future of ~the internet~

the "if it works, it works" argument

I also remember people complaining about Amazon's poor customer service for years! They were notorious for not having a published phone number anywhere on the site. They now have it as an option after bouncing through a troubleshooting dialog about order problems.

never have problems w/ amazon -- prime!!!

they're also shitty to their temp workers

http://www.mcall.com/news/local/mc-allentown-amazon-complaints-20110917,0,7937001,full.story

shit just shows up! fast!

I think my point is that while the big picture is a relevant part of user experience (yeah, UX) that the particular web design part of it isn't one that I've seen with a direct link to Bezos.

That doesn't necessarily mean that there are designers that have been there for the last fifteen years who should have the credit, or that Bezos has no input in the hiring, but part of having a well-run business is the ability to hire talented people. Generally, giving people credit starts at the top but should really flow down, while blame too often is laid on the lower tiers when it should make its way up. No executive does an excellent job without relying on talented people, and no grunt worker really fails without levels of management having failed in some way.

markers I also have amazon prime but it's not the solution to everything :)

I'm speaking more to the parts of user experience that deal with interface design and actual web interactions and the closest the article you sent gets to that is: "Customer experience includes having the lowest price, having the fastest delivery, having it reliable enough so that you don't need to contact anyone. Then you save customer service for those truly unusual situations."

That's kind of a far cry from web experience! That speaks more to supply chain, which Amazon does remarkably well.

― so i had sex with a piñata (mh), Friday, September 23, 2011 8:36 PM (8 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

i'll own up here that when i said 'bezos on that other level' i was sorta pulling it out of my ass as shorthand for 'amazon knows what its doing wrt ux'

hahaha

I want the name and title of all of your managers, hoos, so I can give them credit when you do something insightful

and that the consistency of ux bespeaks a consistency of vision that suggests a braintrust, and that i'd be surprised if bezos himself wasn't part of that in some way

I like how markers makes fun of things while at the same time being extremely sincere about them. It's like he's merged the sarcastic meaning with the literal meaning.

i do live prime tbh

i love physical books and being able to get them in two days is really nice -- esp. w/ amazon's selection & prices

love, not live

coming soon amazon liveprime

order your life in realtime

damnnnnnnn *orders life*

free 2-day shipping!

well, for only $79.99 a year

has a hoos ever worked with IA, UX, or web teams?

yah i've done junior IA stuff as an intern and its where i want to be eventually

lookin at u of balt's UX/IA grad program for next fall, fingers crossed

free 2-day shipping!

― rebels against newton (Z S), Friday, September 23, 2011 5:10 PM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

well, for only $79.99 a year

― rebels against newton (Z S), Friday, September 23, 2011 5:11 PM

XD

speaking of

http://www.mcall.com/news/local/amazon/

The prevailing American story line right now is seething anger at politicians: that they’re corrupt, or heartless, or socialist, or dumb. But the Amazon story, and many other recent developments, suggest that the problem is significantly deeper.

Far beyond official Washington, we would seem to be witnessing a fraying of the bonds of empathy, decency, common purpose. It is becoming a country in which people more than disagree. They fail to see each other. They think in types about others, and assume the worst of types not their own.

It takes some effort these days to remember that the United States is still one nation.

It doesn’t feel like one nation when a company like Amazon, with such resources to its name, treats vulnerable people so badly just because it can.

more ~past of the internet~, neat but kinda pointless resurrection of geocities data

http://vimeo.com/29523075

http://cdespinosa.posterous.com/fire

damn

thx for that

“Think of it as a product like foursquare or Klout initially, but around your financial life,” Mr. King said. “Wherein a typical bank might say–you come to them, and you say you want a credit card–and you’re a customer with a score of say 580, the bank’s going to say ‘no, you’re marginal, you’re too high-risk.’ But we might give them a card based on other things. Say they have 10,000 friends on Facebook and Twitter. We’ll say okay, they have high influence–we should probably pay this guy to get access to his friends list!”

~You May Soon Be Able to Get A Credit Line Based on Your Klout Score~ with this thing Movenbank

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=aXV-yaFmQNk#!

why don't embeds work anymore??

They work if you take that "Feature=player_embedded" stuff out.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXV-yaFmQNk

oh thx good to know

Liked it up until the pointless Steve Jobs idolatry, at which I vomited on my shoes.

true

the nearly universal tone of the comments is WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU PARENTS which kind of surprised me?

but then i'm a guy who regularly posts on future of ~the internet~

An international group of online hackers is warning a Mexican drug cartel to release one of its members, kidnapped from a street protest, or it will publish the identities and addresses of the syndicate's associates, from corrupt police to taxi drivers, as well as reveal the syndicates' businesses.

The vow is a bizarre cyber twist to Mexico's ongoing drug war, as a group that has no guns is squaring off against the Zetas, a cartel blamed for thousands of deaths as well as introducing beheadings and other frightening brutality.

"You made a huge mistake by taking one of us. Release him," says a masked man in a video posted online on behalf of the group, Anonymous.

"It won't be difficult; we all know who they are and where they are located," says the man, who underlines the group's international ties by speaking Spanish with the accent of a Spaniard while using Mexican slang.

"We demand his release," says the Anonymous spokesman, who is wearing a mask like the one worn by the shadowy revolutionary character in the movie V for Vendetta, which came out in 2006. "If anything happens to him, you sons of (expletive) will always remember this upcoming November 5."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJORGO1Q2VY

whoah

They're going to shut down their Facebooks accounts too?!?!

"It won't be difficult; we all know who they are and where they are located," says the man, who underlines the group's international ties by speaking Spanish with the accent of a Spaniard while using Mexican slang.

need to watch the vid again but i'm pretty sure it's text-to-speech, sounds to me no more high-minded than 'mexican hacker using tts voice w/default spanish accent.'

p sure the only thing this guarantees is that kidnapped anon is now headless anon.

anon veracruz fb page is saying none of their people have been kidnapped, the guy who orig posted the video says 'opcartel' is going forward, sanctioned or not.

u do realize though that if a list of names comes out, no matter who puts it out, all those people have targets on their backs from the many, many people gunning for the zeta's top spot, right? xp

like if this goes forward its gonna mean a lotta z connected ppl gonna wind up dead and vcruz is gonna get even messier as the cycle of reprisal intensifies.

and yeah prob broader reprisals by z against net activists in general, can easily see them putting their victims in anon masks to make the point.

well yeah it could be some almighty bloodbath, but I don't see how threats like this are going to make the kidnappers 'see sense'. could look worse for them to back down to some vague anon threats. nb i don't know much about this situation in general so zeta thinking is beyond me.

idk about 'seeing sense,' sounds like all anon wants is their mans released

but yeah i mean this is a no-win for the z's imo

https://squareup.com/cardcase/tabs

https://www.dwolla.com/

if you're mentioning that, I'm gonna rep for the local payment up-and-comer

rad

When the kidnapped activist was freed on Nov. 4 with a note from her captors threatening to kill 10 people for every name released, OpCartel was quickly called off. “We blackmailed them,” says Barrett Brown, an informal spokesman for Anonymous, noting that the Zetas don’t often release victims alive. “And they blackmailed us.”