Quick notes past midnight, January 2008 edition

– “How Facebook is Like Ikea – they get their customers to do the work and to enjoy doing it”… Whoa, hang on a second there. Are you nuts? No one enjoys assembling Ikea furniture.

– My blog is now ranked fifth on Google when you do a search on “Rakesh“. Rakesh Roshan, watch out — I’m gunning for you.

– Last week I wrote about the Plantronics Calisto Pro telephone I bought for my office. I’ve used it a lot now and it’s definitely a keeper. The only thing I have to get better at is quickly putting on the bluetooth headset when my phone is ringing. I’ll learn?

– Wow, my blog is really inundated with comment spam — I have to do something about that.

– Speaking of this blog, I still haven’t migrated away from Yahoo’s hosting to something better. Dave Zatz had two good recommendations though: MediaTemple (who he uses at Zatznotfunny) and Bluehost. It’s on my list of things to do.

– At this moment, I’m simultaneously bummed that 1) I didn’t mail off a photograph that I took earlier tonight on my phone and 2) that the iPhone doesn’t have some sort of a recycling bin for photographs that get deleted.

– Facebook isn’t shiny and new anymore. I’m just not as drawn anymore to the site, updating my status, emailing photos, etc.

– I’ve been experimenting as a twitter user in the past month and it’s kind of interesting. The thing that I find most interesting about the service is the frugality of the core service and the rich community of sites/apps that it has spawned. The most baffling thing, to me, is how people who constantly follow and post on twitter can ever get any work done.

– We discovered this morning that our Google Adwords account was hacked starting some time last week. The hacker in question managed to get into our account, delete all of our existing keywords and ads (1000s of them!) and create several campaigns focusing on, yes, you guessed it: online pornography. After five days and several thousand bucks in charges to our credit card, we found out about it this morning. Who knew the average cost per click for keywords related to online pornography is, in some cases >$14 / click!! Everything’s reverted to its previous state and we’re awaiting the findings from Google’s investigation, but… wow, what a mess!

– I run into smart people regularly that are unimpressed with and ultimately confused by Gmail’s interface for e-mail. It always surprises me but people just don’t universally “get” threaded email.

– I’m a big fan of Gmail’s “filter messages like this” option that makes it quick and easy to kill what I call “soft spam” — the stuff that is unsolicited but loosely tied to something you did or signed up for and not something you can easily, authoritatively unsubscribe from. For example: you sign up the exhibit at a tradeshow, they sell your address to people that sell shipping services, pop-up booth displays, etc. You attend a tradeshow in Taiwan and subsequently every manufacturer in taiwan/china is “happy to is meeting you” and wants to sell you “high-quality hello kitty USB styrofoam missile launchers, only 10,000 MOQ!!!”. Unsubscribing from some of these is difficult so I just quickly create a filter that sends ’em straight to the trash. 🙂 Ah sweet, sweet google mail filters.

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