CopyDiva

At the requisite weekend BBQ, I chatted with my friend Caroline, a relative Internet newbie who is completely enthralled with all things online. I had told her about Pandora Internet Radio, and she was telling someone else about it, which reminded me that I hadn’t listened in a while. So, today, while working, I logged in to Pandora.

Wow, it’s really changed since the last time I saw it.

The whole interface received an upgrade, which is nice, but I have to say their ad model is just, well, weird. I initially could not figure out why there was a strange looking pair of legs on the page. Then, I see that I am invited to listen to “Schick Quattro Radio for Women,” or add it to my radio list. Now why would I do that? I mean, do I care that much about what razor I use that it is somehow related to my music choices? This is some weird-ass brand extension idea. I would be extremely curious to see what kind of impact this has.
I did also see the opportunity to listen to radio stations put together by Budweiser, which seems more likely because listening to music somehow seems more related to drinking beer than shaving my legs.

I decided to click through on the Schick ad, and it just got weirder. I was offered a free leg reading –uh, what? Somebody actually got paid to come up with the oddest idea for a viral campaign I think that I have ever seen. And odd here is not good, I can’t actually believe that someone would actually send this to a person, wasting bandwidth in the process. I only did it so I could blog about how weird it is.

With my fake name (Eunice), I selected pictures of what kind of shoes (flip-flops, sneakers, heels), clothes, and toe nails (painted, unpainted, tattooed) to get my leg reading — which it turns out is a really dumb ad for these new razors for women. The lack of imagination and fun value that’s required for a successful viral campaign is not anywhere to be found in this campaign.

But this is really besides the point. Really what I cannot figure out is why I would want to listen to song selections made by Schick. Especially if I am making my own radio stations on Pandora because I think I know what I like.

Today someone told me about We Feel Fine, a very addictive site that basically takes keyword search strings and organizes them by feeling (such as happy, sad, excited, masochistic, etc), then represents them in different ways — text are dots, the colors represent a feeling; squares are pictures — and then lets you decide how you want to view the mass of feelings posted to the Internet. There are six different “movements” to choose from, including just having murmurs, or the sentences where the words appear, come up one after another on the screen. I am in no way doing justice to the very cool UI they have put together. Some of the information isn’t quite right, but still, I had fun today looking at women’s feelings in the city of Baghdad, Iraq today (kind of depressing), and also people in Israel. You can even narrow your search by weather, which is kind of funny too.

So, its cool, and I think it has way more value than Twitter, which I can’t seem to figure out the point of (though maybe it is because my friend list is so lame — no offense, friends). Plus, Twitter seems to be down half the time I think about Twittering. So, its just frustrating.

We Feel Fine is the perfect web lurker experience, kind of like PostSecret but with way more ways to slice the information, and it isn’t edited, like PostSecret is. Anyway, I find it very addictive.

Yesterday, my son and I got new cell phones. We finally reached our two-year “you get a new phone now!” date — he was beyond excited, since he had a cheapy crap phone we bought on Ebay after he lost one nice phone skiing and sent another through the laundry (sound familiar, parents?). He decided on a V-Cast phone so he could get music on his phone. This V-Cast thing is quite the scam, as far as I can tell. The monthly fee only covers the airtime you’re accessing the V-Cast system so you don’t use your minutes. The songs are so incredibly expensive — $2/each — that I am amazed anyone decides to buy this service. Then again, what do I know, I’m not a teenager.

The craziest thing about the whole buying experience with Verizon is that I wanted to change my service level at the same time, since I apparently am such a big cell phone blabber that I blow past my minutes pretty consistently. But, every time you change anything on your plan, you automatically extend your plan by a year. So, according to the Verizon customer service guy, I should wait until the day after buying the new phone BEFORE changing my service level. Why? Because, and I know this is wacky math and all:

new phone = new 2-year contract
new service = new 1-year contract

Total: new 3-year contract

Basically, by changing phones and plans on the same day, they add these two together and come up with 3 years. By waiting 1 day, I add just 1 more day to my two year contract. Now, this has got to be the stupidest, customer-irritating thing — no wait, the whole contract thing really is, but this is just an extension on that whole story. Why isn’t their system as smart as that customer service agent?