Alan Is Good

In just five months, she gained over 2.1 million followers on Twitter.  Not nearly as impressive as @AlanIsGood, but not bad for a 16 year-old pop star.  For a time, things were good, but Miley decided to make like Trent Reznor and become a qwitter, even going one step further by actually deleting her account.

It’s always a party in the USA when you’re Miley, so she explains her decision via (drumroll) YouTube rap video. More »

No apologies for any bias or skew this post may contain.  The past 5 years have been horrendous for American horror, and original films like the SAW franchise have been our only saving grace from throwing in the towel and letting Japan go ahead and handle the entire genre.

Yes, the SAW franchise is five sequels deep.  I strongly recommend watching them chronologically, as the story definitely builds upon each previous movie.  In an age with remakes abound,  films produced around gore/new CGI tricks instead of storyline and plot, the SAW franchise is original, unpredictable, and THE most successful horror franchise ever.  Fact.

I put together a rough breakdown of the box office success the SAW franchise has seen to date:

(Hover over the movie posters to see movie data) More »

Facebook Is Now In A Complicated Relationship With FriendFeed

First off, Facebook acquired FriendFeed for $50M this week.  If you’re not familiar with FriendFeed, its an aggregator of your activity on Facebook, *Twitter (<—- :-O )*, Youtube and dozens of other compatible social networks.  It’s a good site to use.  TechCrunch posted pics of the meeting:

Yeah, these guys party real hard.  Anyway, everyone goes around whispering that this is really bad news for Twitter, but 9 out of 10 people I asked couldn’t give a decent explanation for how or why.  Sensationalism and drama are awesome, don’t get me wrong, but its good to be able to simplify and dissect conflict. More »

According to the Rolling Stone and other entertainment news sources, Trent Reznor threw in the Twitter towel last week.  A few weeks ago I wrote about the ongoing trolling by Twitter users from across various message boards and forums.  Reznor said he was going to use Twitter solely to announce news and tour dates, but the @ reply trolling didn’t calm down, and succeeded in frustrating him further.

I’m truly surprised at the number and intensity of anti-Reznor blog posts and comments.  It seems like every time someone posts that “Reznor is God,” a troll is born.  Even though I disagree subjectively with a lot of the angles, I respect this post written by AndreaUrbanFox, which fully details and maps out the Reznor vs. anti-Reznor trolls saga.

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(A good video to play/listen to while you read this)

Bite The Hand That Tweets

Nine Inch Nails vocalist Trent Reznor explains in a recent message board post that he’s done with online communities and social networks due to a large amount of negativity and trolling directed toward him.  Apparently there was an unmanageable amount of hateful comments and replies posted to Reznor on NIN.com and Twitter that set him off and resulted in his Twitter ‘vow of silence.’

Reznor explains, “The problem with really getting engaged in a community is getting through the clutter and noise. In a closed environment like nin.com a lot of this can be moderated away, or code can be implemented to make it more difficult for troublemakers to persist. It’s tedious and feels like wasted energy doing that shit, but some people exist to ruin it for others – and they are the ones who have nothing better to do with their time.”

While the moderators of the NIN boards were doing a good job deterring trolls and hateful posts, it’s the nature of the troll to circumvent and persist despite active policing.  Nine times out of ten, if you ask an internet troll, “Why?” the response is, “To waste someone else’s time.”  Sad, but true.

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Another Xtranormal video by AlanIsGood:

Lately I’ve noticed a few updates and notables to some of my previous posts.  None truly warrant an entire new post on the matter, so I’ll just jot them down here in this update post.  It’ll be like those reality shows on VH1, where they have the “Reunion Special” and everyone gets together for 15 more minutes of drama.

The Darker Side of Google Latitude

I wrote about the dark effects of this new app, but I didn’t consider the lighter side!  Yesterday TechCrunch wrote about a San Francisco woman whose purse was stolen, with her iPhone inside.  Sure enough, she was a Google Latitude user.  She called her sister who had access to see her location at all times, and they were able to track down the criminal, arrest him and get the purse back.   Check out this CBS video covering the story.  Epic!  Turn on your Google Latitude function and let a family member have constant updates to your location.  You never know!

The Fate of The Facebook Relationship Status

Facebook has since changed the layout of their front page, and for a time I thought this nullified my relationship status posts.  It seemed like the only way to check on relationship status was to actually visit a person’s page, which so few of us do on a regular basis.  Then I realized that the relationship updates do show up in the Highlights box on the right side of the page!  In my personal life, I found it in me to hit the “Like” button for a recently ended relationship of a long time friend.  It also put the status update at the top of the highlights list for the week.  

Additionally, with the “Comment” option on these relationship updates, I’ve been seeing more and more threads unfold from them.  So far they have all been light hearted, fun comments, like ‘ooo,’ or ‘who’s the lucky gal?” but I have yet to see snarky or vindictive ones.  My appreciation for my friend’s breakup probably falls under that category, but I’ve made several justifications internally for why I did it.  

Skittles Tastes the Fail Boat

Skittles is again using the Twitter Search results for “Skittles” as their homepage at Skittles.com.  At this point who knows what their strategy is.  They have the age filter, but no word filters or anything.  It’s like they just said, “Umm, I dunno.  Put the Twitter results up again, I guess.”

Cisco Fatty and Social Media Censorship

Many bloggers wrote the standard ‘this is why you should watch what you say on Twitter,’ or the ‘how to lose your job via Twitter’ postings, but I didn’t really see anyone take my stance.  My stance – you know, the one that was featured on Brazen Careerist and was one of the most popular posts of the week!  The only other update to this post was that horrible cisco fatty video on YouTube.  Very high chance of being offended, even higher chance of chuckling hysterically.

TIME Magazine’s Most Influential Person of . . . LOLwut? 

The voting for this is still going on, but it’s all for naught.  4Chan’s founder, moot, is ahead by an astronomical amount.  Here’s the latest tally, from TIME’s website: 

Of course, it doesn’t end there.  Just to show the world the power of the Anonymous, they also went ahead and strategically voted up the rest of the top 21 such that they acrostically spelled out MARBLECAKE, ALSO THE GAME.  Do you see it?  The phrase means nothing, really.  It’s another meme that’s lulzy.  Just the muscles of the Anonymous being flexed for the entire world to see.  The day that a viral campaign or digital PR effort is somehow supported by the Anonymous is the day that the marketers responsible for the campaign become quite wealthy.  

No Further Updates

This concludes the VH1 reunion special “AlanIsGood Blog Posts.”  See you next season.  And by next season, I mean tomorrow.