In probably the 1,000,000th post that MG Siegler has written related to FOURSQUARE (not the fun game we played as kids, but the super “hip” being continually crammed down our throats mobile app/service that allows you to “check-in” to local businesses), he coves a new startup, Future Checkin, which allows you to “Check-In On Foursqaure Without Taking Your Phone Out of Your Pocket“.

The problem this startup is solving according to the article is:

Check-in fatigue in particular is a growing problem. A number of heavy users of Foursquare that I know (myself included) have been complaining in recent months that it’s getting a bit tedious to have to pull out your phone each time to check-in to a venue. Particularly venues that you frequent. Future Checkin absolutely solves that.

After reading that I don’t know where to begin. My initial reaction or solution to check-in fatigue wold be to STOP PLAYING FOURSQUARE. But I think that might be too logical. But I’m not too smart, and maybe I’m missing something. Instead I’ll follow up with while MG and gang might think that Future Checkin will be a big help for frequent users of Foursquare, Future Checkin is acutally the downfall of Foursqaure.

Why the Downfall?

It’s simple. The whole point of engaging in Foursquare is to partake in a “game.” I use the term very loosely cause I don’t see it so much a game, but if you consider anything where you get points and compete as a game then technically it’s a “game.”  Foursquare’s game mechanics are simple, you take you out your phone, open the app, tap check-in, and you gain a check-in point. Whoever has the most check-ins for a location is crowned the Mayor and has all the same privileges a real mayor has (none).

Maybe I’m just old fashioned, but part of the enjoyment of playing games is not so much the end result (getting the high score) but the process (the whole journey is the reward thing). What Future Checkin provides people is basically a way to automatically play the game without any work on the player’s part. That’s like having a program play Pacman for you. That’s not fun, that’s lame. If this is how these mobile local app/games are going to work this raises the question, why bother using stuff like Foursquare if you don’t even need to take it out of your pocket?

But maybe some people feel like the following…

Well I like playing Foursqaure since I can become the mayor of McDonald’s…so Future Check-In allows me to check-in when I forget

That’s true, but it makes the game truly irrelevant when you don’t have to do any additional work. That’s like me getting points every time I pee, take a breath of air, or scratch my butt (actually I’m kind of liking the sound of this game). I don’t have to do any work to play this game, I just do it cause I need to.

The bigger problem is that once someone starts using Future Checkin and racking up more points than another person that other person is going to install it…and then sooner or later everyone will have to install it to be competitive.  Once one person starts cheating it brings down the whole ecosystem and just makes it so everyone has to “cheat” to stay competitve.  Then we have the situation where everyone is playing a game where no one is doing anything…except installing an app on their phone.

So basically Future Checkin makes Foursquare irrelevant.

If You like Future Checkin You’ll Love These Ideas…

Maybe you don’t agree with me and that’s fine.   It doesn’t seem like Techcrunch sees it my way either. Somehow I’ll survive.  However, before I go I’ll leave you with some other awesome super brilliant app ideas that you’re guaranteed to love if you love Future Checkin:

• Future Twitter – automatically tweets and responds to tweets based on your personality – for people who have tweet fatigue
• Future Chat – automatically chats with your friends so you have more time to use Future Twitter – for people who have chat fatigue
• Future Tennis – a robot that will play tennis for you against other opponents – for people who have movement fatigue

Anyway you get the point…if it gets to the point where you aren’t involved in the process it makes me wonder why even do it in the first place?

I did have hope today when I read the headline in Techcrunch, “Why Checking Into Foursquare with Your Phone in Your Pocket Won’t Always Work,” that someone would realize this futility issue with Future Checkin. But the article was talking more of the technological constraints of this working rather than discussing the bigger question of “why bother using Foursquare if we aren’t going to be using it.”

Stay classy Techcrunch.

Disclaimer:

I’m not ragging on the developers of the app, it’s not easy to build and launch stuff. I’m just ranting on the bigger picture of what’s the point of doing something when we aren’t involved. Hopefully you see that.  If not then keep enjoying Foursquare.

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I don’t consider myself an Apple “Fanboy,” but I do happen to like quite a few Apple Products.  For me it’s not about just being blindly loyal to a company for the sake of being loyal (ie Fanboy-ish), but really just choosing to purchase products that I think are better and do what I want them to do.  In college I didn’t like Apple’s products that much.  My roommate had like a G3 iMac and was a big fan of Apple products.  He kept trying to convince me to abandon my home built PC and drink the Apple Kool-Aid.  At the time I wasn’t convinced.  A few years later though after the release of  Mac OSX and playing around with it I decided to jump ship from Windows XP (which was crashy and annoying) give Apple a chance.

It was great and to this day I still love Mac OSX.  I can work efficiently and there is good software for it (though gaming is weak).  Anyway, this long intro was just to highlight the fact that while I use Apple’s product I’m not “owned” by them.   I expect a lot if I’m dropping money on something. So with all the hype surrounding iSlate which now has been confirmed as iPad I wanted to chime in with my 2 cents (as I’m sure millions of others have already).

I know other people are exploding in their pants when they first saw the announcement.  Many people on my Facebook feed were like “I WANT IT NOW”  (in all caps).  However, my response is “Don’t I have this already?”

iPad looks just like a big iPod Touch / iPhone, but more expensive.  Sure it’s “sexy” and all that crap, but if I have a bigger device I expect it to do more things…at least do Flash and let me do some background apps.  Oh yeah, what about Skype video conferencing?  Nope…not without buying external hardware.  You can attach a keyboard to it too, but doesn’t that defeat the whole purpose of creating this “tablet” style in the first place?

For all the Fanboys go ahead and buy it right away.  My prediction is this will go the way of the Macbook Air, relatively cool, but not as popular as anticipated.  I’m holding out for another year and looking forward to some Tegra 2 enabled devices.  Have you guys seen this Nvidia pwered ICD Slate that was demoed at CES 2010?  This thing is exciting:

Why is it exciting?

• It can run a variety of operating systems since it is ARM based (Chrome, Android, Windows Mobile, etc…) so you aren’t locked in.  If you do use Android you’ll still have access to 3rd party apps
• It plays flash natively…this means Farmville, Bejeweled Blitz on your device
• It plays 1080p video without breaking a sweat…this means I can watch hulu (since it plays flash) without busting out my laptop…oh it also can output 1080p via HDMI so it’s like a VCR/DVD player you can carry around with you
• You aren’t locked into Apple and Itunes (which I hate, but that’s another story)…
• Looks like there’s a camera on that device so skype and other video conferencing is definitely possible
• It looks like and just as easy to use as iPad
• If you kept watching the video you can see it runs Unreal 3 with no problems whatsoever

To me this looks like the superior product, but unfortunately ICD can generate the amount of buzz that Apple can.  However, I don’t care I’m still holding out and in the mean time I’m sticking with my iPhone 3GA.

*** UPDATE ***

Here are two other tablets that I’m looking forward to over the “magical and revolutionary” iPad.

The Notion Ink Adam (featuring Pixel Qi screen):

And the Microsoft Courier

I don’t really Microsoft, but they’ve had some decent products (Xbox)…so I was pretty skeptical when I heard about their own tablet pc.  What I like about this is that rather than trying to be a great game device/music device it aims to be a great digital journal.  I like taking notes on real paper notepads.  I find handwriting stuff down helps the creative process and just adds more personality than just typing stuff in.  It also allows more free freedom in how you put stuff down.  Unfortunately searching through piles of notebooks gets old and while I could cut out photos from magazine or print them out on the computer and paste them into my notebook…that’s just too much work.  Depending on the price point this is something that I could definitely use.  Not only would it save me time, but it would also allow me to save paper (and ultimately the environment!).

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A good example of this is Lady Gaga’s Poker Face.  In the song she has a verse, “I’ll get him hot, show him what I got.”  Here you can watch this verse below:

Anyway, when I heard first this song I always thought Lady Gaga was saying “I’ll get him HARD, show him what I got.”  To which I would ask other people, “Why is Lady Gaga so naughty??”  How could they let such explicit lyrics on American radio waves??

Of course I always thought I was the only one who thought this way…that is until I found this video.  The video is of a Taiwanese pop star performing Lady Gaga’s Poker face on some kind of reality TV show competition (I’m guessing like American Idol, but for Taiwan, which would actually make it Taiwanese Idol…).  She really gets into the part: dies her hair white, wears the Gaga outfit, and even applies Gaga makeup.  I mention all this to point out that this is a serious competition and not just some silly person on youtube singing covers of Poker Face.   This is well produced.  See for yourself what lyric she ends up singing:

That’s right folks not only can you hear her say “hard,” but it’s also in the English subtitled lyrics that the show includes!

Perhaps the official lyrics are not so official anymore and this was all just a ploy by Lady Gaga to get naughty lyrics on the airwaves.  Nice one Gaga…nice one!

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Why?  It all started out of boredom as I was playing around with Facebook settings.  I happen to click on in the section where it says you can change your name.   Facebook basically asks you for the name you are changing to so I typed in something ridiculous (I was kind of curious how crazy you could make them name before they would reject it), so off the top of my head “O’Mally Valdez” sounded good.  Later on I decided to add “Madoff” to the end after I read about how Whoopi Goldberg’s real name was “Caryn Elaine Johnson” and her mom suggested in order for people to take her serious she should add a Jewish last name…so hence Goldberg.  In my case I decided to choose a Jewish surname that would command respect and trust…hence “Madoff.”

So that’s how the whole name changing thing started.  (There was also a slight paranoid factor/motivation involved (in that I really don’t trust Facebook with all my real data so I try to give it fake data so at least this way Mark Zuckerberg can’t stalk me.)  Anyway, so I went ahead with the name change.

I assumed that people would know that I changed my name and that anytime they saw “O’Malley” in their feed they would realize it was me, however this was not the case.  I started noticing some interesting things.

• The number of friend requests I normally got decreased (this could be just because I ran out of friends…)
• When I would try to add people whom I knew and just met they would ignore my friend request
• One girl I met asked me for my Facebook name and I told her “O’Malley” and she said “No, really what’s your Facebook name?”  I swore to god that that was my name…but she wouldn’t believe me
• Less people responded to my status updates and general Facebook spewing (I attribute this to people looking in the feed and wondering “who the f*ck is O’Malley?” and then ignoring whatever was there
• One person actually thought my name was O’Malley and addressed me as O’Malley (just goes to show you how close Facebook friends are!)

Anyway, today O’Malley got hit by a bus and died.  So he no longer exists.  I’ll see if anything changes by using my “real name.”

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The headline was “Rihanna Shows Off Her Nipple Ring” which was on Celebrity Jihad (which is probably the only gossip site I’ll read since it’s celebrity gossip written from an Islamic extremist’s perspective…no joke).   I was curious so I decided to investigate further.

So if you took a look at you’ll see there’s a bunch of picture of Rihanna sporting her new hardware through a black mesh see through top.  However, the nipple ring was not  what got my attention.  It was the carpet / towel creature she had draper over. Evidence below:

I mean that looks like the carpet rug thing i put around my toilet on the ground.   I don’t understand fashion, but then I don’t get how people can think this woolly mammoth carcass is cool looking and then think that the the Snuggie isn’t fashionable.

I mean how much worse is the Snuggie than Rihanna’s outfit?

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not ragging on her outfit just because I’m a “Rihanna hater” (though I do hate her music).  On the contrary I’m just jealous that she can get away with that kind of fashion since she’s famous and I can’t.  If I wore what she wore people would think I was crazy (I’ve tried some interesting outfits in the past).

Bottomline…I think I could be Rihanna’s fashion consultant.  My first piece of advice.  Lose the buffallo shawl and trade up to the wearable towel!

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As you guys know I’m a SUPER BIG AWESOME-O BEST-EST Fan of Twitter (see my post I Truly Hate Twitter) and I’ve decided to jump on the Twitter book publishing bandwagon and am working on my own Twitter book titled Twitter IS For Dummies.

Just what kinds of things can you expect to learn in my upcoming super great Twitter book?  I’m glad you asked… Learn to:

• Share when you last made a bowel movement or any other personal bodily function that ordinarily you wouldn’t publicize to the world.  Ex.  “I just pooped my pants!”
• Believe that Twitter is the greatest thing on the planet.  In order to use twitter you must love it unconditionally.  It’s better than everything.  The sooner you realize this the more ready you are to join the Church of Twitter
• Make yourself feel even more important than you really are.  If you have low self-esteem Twitter will make you feel more important by deluding yourself into thinking people actually care when you tweet “OMG I just got my period”
• Twitter in dangerous situations where your safety is less important than sharing your tweet.  Next time you are being mugged, attacked, raped, held at gun point…take a timeout with your assailant and whip out your phone so you can tweet “I’m being raped now and I feel bloated. FML!”

So yeah, please keep a look out for Twitter Is For Dummies.  It truly will be a glorious book and make me filthy rich.  If you are looking for other self help books also check out my book Just Because There’s a Goalie Doesn’t Mean You Can’t Score.

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I have to get something off my chest.  It’s been bothering me for the past few months and I’ve been meaning to write about it, but hadn’t made the time.  Better now than never.  So here it goes…

LMFAO (the band) please stop making alternate versions to your song “I’m in Miami Trick.”

I don’t know if you guys know LMFAO, but they have this super annoying song that’s played a billion times on the radio called “I’m in Miami Bitch” or the more radio appropriate version “I’m in Miami Trick.”  I’ve embedded the song and video below for your listening “enjoyment.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

To be honest I kinda liked the song the first time they played it, but in typical commercialized brainwashing fashion they kept playing it until my ears bled.  That was already painful enough, but nothing out of the ordinary, however things got worse.  One day while listening to the radio I hear…

blah blah blah … I’m in LA trick!

At first I thought I was listening to a different song because I could have sworn they normally say “I’m in Miami Trick.” But the DJ said it was LMFAO.   Fair enough so there’s 2 different versions of this song. A few weeks later I was driving around San Francisco and heard this on the radio…

blah blah blah…I’m in The Bay trick!

WTF?  There 3 versions of this song now?  The worst part is that’s it’s not even brand new lyrics talking about “the Bay” or whatever city they are singing about.  It’s just them replacing one city name with another city name and then adding “trick” after it.   Either way my hatred for the song and the band is steadily increasing (not yet at Twitter hate levels).

A few weeks later my girlfriend comes back from Denver, Colorado, and says “you’ll never guess what I heard in Denver…”   Please don’t tell me–

blah blah blah…I’m in Denver trick!

That’s right, Denver now has it’s own LMFAO “Trick” song.  This was the straw that broke my back.  Just how much more pandering to the audience and selling out can LMFAO do?  Just how many versions of their crappy song “I’m in Miami Trick” are there?  Wikipedia provided me the answers.

There are at least 59 versions of “I’m in [FILL IN THE BLANK WITH WHATEVER] Trick!”

Yes 59 versions of their song.  I won’t list them all here, but that’s a lot of “tricks.”  Among the more notable “Tricks” include:

• “I’m in New Bedford Trick” (New Bedford, MA, I had to look that up)
• “I’m in the Burgh Trick” (Pittsburgh)
• “I’m in Fort Wayne Trick” (Fort Wayne, IN)
• “I’m in Winnipeg Trick” (Winnipeg, Canada)
• “I’m in the IE Trick” (I thought Internet Explorer, but Inland Empire CA)
• “I’m in Canada Trick” (for stations in rural Canada)

Before I thought the formula for a LMFAO song was [Any American City] + Trick.  However, from the list of 59 versions apparently you can just choose any geographic location.  It can be a city anywhere in the world, a region, a country, etc…  What is somewhat amusing is how LMFAO got lazy with Canada.  Rather than go through and “create” alternate versions for many of the cities in Canada (besides the major ones) they just decided to do a blanket Canadian version “I’m in Canada Trick.”  Geez, LMFAO, if you are going to do something do it all the way!

Why stop at geographic locations?  Why not take your hit making formula and just  incorporate any nouns that make somewhat sense?  This way you can target and market your talent to those people…  Here are some suggestions to help you increase your sales revenue:

• “I’m in Foreclosure Trick!”
• “I’m without Insurance Trick!”
• “I’m in Pre-School Trick”
• “I’m in Detention Trick”
• “I’m in Jail Trick”
• “I’m in Denial Trick”
• “I’m in My Car Trick”

I can’t stop myself from coming up with more LMFAO hits.  I should be a song writer.

Anyway, there has to be some record in the Guinness Book of World Records for most versions of a crappy song done by the same artist.  At 59 versions LMFAO would definitely be the front runner.  Not even Petey Pablo and his song “Raise Up” did he decide to sell out and do separate versions for each major city instead he just did:

a remix called “Raise Up [All Cities remix]” which is similar to the original, starting off with North Carolina, except that he shouts out other cities, states or regions in this order: South Carolina, Atlanta, Virginia, New York City, New Jersey, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., Maryland, Houston, Dallas, New Orleans, St. Louis, Miami, Los Angeles, Chicago, Las Vegas and San Francisco Bay Area.

Luckily not every music artist goes to the darkside like LMFAO and creates a cookie cutter song.  I mean can you imagine if John Denver had gone to LMFAO for guidance on his song “Take Me Home, Country Roads”?  The chorus might have been:

“Take me home, country roads, to the place I belong…East Calcutta, Mountain Mama…”

So I make my final plea LMFAO…please stop…please!!

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So for anyone who has applied or gone through the process of opening and filing their own paper work for a small business they know there is a lot of different papers and forms that need to be filled out, signed, and filed with their state government.  A lot of these forms you have to pay different fees to get processed.  You kind of get immune to all the forms.

However, just recently I received this letter and from in the mail from the “Board of Business Center” asking me to “remit payment: $175.”  When I first saw this I was like “what!  More forms and bills to pay?”  But then I was mentally going through my checklist of stuff to see if indeed this was something I needed to pay…but thought something was very fishy for several reasons:

• It was from the Board of Business Center — all the forms I had received up till now were always from the California Secretary of State, this was some state-less Board of Business Center.
• The address (PO Box 39876, Los Angeles CA 90039) I was supposed to send payment was LA — all of the small business stuff is handled in Sacramento, the capital, why send to LA?
• The fine print on the back of the form — the back says “upon receipt of your payment Board of Business Center will deliver the Statement of Information to the Office of California Secretary of State in a timely manner with the State Fees.  Luckily I had just sent my Statement of Information so why would they need to deliver this again for me?

All these little clues just tipped me off to the fact that this thing was some kind of scam.  So I finally googled it and found a very similar looking letter, but for a different document that needs to be filed with the State.

According to the link above I posted one of the commenters works for the California Attorney General’s office and is investigating these scammers.  If you run across a similar letter as the one I posted you’re urged to contact them.  Info below:

Complaints may be filed with the California Attorney General’s Office by mail, telephone, fax, the Internet, or email:

MAILING ADDRESS:

Attorney General’s Office
California Department of Justice
Attn: Public Inquiry Unit
P.O. Box 944255
Sacramento, CA 94244-2550TELEPHONE:   1-800-952-5225 (Toll-free in CA) or (916) 322-3360

FAX:   (916) 323-5341

WEBSITE:   http://ag.ca.gov/consumers

In the spirit of sharing and hoping that someone googles the scam letter I got so they don’t lose out $175 I’ve posted scans of the letter I’ve received and made a post here.  The things people will do to make a buck.

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In case you don’t believe me checkout the email’s I received (I’ve crossed out the winning reference numbers since I don’t want you claiming prize)…Ok really do people really fall for this stuff?

From:     jmitchell@qcc.mass.edu
Subject:     Dear Inernet User
Date:     July 23, 2009 12:32:36 AM PDT

Dear Inernet User

We are pleased to notify you the “Winner” of our Internet Lotto draws. This is a reward program for the patronage of internet services and all email addresses entered for this promotional draws were randomly selected from an internet resource database of of registered software and domain users.

Reference Number: NLS 90 EU 1109
e-ticket number: 765-45556453 098
Category: A
Amount: $2,500,000.00 (Two Million, Five Hundred Thousand Dollars)

You may wish to establish contact with your claims agent via e-mail with the particulars presented below:

CLAIMS AGENT.
Name: Thomas Ward
Tel::+31 619 551 210
Email: dptclnl2009@yahoo.cn

In line with the governing rules of claim, you are requested to furnish your claims agent With the following information:

1. Full names
2. Address
3. Occupation.
4. Tel/Fax
5. Nationality
6.  Winning Reference Number

Yours faithfully,
John Mitchell
Promotions Co-ordinator

John really should use spell check…I’m not an “Inernet” user!

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• A Facebook Application for dating
• Actually a Facebook application
• A Facebook Application to charge strangers money to have sex with your friends

What it is:

• An easy way to annoy and poke fun at your friends
• A method to imply that your friends support messages, products, causes which in fact they might not
• A way to pass the time on Facebook

How to Play:

1)  Select a Facebook advertisement that you want one of your FB friends to endorse.  In my example here I have chosen this Ad which is “Mom Builds Her Company”

2) Select one of your friend’s on Facebook which you would like to “pimp out.”  Or in this case which friend do you think would best represent the advertisement you have chosen.  In my case I felt my friend, we’ll call him Ed, would be a fitting spokesperson for a Mom who builds a company.  Grab a picture from their photos which you think would look best for the ad.  This one is a good one of Ed.

3) Edit the photo you selected so it fits in nicely with the advertisement you chose.  This take a little technical know-how, but you can use photoshop, paint, or whatever imaging program you like to use.  Once you have done that you should have something that might look like this:

4)  Post your newly created advertisement image into your Facebook feed by sharing the image.  Make sure to tag your friend and write a “cheeky” message along side it.  It’s up to you if you want to tell them it’s fake or not.   Here’s my example again.

5) Now wait and see if your friend responds.  If they don’t respond with their own advertisement you are considered the winner which gives you permission to continue putting them into fake ads.

The Inspiration

This game came about from this article i read about how Facebook is already inserting our profile photos (and other photos) into Facebook ads.  Apparently as a user of Facebook you have to go in and manually “opt out.”  I figure if they are going to do that i might as well make my own ads to help them.  You’re welcome Facebook.

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