed their site to handle 70,000 SSL requests per second, but they didn’t, and I wasted 2 hours of my life as a consequence, therefore SparkFun is bad.
This one is most confusing to me because SparkFun clearly indicated as early as November 23rd, 2009 that one of the aims of Free Day was to evaluate the capabilities of their new servers under extreme load:
Third: Free Day will possibly create a maelstrom of site traffic, the likes of which our servers have not seen. At the beginning of December, 2009, SparkFun will be graduating out of its high-chair and moving into a server cluster. We are excited to have the breathing room, and Free Day will help us evaluate just how much breathing room we’re getting. We’ll do everything in our power to keep the site up but please understand that the site may go down.
Despite this very clear warning, people apparently felt that SparkFun had promised them a smooth, error-free giveaway in which only their connection and clicking speeds would affect the outcome. Even when it was quite obvious that was not what was happening, they continued to persist (see rebuttal #2 above).
There are, of course, many people who didn’t get a freebie who are being very reasonable with their disappointment—expressing their gratitude at the opportunity, or offering constructive suggestions for how to improve the next Free Day. I hope that others will learn from their examples.
To the SparkFun employees: I hope that you will not let the negative comments discourage you from future generosity; although considering this aftermath, I would fully support a decision on your part to send $100,000 to save the starving children instead.
The eBay SNAD Scam (How To Get Anything For Free Off eBay)
Just got burned by this, so I thought I’d let folks know.
The scam is simple and hinges on 2 key elements:
- eBay “seller protection” doesn’t protect against this (or much else, for that matter).
- eBay recently changed its policies to prevent anyone from leaving negative feedback ratings for buyers. Buyers can only be good people. Obviously.
And the scam itself goes like this (from the buyer’s/scammer’s perspective):
- Buy something from some unfortunate person on eBay.
- After it arrives, file a dispute stating the item was significantly not as described (SNAD), the seller isn’t working with you to resolve the issue, and ask Customer Support to resolve the case.
- Wait a few days for Customer Support to decide in your favor. They will always decide in your favor for a SNAD case. They are well-trained monkeys.
- You’ll get a refund and be asked to ship the item back to the seller. Send them a box of rocks instead; eBay doesn’t care much.
eBay used to be a halfway decent place to sell your stuff, but clearly those days have passed. I’m not a regular seller, and I only got burned for a small-value item (barely worth the time it took to write this post), but the next time I clean out my closet, I’ll take it elsewhere. Honestly, I wonder why anyone still sells there in this environment.
NoseRub
NoseRub is making excellent progress towards free, distributed social networking. I’d still like to see more focus on self-hosted content (images, videos, etc.) and granular permissions/privacy settings.
