Elliott C. Back: In Aere Aedificare

I don’t know if this is new or old, but check out the latest design of Twitter, which features three panels for the questions “What?”, “Why?”, and “How?”. They look really quite nice, so I thought I’d drop a couple screenshots here for you:

I know I complained about the reliability and uptime of Twitter recently, but I’d really like to applaud the designer and company here for producing such clear concise work. I love the washed out colors and ultra-minimalist style. The large type and boxiness also work well.

This advertisement for a NY-based programmer showed up on Craigslist, and I expect that more will follow:

YOU CAN HAS CHEEZEBURGER?
YOU HAS A FLAVUR?

If so, you may be the right fit for this Midtown Manhattan Web Design Startup! We are a small company looking for a Senior LOLCode Developer, preferably with at least 1 month experience developing LOLapps. Please send a resume, along with links to any web-based LOLapps you have developed.

KTHXBYE

The recently invented LOL.NET has a compiler for the Microsoft CLR which you can use with MS Visual Studio to write and compile code. For example, to loop from 0 to 9 and print each number and then exit, you would write (it’s horrible, brace yourself):

HAI
CAN HAS STDIO?
I HAS A VAR
IM IN YR LOOP
    UP VAR!!1
    VISIBLE VAR
    IZ VAR BIGGER THAN 10? KTHXBYE
IM OUTTA YR LOOP
KTHXBYE

This can be compared to a normal language which might write:

void main(int argc, char *argv[]) {
    for(int i=0; i < 10; i++)
        printf(”%d”, i);
}

Among other things, they have an Eclipse syntax highlighter, an Erlang bytecode compiler, a Ruby interpreter, a javascript implementation, C and C++ support, and some translators into LUA, JS, and other languages. Check out the lolcode 1.2 language spec if you’re bored.

It seems like Amazon.com is offering a free three month trial of their Prime program, for which I’ll eagerly sign up:

As the 3-month free trial period ends, if you want to join Amazon Prime, do nothing. At that point we will enroll you in a 12-month membership and charge a $79 annual fee to the credit card listed below. If you are not interested in joining Amazon Prime after the free trial, that’s okay, too. We make it easy to cancel online any time before the trial ends, and we’ll even send you a reminder e-mail along the way. We’re hoping you’ll like the membership and will want to continue.

They promise to remind me to cancel it! That’s great of them:

This makes 2-day shipping free, and 1-day shipping cost about $3.99. Great deal:

Now I’ll leave it up to you to decide what I bought that will get here before Friday, eh? You can read more about the Amazon Prime Program (which costs $79 per year), and if you’re signed in, it may offer you a free trial.

Update: Since people seem confused about what Amazon actually offered and delivered, here are the emails I received from them, verbatim:

Subject: [commerce] Amazon Prime Free Trial Membership Confirmation
From: prime@amazon.com
Date: 2/8/2006 9:10 PM

Hello from Amazon.com.

Congratulations, you successfully enrolled in the Amazon Prime Free Trial! You can now take advantage of free Two-Day Shipping and upgraded Overnight Shipping for only $3.99 on millions of eligible items through May 8, 2006. You also will receive free Standard Shipping on items not eligible for expedited shipping.

When your trial membership ends, it will be automatically upgraded to a 12-month membership for $79. You will have the opportunity to opt out of the automatic upgrade before the trial ends. You can opt out of the upgrade, change your payment method for the upgrade, and perform other administrative tasks for your Amazon Prime membership in Your Account: www.amazon.com/your-account

As an Amazon Prime Free Trial member, you’re welcome to invite up to four household members to share your subscription. Please note, members you invite will need to know your birthday and enter their own birthday. You can manage your account settings and invite or remove members in Your Account: www.amazon.com/your-account

You can read more about Amazon Prime on our online Help pages: www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/browse/-/13819211/

Thank you for subscribing to Amazon Prime and shopping at Amazon.com.

Best regards,
Amazon.com Customer Service
www.amazon.com

Subject: [commerce] Your free trial of Amazon Prime will expire on May 08, 2006 and will automatically upgrade
From: primeclub@amazon.com
Date: 5/6/2006 2:00 AM

Dear Elliott C. Back:

*** Your free trial of Amazon Prime will expire on May 08, 2006 and will automatically upgrade to a full membership for $79. ***

If you have enjoyed your Amazon Prime benefits and wish to remain a member, you don’t need to take any extra action. That is why we asked for a credit card when you signed up for the free trial: to make the conversion truly automatic and ensure you have uninterrupted access to your Amazon Prime benefits. We will charge your credit card $79 and your trial membership will upgrade to a full, 12-month membership (that is 12 months in addition to the period of free membership you received).

We are notifying you now, before the upgrade takes place, so that you may update your payment information (if necessary) or cancel the automatic upgrade. To make these changes, start by following these three steps:

– Visit Your Account at www.amazon.com/your-account/
– Click on “Manage Your Amazon Prime Membership”
– Log in using the Amazon.com account that you used to sign up for your trial membership

*** How do I cancel the automatic upgrade? ***

If you do not wish to automatically upgrade to a full, 12-month membership at a cost of $79 when your free trial membership expires, then click the “Do not upgrade” button. On the membership status screen, you will see a message that reads “Your trial membership will not upgrade to a full membership automatically.” Note that you will also be able to change your
mind and switch back to an automatic upgrade before the trial period ends.

If you choose to cancel your membership during the trial period, you will stop receiving Amazon Prime benefits when the trial period ends and will not be charged $79. Also, you will not be charged for any Prime benefits you enjoyed during the trial period. However, you will not be able to sign up for additional free trials of Amazon Prime.

*** How do I change my payment information? ***

At the end of the line that begins “Payment method for upgrade,” you will see an “Edit” button. Click that button to change the payment method that we will use to upgrade your membership.

We hope that you have seen how easy and convenient shopping on Amazon.com is when you’re a member of Amazon Prime, and that you’ll want to continue when the trial period ends.

Thank you for shopping at Amazon.com.

*** Details of your free trial membership ***
sign-up date: February 08, 2006
expiration date: May 08, 2006

If anyone would like more detail, please contact me.

Update: Techdirt is again mentioning the customer service issue that this is becoming. I have prime and love it, but some others thought they were on a free trial, got billed, and now hate Amazon. And, they’re starting to yell.

The blogosphere today is in collective shock after Google downgraded the pagerank of many leading blogs and news sources. The response tends to fall into several categories: we knew it was coming, pagerank doesn’t matter, and we deserved it. Techcrunch does a pretty good job of examining the evidence behind the update:

The only clear change appears to be among large scale blog networks and similar link farms, where each site in the network provides hundreds of outgoing links on each page of the blog to other blogs in the network, in some cases creating tens, even hundred of thousands of cross links. Previously such behavior has been rewarded by Google with high page rank, although it would now appear that this loop hole may now be shut.

Here’s a table of pagerank changes organized by the percent difference:

An interesting tidbit comes from Syntagma who note that “the majority of these decreases happened after a human review.” So, it might not be easy for you to fix your linking strategy and regain Pagerank automatically.

Ironically, this coincides with GOOG hitting $666 today. And, Silicon Valley is calling us “Pagerankled.” For you people out there running blogs, an immediate solution is the following:

• Make sure you nofollow any links that you don’t directly control
• Avoid using static link-farms like directories, like linking to every blog in your network from every page
• Don’t let your commenters add links to their sites

Here’s an example of the link distribution of my site after I’ve properly annotated some links with nofollow:

The green areas (header, footer, content, and some meta data) represent regular links, the red areas (advertising, sidebar links, tags, and related stories) are nofollow links, and the blue areas are dynamic links (javascript widgets) which don’t need updating. I am not sure if I want to nofollow anything else–what do you think?

Update: Forbes weighs in, “it could also be Google simply taking into account the growth of the Internet.”

Microsoft just made a $240M bet for 1.6% of Facebook, a ridiculously high valuation.