Facebook begins to unravel

When VH1's "I Love the 00s" rolls around, a bunch of C-list comedians will attempt to pinpoint when, exactly, Facebook lost it. Today, Facebook's shark-jumping moment popped up in my News Feed:



I think it's time for Facebook to really think long and hard about letting just anyone write a program for the site, or it's on its way to MySpace flashing lights and blaring-background-muzak-from-shitty-basement-'punk'-bands hell.

A lesson in concision for the CIA

So I saw on the Washington Post today that the CIA released a 19-page redacted executive summary of a report about the Agency's failures leading up to 9/11.

19 pages?! For just the executive summary?! You've got to be kidding me. If you're calling it an "executive summary" it damn well better be less than a page or 2--especially considering who our chief executive is.

Here's a hint for the CIA (and, really, anyone): if you want people to read your reports and enact change, make the executive summary shorter than the latest Harry Potter book.

From what I can surmise from the article, this would have done nicely:



I think it nicely hits all the talking points.

What do Vince Vaughn and Peru have in common?

Your wholly insensitive moment of the day:

From a slideshow of the Peruvian earthquake from the BBC:


Refugees took what they could carry from the rubble of their homes, as did this man in Chincha, 155 miles (250km) south of Lima.

Is it wrong that the first thing I thought of was this?


"That painting was a gift. I'm taking it with me."

Yes, for equating a terrible tragedy with Wedding Crashers, I'm a terrible person. But you knew that already.

The Skittles Touch

Because nothing sells candy quite like the magical negro stock character taken to its ludicrous extreme:



I love the part about the man on the bus.

And I swear some day I'll have some real content to share. Not just YouTube videos. Really.

Friday morning time waster - Be Kind Rewind trailer

There's a new trailer out for the next Michel Gondry movie called Be Kind Rewind. Gondry was the man behind--yeah, I'll say it--the best movie of this decade, so I was already nigh giddy as the trailer was loading. My school-girl giddiness was fast replaced by pure joy as the trailer served up a steaming ladle of ohmygodawesome:



You saw that right. Jack Black and Mos Def recreating famous movies with a camcorder. I saw Ghostbusters, Rocky, Driving Miss Daisy, RoboCop, Rush Hour 2, 2001, and Boyz in the Hood. It's turning Rushmore's 'films-remade-as-plays' aesthetic up to 11 for the YouTube age. I'm pumped. You should be too.

Oh, and here's a link to some higher-def versions if you care about that kind of thing.

Fake Steve Jobs is Daniel Lyons ... and still awesome

Awww, man. The New York Times has discovered the true identity of the blogger known as Fake Steve Jobs (Tagline: Dude, I invented the friggin' iPhone. Have you heard of it?).

Here's the short story:

1) Anonymous blogger adopts persona of Steve Jobs, founder of Apple

2) Fake Steve does not hold back. Writes hilarious, bitter posts mocking, well, everyone.

3) Remainder of bloggers split two ways: a) The true identity of Fake Steve is our Holy Grail! We must find it and share its bounty! or b) Don't unmask him! You'll ruin the fun!

4) Almost a year later, Times reporter Brad Stone takes a week or so to figure it out. Here's the evidence, a combination of writing tics, location, and other slips that led to the unmasking.

5) Fake Steve owns up to being Daniel Lyons, an editor at Forbes magazine. Of course, he takes a stab at the blogosphere while he's at it:

One bright side is that at least I was busted by the Times and not Valleywag. I really, really enjoyed seeing those guys keep guessing wrong. For six months Dr. Evil and Mr. Bigglesworth put their big brains together and couldn't come up with the answer. Guy from the Times did it in a week. So much for the trope about smarty-pants bloggers disrupting old media.

I'm kind of sad, but it gives me an excuse to dump all the links I've been hoarding of Fake Steve's best posts since I started reading a few months ago:

There's the one where he shows how the iPhone can charm even the Amish.

There's the one where he explains why Apple is cutting back on iPhone production; it's to make you feel special:

[This is] a product that makes you smarter and, well, better than other people. Can't do that if everyone has one, right?

We figured we could keep things under control using our usual overpricing strategy. Who in their right mind was going to shell out 600 bucks for a friggin phone, right? Especially if it lacks all sorts of features that people really want. Just to be doubly sure we put it on the AT&T network and gave it an unbearably slow wireless connection so that Web browsing is practically impossible. Well, much to our amazement, it turns out there are just loads and loads of people willing to spend 600 bucks on a feature-lite phone as long as it has one crucial feature, which is our Apple logo on the outside. Who knew?

My personal favorite, there's the one where he tears the music industry a new one after they whined about iTunes dominating the MP3 market:

Here's the thing. These guys could have done what we did. In the early days of the Internet, everyone figured the majors would build digital distribution arms. But they didn't do it, because they didn't understand technology, and they didn't want to invest in building this expertise, and they were freaked out about piracy and paralyzed with fear. So we stepped in. We made the big investment. We hired programmers. We developed software that's easy to use and works flawlessly. (If you think that's trivial, think again. It's huge.) We ran the system. We promoted it, we marketed it, we haggled with all the majors and struck deals. We took all the risk, which was considerable. Now we're reaping the reward. And the majors want a bigger slice. Um, for what? We did all the work. Ain't gonna happen, slick.

Here's the back story. The music companies are in a dying business, and they know it. Sure, they act all cool because they hang around with rock stars. But beneath all the glamour these guys are actually operating two very low-tech businesses. One is a form of loan-sharking: they put up money to make records, then force recording artists to pay the money back with exorbitant interest. The other business is distribution. They’ve got big warehouses and they control the shipment of little plastic boxes that happen to have music in them.

The guys running the labels are pretty stupid -- most are just dirtbags who started out as band managers or promoters -- but now at long last they are kinda sorta finally vaguely getting clued in to the fact that both parts of their business model are fucked. Their loan-sharking business is being eliminated by low-cost digital recording technology that lets people make an album for very little money. And by letting us build the online music store they've taken themselves out of the distribution business. In the days of vinyl and then CDs, the labels managed to control the value chain by having loads of retailers in a highly fragmented market, and playing them off each other. In the digital world they've got us. And that's it.

Pretty brilliant, if you ask me. I hope Mr. Lyons stays this insightful post-unmasking.