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PicApp picks up your pix!
Posted: November 1, 2010 (23:14) under Intellectual Property, OMG, Security, Software, Technology
 PicApp picked a fight PicApp has a problem, and so does everyone who uses them. Formerly a benevolent, free photoservice which allowed bloggers of all types access to fresh, high-quality images, over the weekend it morphed into an unstoppable plague, taking over websites all over the interwebs while their owners slept.
It happened this way.
There comes a point in every free service’s life when it feels the need to generate income. If you’ve been around longer than ChatRoulette, you know this, and you knew the day of reckoning would come. Well, it came over the weekend in the form of an email to bloggers that if they wished to use Picapp images in the future, they’d have to register and install the Picapp widget on their blogs (or insert a line of code in their themes).
That’s a simple yes/no proposition, and easy enough to make up one’s mind about. But whether or not one agreed to the terms, Picapp went ahead and did something to its existing images already embedded in blogs, with the following result:
- every image on the front page of a blog now links to PicApp instead of wherever it linked to before.
In the case of blogs that give credit to their image sources by linking to them, this is a huge deal. Well, I wouldn’t want some third-party service messing with the actual links and content on my site without specific permission in any case, so PicApp has some ‘splainin’ to do this week.
Yet another example of “if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.”
Facebook <3 U!
Posted: October 19, 2010 (05:20) under Humor, Intellectual Property, Security, Software, Technology
I know we occasionally rag on Facebook here, accusing it of being a sort of social media honey trap from which one finds it impossible to completely extricate one’s self, but it’s not that we’re saying they’re actively malevolent. Just look at some of the things they’ve come up with to make your life better:
Customer Service Manifestos
“You are not Facebook’s customer. You are the product that they sell to their real customers—advertisers. Forget this at your peril”
(quote from @cqwww)
The soothing announcement
FACEBOOK WANTS TO MAKE TWO THINGS CLEAR: 1. WE’RE COMMITTED TO PROTECTING YOUR PRIVACY. 2. YOU’RE ADORABLE WHEN YOU SLEEP.
The Facebook Phone
Where am I? WordPress and Windows
Posted: September 28, 2010 (21:34) under Intellectual Property, Software, Support, Technology
 Image via Wikipedia
As the internet found out yesterday, the thirty million bloggers who’d staked their digital turf at Windows Live Spaces were rather abruptly informed that they had six months to pack up and leave: specifically, to WordPress.com, which appears to be the only platform to which a direct Export is even possible from that platform.
We’re excited to announce that WordPress.com is now the default blogging platform for Windows Live Spaces users. We’ve worked with our partners at Microsoft to create a simple migration service for Spaces bloggers to easily bring all their posts, comments, and photos to WordPress.com.
Over a six month period, beginning today, Windows Live Spaces users will have the option to move their blogs to WordPress.com. To make this possible, we’ve created a brand new importer for Windows Live Spaces to WordPress.com. New Windows Live users will also be offered a WordPress.com blog when they choose to create a new blog.
That is what you call an offer you can’t refuse.
Suddenly, WordPress.com has gone from a relatively pastoral 5 million users to more than 6 times its original size, with the same amount of support staff. AND the exporter has a few glitches, like not taking draft posts along with it, and if you’re a drafty blogger, you KNOW what that means: all heck breaking loose when you find your carefully-crafted words missing from your own blog!
Staff at WP.com report that, as of right now, the import servers are swamped and they advise allowing 24 hours for the import to take place. It is not reversable. It is not really optional either, unless you want to lose everything: although Microsoft will maintain the existing content for six months, at that point the Live Spaces themselves go poof.
Welcome to the world of someone else’s service: it’s up to them when you get traded and what you get out of it; in this case, objectively you’d have to say this is going to be an improvement for those affected, but it could just as easily have gone badly, depending on whom Microsoft made a deal with. Whether you’re traded for magic beans, a pot of gold, or a plug nickel isn’t up to you, nor is where you land, if you’ve been hosted on a platform without a robust exporter.
If it makes you feel any better, remember: the same thing happened to Gretzky!
Once again, this has been a public message from the Own Your Own Turf reminder service of Offsite Data Backup!
Tags: Blog, Windows Live Space, WordPress.com
Objects in the mirror may be closer than they appear
Posted: August 25, 2010 (00:59) under Bugs, Humor, Software, Technology
or vastly farther away, if you’re using Microsoft software:
 Estimation; Bill Gates was never terribly precise
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