The Red Monkey

I have this installed on my HP Mini 311 and love this app. Worth the upgrade from the stock one in WIndows 7.

They’re baaaack! I just spotted the greatest beverages on Earth in my local Rite Aid while shopping for New Year’s Eve refreshments. The last I heard, Pepsi discontinued the Throwback line after a brief early summer run. But according to Wikipedia – who’s never wrong — the HFCS-free sodas are back for a limited time. Why, oh why, did I give up soda a few days ago. Who does something like that before New Year’s anyway?

The original Mountain Dew throwback was a love it or hate it sort-of thing. I adored it and teared a bit when I couldn’t find it anymore mid-July 2009. But the Mountain Dew Throwback recipe is slightly different this time around. It still uses real sugar instead of HFCS, but now contains more caffeine and orange juice, among other items. So how does it taste? I don’t know. I gave up soda four days ago and I’ll be damned if I give in now.

I love this stuff. And yes I can taste the difference from HFCS to real sugar in soda.

A downtown protest of the climate change talks in Copenhagen became a victim of Wednesday’s snowstorm.

“Not many people showed up because of the blizzard conditions,” said organizer Clea Major, an international studies student at the University of Utah.

It didn’t take long for the six friends to pack up a bullhorn and posters they’d planned to use for their “scream-in,” an outlet for their frustration about the failure of the Copenhagen climate talks earlier this month to curb the pollution blamed for climate change.

Still, they chatted with a few passers-by during the commuter-hour protest near the Gateway, and explained that, blizzard aside, climate change is expected to bring chaos to the global climate, said Major.

She called Wednesday evening’s effort a success and possibly the first in a series. As for the snow, it’s not entirely new; a protest she attended last year in Washington, D.C., suffered a similar fate.

“There is always the irony element,” Major said.

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That damn man made Global Warming stopping another protest. Ha!

Move over, MiFi — this Sprint Overdrive dual-mode WiMAX / EV-DO mobile hotspot that just hit our inbox has taken over as our new object of broadband desire. Our tipster says internal training on the Sierra-built device has already begun, and that the unit itself features a microSD slot, support for location services, and has a 100-foot Wi-Fi range — but sadly we don’t have pricing or availability deets to share yet. We’re hoping we find out more at CES — and we’d bet that new dual-mode U301 WiMAX modem that leaked a couple weeks ago makes an appearance as well. Fingers crossed.

Damn you Sprint. Just as I am planning on leaving you you throw this in my face. The threat of WiMax! Why does Sacramento no have WiMax yet?

Last weekend I wrote about how the big social gaming companies are making hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue on Facebook and MySpace through games like Farmville and Mobsters. Major media can’t stop applauding

the companies long enough

to understand what’s really going on with these games. The real story isn’t the business success of these startups. It’s the completely unethical way that they are going about achieving that success.

In short, these games try to get people to pay cash for in game currency so they can level up faster and have a better overall experience. Which is fine. But for users who won’t pay cash, a wide variety of “offers” are available where they can get in-game currency in exchange for lead gen-type offers. Most of these offers are bad for consumers because it confusingly gets them to pay far more for in-game currency than if they just paid cash (there are notable exceptions, but the scammy stuff tends to crowd out the legitimate offers). And it’s also bad for legitimate advertisers.

The reason why I call this an ecosystem is that it’s a self-reinforcing downward cycle. Users are tricked into these lead gen scams. The games get paid, and they plow that money back into Facebook and MySpace in advertising, getting more users. Who are then monetized via lead gen scams. That money is then plowed back into Facebook and MySpace in advertising to get more users…

Here’s the really insidious part: game developers who monetize the best (and that’s Zynga) make the most money and can spend the most on advertising. Those that won’t touch this stuff (Slide and others) fall further and further behind. Other game developers have to either get in on the monetization or fall behind as well. Companies like Playdom and Playfish seem to be struggling with their conscience and are constantly shifting their policies on lead gen.

The games that scam the most, win.

And some users aren’t dumb, either. For every user who gets tricked into some fake mobile subscription, there’s another who can beat the system. That’s where the legitimate advertisers, like Netflix and Blockbuster, get hit. Users sign up for a free trial with a credit card, get their game currency, then cancel the membership and start over. Netflix has a policy of only paying for a user once. But game developers use a complex set of partner chains to launder these leads and try to get them through for payment. Netflix sees an overall lowering of quality and pays less for leads. Game developers, desperate to monetize, then search for ever more questionable offers to make up the difference. In the end, the decent advertisers are out, and only the worst of the worst remain.

Left alone, the system really will slide into a full blown disaster. The platforms (Facebook and MySpace) are in a position to regulate this, and even have rules prohibiting some scams. But those rules are routinely ignored by developers, and are rarely enforced by Facebook and MySpace.

There can be only one reason Facebook and MySpace turn a blind eye to user protection – they’re getting such a huge cut of revenue back from these developers in advertising. If they turn off the spigot, they hurt themselves.

Zynga may be spending $50 million a year on Facebook advertising alone, fueled partially by lead gen scams. Wonder how Facebook got to profitability way ahead of schedule? It was a surge in this kind of advertising. The money looks clean – it’s from Zynga, Playfish, Playdom and others. But a large portion of it is coming from users who’ve been tricked into one scam or another.

And recent moves by Facebook to shut down application spam only make the problem worse in some way – game developers have to spend more money on advertisers to get users now that the viral channels are shut down. That means the games have to monetize even better. Which means more scams.

It’s time for this to stop. Facebook and MySpace need to create and enforce rules against it so that game developers aren’t tempted to get a competitive edge by scamming users. And if Facebook/MySpace won’t protect users, then the government will have to step in.

There’s an easy way to determine if something is a scam or not. For any particular offer, ask yourself if anyone would buy the product or service if the terms were clearly spelled out for them, and they weren’t being bribed with in-game currency. The answer for many of these is a resounding “no.” A few examples are below.

Examples Of Scams:

A typical scam: users are offered in game currency in exchange for filling out an IQ survey. Four simple questions are asked. The answers are irrelevant. When the user gets to the last question they are told their results will be text messaged to them. They are asked to enter in their mobile phone number, and are texted a pin code to enter on the quiz. Once they’ve done that, they’ve just subscribed to a $9.99/month subscription. Tatto Media

is the company at the very end of the line on most mobile scams, and they flow it up through Offerpal, SuperRewards and others to the game developers.

As you can see in the image below, nothing in the offer says that the user will be billed $10/month forever for a useless service.

Another scam: Video Professor. Users are offered in game currency if they sign up to receive a free learning CD from Video Professor. The user is told they pay nothing except a $10 shipping charge. But the fine print, on a different page from checkout, tells them they are really getting a whole set of CDs and will be billed $189.95 unless they return them. Most users never return them because they don’t know about the extra charge. Woot. Again, sites like Offerpal and SuperRewards flow these offers through to game developers. See here for more on the Video Professor

scam.

Of course, there’s no mention of any of these payments in the offer itself:

An Industry In Denial

Yesterday I attended the Virtual Goods Summit in San Francisco. In the Q&A session of one panel I asked Offerpal CEO Anu Shukla

to explain the ethics of her business, and outlined my ecosystem of hell argument above. Shukla went on a tirade, calling my points “shit, doubleshit, and bullshit” (yes, really), but never really addressed the points. A video of the exchange is below, care of Alexa Lee

.

Offerpal now has a blog post

up on the exchange, but they still don’t address the issues. They offer misdirection, denials and a shield of rules that are never actually enforced.

Sadly, most of the audience of game developers was on Offerpal’s side. Many of these developers see quick dollars with lead gen scams and they don’t really care about how users are affected.

In one session earlier in the day, IGG Cofounder Kevin Xu recommended that game developers “get users in the door to play free, then monetize the hell out of them once they’re hooked.” Sadly, it’s simply human nature to push the rules until they break. It’s time for Facebook and MySpace to protect their users from this stuff and make sure it stops.

p.s. – An interesting development. Offerpal defended their mobile survey scams on stage and in the blog post referenced above, saying there was no scam involved. But today those offers have quietly been pulled down from all the games I’ve checked. If there’s no scam, why remove them? At least some good is coming from my ongoing rants.

Update: Two Companies That Said No To Social Media Scams

Update 2: How To Spam Facebook Like A Pro: An Insider’s Confession

Update 3: Scamville: Zynga Says 1/3 Of Revenue Comes From Lead Gen And Other Offers

Update 4: Zynga Takes Steps To Remove Scams From Games

Update 5: RockYou Joins The No Scams Parade. But What’s Facebook Up To?

Update 6: MySpace Says Zero Tolerance For App Scams, Changes Terms Of Use

Update 7: Tragedy Of The Social Gaming Commons: A Blueprint For Change

Update 8: Offerpal Tries Out A New CEO. Shukla, Queen Of Scams, Is Out.

Update 9: Facebook To Increase Enforcement Of Anti-Scam Rule

Update 10: ScamVille: New Offerpal CEO Admits Mistakes, Makes Bold Promises

Update 11: Zynga CEO Mark Pincus: “I Did Every Horrible Thing In The Book Just To Get Revenues”
Pincus’ response: to zwink or not?

Update 12: Time Magazine: Are You Getting Scammed by Facebook Games?

Update 13: Is Facebook a Paradise for Scammers?

Update 14: “Horrible Things” Slink Back Into Zynga

Update 15: Zynga’s FishVille Sleeps With The Fishes For Ad Violations

Update 16: Zynga To Remove All In Game Offers

Update 17: Zynga’s FishVille Gets Out Of The Penalty Box At Midnight

Update 18: The ScamVille Lawsuit: Facebook, MySpace, Zynga And More Face Possible Class Action Suit

Update 19: Scamville Shakeout: Was Gambit The Right Fall Guy?

Update 20: Video Professor Tries To Bully Washington Post, Fails

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CrunchBase Information

Facebook

Website:	facebook.com
Location:	Palo Alto, California, United States
Founded:	February 1, 2004
Funding:	$716M

Facebook is the world’s largest social network, with over 350 million users.

Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in February 2004, initially as an exclusive network for Harvard… Learn More

MySpace

Website:	myspace.com
Location:	Beverly Hills, California, United States
Founded:	August 1, 2003
Acquired:	July 1, 2005 by Fox Interactive Media for $580M in Cash

MySpace is one of the world’s largest social networks, with about 125 million users. Originally inspired by Friendster, MySpace quickly grew to become the world’s largest social network, before… Learn More

Zynga

Website:	zynga.com
Location:	San Francisco, California, United States
Founded:	July, 2007
Funding:	$219M

Zynga is a network of gaming applications built off of classic games like Poker, Battleship, and Attack!. The games are found on social networks like Facebook and… Learn More

Offerpal Media

Website:	offerpalmedia.com
Location:	Fremont, California, United States
Founded:	June 8, 2007
Funding:	$19.6M

Offerpal strives to provide a new technology platform for the rapidly emerging social media marketplace. Utilizing experience in personalization, CPA advertising, and robust optimization technologies, OfferPal has delivered a “Managed Offer Network”… Learn More

Super Rewards

Website:	srpoints.com
Founded:	2007

Super Rewards is a KITNMedia company.

Super Rewards was established in the summer of 2007 shortly after the Facebook platform launched. It was an in house tool at first and was officially launched to developers in December… Learn More

Information provided by CrunchBase

This is a couple of months old now but I don’t think enough people have read it. Send it to your relatives that fall prey to this garbage.

Windows only: Image resizing tools are a dime a dozen, but free utility Shrink Pic is actually an extremely clever original: Instead of any requiring manual processing, it runs in the background and automatically resizes images whenever you attach or upload them.

A perfect tool for frequent Facebook uploaders, for example, Shrink Pic works with a number of applications (most browsers, Outlook, Thunderbird, Skype, and MSN Messenger, to name just a few) to monitor when you upload, attach, or send pictures via IM. When you do, it automatically resizes the images in the background based on user-defined settings, then uploads the smaller image (so you don’t have to wait several minutes for an upload to complete just to have it severely compressed at its destination anyway). It can even resize multiple photos in the same upload. The speed at which it resizes and the quality of the compression are nothing to sneeze at, either.

Shrink Pic saves the resized images in a temporary directory, so your originals are never touched—just copied. You can use any kind of compression level you want, as well as choose from 5 different photo types to check for. If you want to disable it, all you need to do is uncheck an option in your system tray—and re-enabling it is just as easy. You can even install a portable version to a USB drive, so you never have to resize images again—not even at other computers.

Shrink Pic is a free download, Windows only.

Shrink Pic [via AddictiveTips]

Send an email to Whitson Gordon, the author of this post, at juvgfba@yvsrunpxre.pbzwhitson@lifehacker.com

moc.rekcahefil@nostihw.

CalPERS is mulling over its options after a judge rejected its challenge to the state-worker furlough program.

The California Public Employees’ Retirement System sued Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger in August, saying the three-times-a-month furlough system was hindering the pension fund’s ability to recover from huge investment losses. In that sense, the furloughs are actually backfiring because the investment losses will put further strain on the state’s budget, the suit argued.

Besides, the furloughs at CalPERS aren’t saving the state money because its 2,000 employees aren’t paid from the general fund, the suit said.

But a San Francisco Superior Court judge rejected CalPERS’ argument. In a recent ruling, Judge Charlotte Woolard said Schwarzenegger “acted reasonably in furloughing all employees to save funds and preserve parity.”

Spokesman Brad Pacheco said CalPERS is “going to look at all our options, including an appeal.”

Furloughs have devastated the Sacramento economy, costing the region some $500 million in salary by the time the program ends in June, according to a Bee analysis. Schwarzenegger is planning to extend the furloughs beyond June as the state copes with a $20.7 billion deficit, The Bee has reported.

Some two dozen lawsuits have been filed against the governor over furloughs, with mixed results. An Alameda Superior Court judge recently ruled that the system for furloughing prison guards violates wage laws. But the judge didn’t invalidate the furloughs themselves.

Seeking to dig out from under a $56 billion investment loss, the CalPERS board voted this month to increase the state’s annual contribution to the pension fund by $200 million. The governor, however, wants the contribution to jump by at least $1 billion – a proposal likely to meet with skepticism in the Legislature.

Schwarzenegger says the state should pay its bills promptly rather than defer the impact of the CalPERS losses. His critics say he’s trying to dramatize his proposal to reduce pension benefits for newly hired workers.

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Call The Bee’s Dale Kasler, (916) 321-1066. Read his blog on the economy, Home Front, at www.sacbee.com/blogs.