More Facebook Folly

If you have a Facebook account, you will be familiar with what I'm writing about today.

People lose their phones all the time, and they create a Facebook Event and invite all their friends just so they can get all their lost phone numbers back. Many of their friends post their phone numbers up there for everyone to see. Sure, the event and its comments are open only to those the Event creator designated, but sometimes that means everyone. Do you want just anyone calling you on your phone? Don't you want your privacy? It can be argued that if someone whom you don't want to get ahold of your number is clever enough, he or she would be able to get it anyway. But by posting your number publicly on such a well-traveled place such as Facebook, you're making it far too easy for your nemeses (that's plural for nemesis) and telemarketers to find you.

Maybe you feel that you don't care who gets your number, so you just post it up there anyway. Well don't complain when you get prank calls, telemarketer calls, or creepy messages.

People have been doing this for years. Why am I suddenly talking about it now? I was just on Facebook right now and I saw the following ad:


I understand and appreciate that Facebook makes it easy and convenient to retrieve your lost numbers. But I would never ask any of my friends or family to post their numbers in such a public forum as a Facebook event. And now there is an app to retain your phone numbers. A freaking Facebook app for storing your phone numbers! Anyone ever hear of an address book!? If you have a bunch of numbers for people you talk to a lot, it's absolutely foolish and mind boggling to only have a copy of them in a device (your cell phone) that is very prone to being misplaced, stolen, lost, etc. Keep a damn copy of your numbers on your computer or in a book so you don't have to inconvenience all your friends and make them vulnerable to time-wasting calls. The idea for this new app is great, but the cause for its existence is ridiculously stupid.

They're everywhere! Part 3

(please read parts 1 and 2 below before reading this)

Speaking of product placement, with the rise of video/computer games as a viable entertainment and storytelling medium, there's no surprise that third party companies are wanting to use them to hawk their products. Video games are especially appealing to those companies because they can easily target specific demographics.

However, product placement in games is not a new thing. Back as far as the days of the Nintendo Entertainment System, we had an entire game that's one big freaking advertisement. It's called Mc Kids, and it features none other than Ronald McDonald and his "friends" like the Hamburglar, that big furry purple thing, the weird duck-like demi-human girl, and I don't remember who else. It was a platformer in the vein of the Mario Bros. series, and it kind of really, really sucked.

Later on, we were treated to another big $50 cartridge of an advertisement, Cool Spot for the Super Nintendo. Yup, 7-up wanted to cash in on this newfangled video game thing and placed its contrived mascot, that red dot in the 7-up logo, into his own game. He was basically a small red disc with arms and legs who wore really cool shades. Yeah, he was cool. So cool that "cool" was in his name! Anyway, that game was actually not bad. But like Mc Kids, it was just one giant advertisement for a food franchise.

If you know of any others, please let me know.

More subtly, we have signs, labels, billboards, decals, and actual objects placed in games to make the player aware of a certain thing. Sometimes painfully aware, literally. In the highly acclaimed NES game Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2, there parts of the game where Foot Soldiers hid behind large Pizza Hut signs and pushed them down onto the turtles as they walked by. The game itself even came with a coupon for Pizza Hut pizza. Wow.

Many sports games nowadays have ads from sponsors of the actual organization. For example, all the companies that sponsor NFL football, whose ads you normally see when you watch a pro game, appear in the latest Madden games for XBox 360 and Playstation 2 and 3.

I don't know where it goes from here, but product placement in games is catching up to (and may be surpassing, for all I know) product placement in movies and TV. But you know what? That doesn't really bother me. We'll see what happens in the near future.

My view on this is that product placement doesn't bother me, but unskippable commercials or ads that appear in front of what I'm reading or watching, forcing me to click to remove them, are unacceptable.

By the way, the title of this post is based on what these little guys from Halo scream when you attack them. Halo, to my knowledge, has no in-game product placement, but I could be wrong.

They're everywhere! Part 2

(please read part 1, below, first)

In the last post, I kind of went off onto a tangent of galactic proportions, so let's get back to the original issue. The real point was that ads in TV are becoming longer and more numerous. But it's not just TV where this is happening.

Anyone who spends any amount of time on the Internet knows that web sites simply do not run without some amount of advertisement. Web space costs money, so those who run sites put ads in order to make money, or at the very least, recoup the costs of the web space. With the advent of flash-based advertisement and other fancy-schmancy ads that feature motion and sound and general, annoying in-your-faceness, it's become a big distraction to say the very least. I realize advertisement is necessary, but from the point of view of someone who doesn't use the web to make money, the magnitude and nature of the ads just presents a gargantuan annoyance.

Sure, there are adblock programs, and very good ones at that, which savvy users can activate to avoid seeing those ads, but not everyone has 'em. And my point is the fact that these ads exist and annoy hundreds of millions of people each day.

Recently, ads have even made their way into web-based video. On the popular YouTube, little text boxes sometimes appear at the bottom on your video while it's playing, forcing you to click a little X button to get rid of it. On other sites, such as cbs2.com and espn.go.com, an actual commercial will play before your video, which the video player does not allow you to skip. This can be exceedingly annoying if you happen to be watching many short clips. Each one will be preceded by an unskippable (yes, that's a word) commercial, often the same one over and over. These vid-ads cannot be blocked by adblock programs, to my knowledge.

People think product placement in movies and TV shows is a big deal... a sign of selling out. But I've never seen any endorsements in movies or TV that are as annoying as these web-video ads. I just wish someone would think of another way. If I think of something, I'll let you know.

They're everywhere! Part 1

Have you seen those huge ads these days that take up a whole side of a bus? Putting ads on the side of a bus is not a new thing. It's quite common to have a little section of the side or back of the bus advertising a movie or a radio station or McDonalds' new old McRib sandwich. I suppose it was just a matter of time before they extended the small, below-the-window displays to bus-height and bus-length monstrosities. I have heard that there are also whole ads that cover both sides of a bus as well as the back, but haven't seen one yet.

But that sort of thing doesn't really bother me. Like all advertisement, it's meant to be omnipresent and kind of in-your-face. And as far as ads go, even full-bus ads aren't really that in-your-face.

Then there's TV ads. We have all grown up with them, no matter how old you are. We're used to it, but now in the age of the new(er) Internet, we have downloadable shows and option to skip the ads that normally accompany the shows. I felt like this was a point of no return of sorts. It's very hard to go back to regular TV, with all the commercials. It's the single leading cause of channel surfing, in my opinion. I don't channel surf though; I just turn it off (there's not much good on these days anyway, but that's a topic for another discussion).

Along these same lines, I'd like to point out that commercials have gotten longer and longer over the years as well. This pretty much sucks because it gives us fewer minutes of show per episode, and forces the showrunners to cut out stuff for time that may have been cool or interesting to see. This is readily apparent when you watch a show either downloaded or from a DVD with the commercials ripped out.

I stumbled across this a while back: the original Star Trek, which debuted in 1966 and ran for 3 seasons, had 50-minute long episodes, including the beginning and end credits, but without commercials. In 1993, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine began, and each episode was barely 45 minutes, including a long credit sequence at the beginning and end. I'd estimate about 42-43 minutes if you take those out.

Some other hour-long shows these days: Babylon 5 (1994, 43 minutes), Psych (current, 42 minutes), Battlestar Galactica (current, 42 minutes), Eureka (current, 42 minutes), and CSI (current, 42 minutes).

The difference might be more striking with half-hour shows. I don't know how long those were in the '60s, but a short-lived favorite cartoon of mine, Undergrads, was 21 minutes long without commercials. And of course, the wildly popular show The Office on NBC is 20-21 minutes when they're not doing their special extended episodes. You know what that means? That means in a half hour, you're only getting 66.667% show and 33.333% commercials. What a gyp!

An exception would be HBO shows, like Entourage, which is 27 minutes out of 30, but that's because it's paid for more by the customers' premium subscription payments than by advertisements.

I guess I should just take consolation in the fact that watching without the commercials will save me 7+ minutes of my day, per episode, so I have more time to blog about it here.

What do you think about this? Do you like the commercials, giving you a sense of suspense while you wait to see what happens after the break? Or would you rather have instant gratification, to see it all at once without interruptions? Have you noticed this when watching DVD episodes?

Of course, I didn't watch any shows today, on TV OR on computer, so where did I find the 7 minutes to type this?