WordTracker is a useful tool for webmasters. WordTracker tells you what searchers are looking for on the web.
Occasionally, WordTracker will surprise you with an insight into something interesting going on in the world. Here’s a WordTracker result I just found:
Search Term
Number of Searches
iphone
9,423
iPhone Complaints
3,321
Apple iPhone
1,149
What this tells us is that “iPhone Complaints” is the second most popular search term which ordinary web searches use to find information about the Apple iPhone.
It looks as if there are plenty of unhappy iPhone customers on the Internet!
iPhone Complaints
Common iPhone complaints include:
No support for custom ringtones
Battery life shorter than promised
Sound volume insufficient
Lack of Flash support in the web browser
Built-in GPS is not user accessible
Built-in Bluetooth cannot be used for data transfer
Built-in camera has no ability to be adjusted
Lack of useful applications (SSH, SFTP, VNC, Remote Desktop)
No games
No voice dialing
Keyboard is very difficult to use
A lot of Apple/AT&T customers have already returned their iPhones for more mature devices such as the RIM BlackBerry.
Get ready for an incredible ride. This first person shooter game is one the best crafted games out there. Find yourself in the city of Rapture with music and mood set in the 40’s and 50’s filled with advanced robots and gadgets that one could imagine during its time. Along with incredible details put into the design graphics you find yourself totally into the game like you are really living in the world of Andrew Ryan. Every fixture, door, sculpture looks vintage and looks like it belongs there, no “check out this design to be wowed” graphic here. Every graphics feels like it was made for a big budget Hollywood movie that was made to make the audience feel just like they were in the past, including the science fiction of the past too.
As you go along, the battles that you come across are gory, graphic and intense. The damage sustained and delivered appears so real that you will be saying “ooohhhh” and “aaaoohhh” with every blow and surprise blow. The bad guys feel like they are from the original “Twilight Zone” and science fiction comic books of the 40’s and 50’s. The only thing is that these bad guys have some agility and speed. Somebody greased their gears, juiced up their cathode tubes and lit a fire under their boots pretty good because these guys mean business and are after you for a quick kill. You can use “plasmids” and “tonics” to build your character without needing high stats. The enemies are tuned into your fighting style and react accordingly to it, no pre-determined killing moves. You really got a fight on your hands and these bad guys are out to finish the job. Get the game on Xbox 360 as soon as you can and jump right into this magnificent and intense game that will have you completely zoned into it.
I’ve stumbled upon the following e-mail that was sent by a disgruntled webmaster. Enjoy it
I must say, I’m quite upset. I have been using images from your website on my website for a long time now and suddenly they are gone, and I am concerned. I am using my website to build up my business which is not easy and you changed the location or deleted them or something.
My concern is that if you do not upload the images again, I might have to contact my lawyer as I am using these images for the purpose of advertising and this sudden change without warning means I have to find where you moved them and to get them working again.
Why would you do such a thing? I am an honest business man and small businesses like mine never get respect. I hope you realize it took me a long time to find images I liked. Now I have to find your images again. Please put them back right away. I don’t think you want me to call my lawyer about this.
After experimenting for a few months with various ways to introduce ads in their videos, YouTube is finally launching a video ad platform. The current format is represented by a strip which occupies 20% of the video. The ad appears only after 15 seconds of the movie have passed and if the user clicks the ad, the video is paused and a new window opens for the ad. If the user does not click the ad, it’s displayed for 10 seconds and then it disappears.
As for the pricing, Google choose to apply a 20$ fee for 1000 impressions. Although it’s a little weird they use this instead of the Google classic Pey Per Click system, but Google officials think that safer CPM model will be better for their customers.
So having YouTube as a constant user-generated content pool, Google can provide extensive coverage for publishers and interesting ways to financially attract advertisers. But for now the platform has to be tested to eliminate eventual bugs and to attract publishers.
As we speak, every single blog in the Blogspot network is not functional, returning a 502 Server Error. That includes the Google Blog itself. Oftenly, the connection to some other blogs hosted on Blogspot times out after a minute, leaving a few question marks behind.
At a quick closer look, the Blogger network is down as well, including their main sites. Could this be due the blog migrations? Perhaps.
I couldn’t find any valid explanation from Google, downtime reports or to be honest any official stance, but I will keep you updated as soon as I find out.
In the mean time, if anyone has any kind of idea or information related to this, please share it with the others by leaving a comment. I would appreciate it.
Keep in touch,
When Google launched their new Google Gears service a couple of months ago, I was sure online-based applications will make full use of it. And that’s just the case with Zoho, one of the most popular online office suite and a direct contestant of Google Docs.
The fact that they used Google Gears to provide offline availability for Zoho Writer before Google did is funny in a way. But for now only Zoho Writer will be accessible offline, the rest of the Zoho suite is going to be made available in weeks to come, and besides that the documents will be read-only when offline.
After the install of the Google Gears plugin a “Go Offline” button will be enabled, not that this only works with Internet Explorer 6 or higher or Mozilla 1.5 or higher. Zoho lovers should be pleased, as this is only the beginning and other features will become available in the following 4 or 5 weeks.
If you’re a comfortable person, or if you just love to have the latest entertainment gadgets, the researchers from the Osaka university have just the thing for you. The gadget is designed to make you control your iPod with a maximum of ease and absolutely no use of your hands.
The headgear uses “infrared sensors and a microcomputer” to detect when you clench your teeth for a second or more and uses that to send commands to your iPod. The system is said to avoid accidental mouth gestures and allows you to talk or chew gum in the same time as you use the iPod headgear.
And the developers don’t plan on stopping here, they say they want to make this available for larger arrays of devices, and of course better the system itself. It might be comfortable and some might like it, but I really don’t think it’ll be such a great (or useful) gadget, but then again, I’m not the person who likes to make weird faces when changing the song I listen to.
Take a close look at the following two pictures. The first one represents a picture of the Microsoft staff 29 years ago in 1978. Here are the members from the portrait, from left to right.
Top row: Steve Wood, Bob Wallace, Jim Lane. Middle row: Bob O’Rear, Bob Greenberg, Marc McDonald, Gordon Letwin. Bottom row: Bill Gates, Andrea Lewis, Marla Wood, Paul Allen.
Yes, that little kid in the bottom left corner is actually Bill Gates. He was just a teenager then, but he grew and had an important contribution to what Microsoft is today. Who would have thought back then that those geekish people would propel Microsoft into the large corporation it stands as today?
Easy to see they were all ‘hippies’ back then (or were people dressing like that 30 years ago?) There were some at Apple Corporation as well, so maybe we could say that hippies created the personal computer industry. For those interested, the history of the personal computer is (at least partially) interwoven with the 60’s counterculture. An excellent book on this topic is John Markoff’s “What The Dormouse Said: How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer”.
Either way, “Would you have invested back then?”
The second picture presents Microsoft’s senior leadership roles.
From left to right:
Bill Gates, Craig Mundie (Chief Research and Strategy Officer), Ray Ozzie (Chief Software Architect), Steve Ballmer (CEO).
They were at a news conference announcing plans for Ozzie and Mundie to assume increased roles in the company. The picture was taken about a year ago.
If you’re ever put in the position of calling tech support, for any product or service you benefit, you MUST follow a few simple rules that will make you become an integral and respectable person through the eyes of the totally insignificant persons you’re going to talk to.
First of all, impose respect from the first seconds of conversation, avoiding any signs of hello. This way, the tech support operator will realize that you’re a rushed person that has no time to chit-chat, and will definitely prove maximum efficiency in his further actions. You get a bonus if you’re interrupting him from his introductory phrase when he wishes you a good day and says his name.
You must also talk to the person who by now is all the more willing to help, with such colorful terms as “dude,” “man,” “muchacho,” and so on, even if he politely addresses you with “Mr.” or “Mrs.” insert your last name here. You will prove yourself a well-educated person that knows how to communicate efficiently and with dominance.
Since you’ve already been introduced, start complaining about a general issue that has absolutely no connection to your actual problem. And when I’m saying “general issue”, I really mean ANYTHING. If you’ve waited more than a couple of seconds on the line, make sure to remind that to the tech support operator, since obviously he needs to pay more attention to you and your issue. And if you haven’t waited at all, invoke the fact that you’re paying for this conversation. If it’s free, complain arbitrarily about things such as how tediously long the tech support line’s phone number is, complain about the fact that you’re talking to a different person every time you call, and of course, don’t hesitate to mention that you were better with the competition. This acts like spurs to a horse, and will allow the tech support operator to work harder, faster, and outside his normal realm of knowledge to get you to your required fix in record time.
When complaining, make full usage of the phrase “I’m paying for these services that I’m not getting”. I can assure you this will touch the operator’s heart and if he can’t solve your problem from behind his desk, he will come to you in person.
Don’t offer the person you’re talking to the time to identify you or to run some basic check-ups. Maintain constant pressure over him that you’re calling from the cell phone and that he needs to hurry it up. Anyway, these tech support operators have a big wide screen that displays the necessary information. They already know you called three weeks ago from a neighbor’s house, that you wore a blue shirt that day and that you’d had eggs for breakfast — they have access to all this information and more, and know that you want information regarding your bill when you’re calling at 3 AM.
By the way, about that 3AM… As often as possible, try to call only around these hours. Motivate them further by saying that no one’s answering the phone during the day, that someone answers and immediately hangs up, or even better, that the line was busy every time you tried.
Be sure to make full usage of the expression “This is unacceptable!”.
Furthermore, there should be no modesty during a conversation with tech support. You must mention that you’re Doctor Engineer Astronaut Sir “Shaman of the Mountains” Smith and you must enumerate all of your studies and qualifications. Avoid any kind of technical talk. Every bit information the operator shares with you is egregiously wrong. Remember, only you know how things are really going on.
Every call center in the world has a secret agreement with every other telephony provider, landlines or cellphones. The operators are actually paid to talk to you longer. That’s why when you’re being given detailed instructions about what to do, ignore everything and do the first thing that comes to your mind. Don’t offer any feedback, regardless. Again, the operators are monitoring you from the satellite and know what you did to your computer, How long it took you to do it, and what you’re about to do at any given time.
If you follow all of this sage advice, you will pass as an extremely polite man in front of the tech support operators, and those who had the honor of talking to you will tell this encounter to their colleagues, and they will all burst into laughter because they weren’t fully ready and prepared to talk to your highness on the phone.
This text is a joke and should be treated like one. It just concentrates a high number of customer stereotypes I’ve encountered in my two years of technical support over the phone. Depending on the effect of this one, I might have a second part I’ll write about at a later tine. This might not seem that funny to those who never interacted to technical support, but it honestly worths a read nevertheless.
It seems that the problems Skype users were experiencing were over as of yesterday. For the moment Skype officials only posted a brief notice, promising to give more details on Monday.
Hello friends,
Take a deep breath. Skype is back to normal.
On Monday, we’ll provide a more detailed explanation of what happened. Until then, we’d like to apologize and thank you. Precisely in that order.
We know how difficult and frustrating the past two days have been. And still, your good wishes kept flowing in. Thank you for the amazing patience, trust and support!
Yesterday the service came back online, first the VoIP calls an then, the presence and chat services became available. Skype blames the outage on “a deficiency in an algorithm within Skype networking software”. The latest news is that this fault was present in every copy of Skype downloaded since 2003 until now. Although nobody seems to know why the failure of the system occurred now, since it was present since 2003, some say that it has something to do with the Skype network infrastructure that relies on high-bandwith peers. When several of these peers go down the whole network becomes unstable.
For short there’s no exact answers and we’ll have to wait until Monday to find out more.
