Various and Sundry: Now Everything But Photography

When Jason Calacanis said to Sarah Lane on TWiT this week that Revision3 has a few too many people for a company of its size, it seemed like an honest enough business assessment.  After she got laid off from Rev3 yesterday, it’s a little chilling.

Eep.  Bad timing.

But the thing that cracks me up the most about the relatively minor layoffs at Rev3 this week is the internet outrage and outcry against the company.  It’s a repeat of every stupid thing every dumb comic book fanboy ever says about Marvel or DC when a book they like gets cancelled.

And I supposed I shouldn’t be surprised that a company that relies on Diggnation for its top viewership would have fans who would say Rev3 did everything wrong this week, and that Rev3 should have democratized who got laid off and which shows got canned.

There comes a time, I suppose, where you reap what you sow.  Rely on social media, and have that society think that everything mirrors them.

Tech Crunch wasn’t as thrilled with eBay’s recent earnings statement.  In fact, they found really only one point of hope for the company:
As eBay’s Core Business Hits Hard Times, Skype Begins To Shine

Another eBay business that is holding its own, surprisingly, is Skype. Revenues for the third quarter were $143 million. Although its growth rate is slowing, at least it is still growing, both on an annual (46 percent) and sequential quarterly (5 percent) basis. Its total registered users grew 51 percent to 370 million, and those people used up 16 billion minutes of talk time.

Ah, good ol’ Skype! Love it.

eBay Inc. Reports Third Quarter 2008 Results: Financial News – Yahoo! Finance

eBay Inc. today reported financial results for its third quarter ended September 30, 2008. The ecommerce company posted third quarter revenue of $2.12 billion, up $228 million from the same period last year.

There’s no accounting for taste on the internet.

Slashdot: News for nerds, stuff that matters

“In eBay’s latest FAQ, they explain that sellers (for the good of the buyers) will no longer be allowed to accept checks or money orders as payment. They can take electronic payments only. So, will Google Checkout, Checkout by Amazon or Amazon Flexible Payment be allowed? No, says eBay. . .”

I’ve sent and accepted checks and money orders in the past.  OK, it was years ago. I would use PayPal for all that stuff today.  I’m not blaming eBay for destroying this. Really, it’s the community that’s grown too large to police it, with too many pieces of spoiled fruit ruining it for the rest.  eBay isn’t killing its customer base.  It’s merely putting itself out of its misery, step by step.

I need an eBay Death Watch logo for this type of thing.

eBay is selling off StumbleUpon.  And if you’re anything like me, you’re thinking, “Wait, eBay owns StumbleUpon?  Why?  What’s next, Skype?!? Oh, wait. . .”  I think the theory is that under eBay ownership, people might stumble upon more eBay auctions.  Not sure that ever happened, though.

This is minor compared to their other big stumble of the week.  Have you seen eBay’s new Maximum Shipping Price policy page?  Starting in October, eBay is controlling how much you can charge for basic shipping.  If you’re selling a DVD Audio, you can only charge $3 for it.  Cookbook?  $4.  DVD?  $3.

Sellers are required to offer at least one shipping option within the maximum and may also offer other options above the maximums for expedited or international shipping.

I’m sure this is an effort to stop people who charge outrageous fees for “shipping and handling” as a profit center.  I guess eBay is too big now for the community to police that kind of bad behavior. I can guarantee you right now that an awful lot of sellers will not be happy with this attempt by eBay to control their fees.
(Thanks, Chad A., for the link!)

I used to do these weekly.  I need to get back to that.  You can follow my every Tweet at Twitter.com/augiedb.  Here’s some recent 140-character-max-musings, in no particular order:

• MI-5 Season Six is coming to DVD January 20th, before it airs on TV in the States, not that I ever watched those butchered versions.

• The hardest part of using a video camera? Not flipping it on its side to go portrait instead of landscape. I’m such a photographer. . .

• Oh, and UGH. Wednesdays. Half a week away from my last day off, and halfway towards my next. Wednesdays are a tease.

• And last night’s episode of THE SHIELD was brilliant as always. Mackey is going to undo himself this season, I fear. It’s too much for him.

• @eliopoulos – The last thing anyone should ever want to be is a Mets fan in September.

• Recorded a proof of concept demo type thing for something I may or may not do in the future. It might be more tedious than fun. (I’m still saying no more.)

• Put together another IKEA Billy bookcase. Flush to the wall, screwed in place. That sucker ain’t moving. (Not that I doubt for a second that my daughter won’t try in a few years. . . )

• Tuesday. Whose bright idea was Tuesdays?!?  (OK, so these tweets are in vaguely reverse chronological order.)

• Recorded this week’s podcast a day earlier than usual. That feels good. Should be published tonight. And it’s half as long as the last one. (And then the RSS feed got lost in the cache for a day, and the podcast wasn’t early; it was merely on time.)

• So, that football thing seems to have started up again, eh? What’s that all about?

• Sunday morning and I’ve already put a new screen into a sliding door. It’s a swamp out there, though. Ick. Now, to hang a shelf. . .  (Ah, the continuous joys of home ownership.  I’ve also reglued laminate that came loose from a cabinet this week, put together a bookshelf and a side table, and put in a door stopper before a doorknob punched through a wall.)

• Scanning is boring. (And scanning at high DPIs, doubly so.)

• First, Steven Page gets a drug bust.  Now, Ed Robertson crashes his plane.  (Ed was piloting; he and his passengers walked away.)  It’s been a bad month for The Barenaked Ladies.

• Clu Clu Land!  Clu Clu Land!  Clu Clu Land!  I demand the Virtual Console release of it, NOW!

• The greatest Firefox plug-in ever: It removes the crap comments from under any YouTube video. The Before/After pic is not just funny, but about the most damning thing on Internet discourse ever.

• No free dinners at Google anymore. Maybe you people should go home to your families, instead!

• The “Boom Goes the Dynamite” kid is back!

• A pretty cool First Person Shooter for the Wii is coming?

It’s done.

Toast.

A relic now, consigned to the trash heap of internet history.  It’s a site that is part of the common language today, but will shortly prove to be a memory, and not a viable shopping option.

So long, and farewell.
EBay Is Planning to Emphasize Fixed-Price Sales Format Over Its Auction Model – NYTimes.com

Acknowledging that most online shoppers cannot be bothered with auctions, eBay plans Wednesday to announce changes to its fee structure that emphasize fixed prices over bidding. The move is intended to help eBay compete more effectively with Amazon .com and other big online retailers.

Thoughts of this week’s Cuil.com fiasco sent me into a nostalgic haze. .  .

Remember when –
– USENET was king, and why would you want to splinter off conversations to a million little websites?

– AltaVista was king?

– AltaVista was destroyed in an attempt to create another portal?

– Alltheweb.com challenged the young Google on the basis of speed?

– floppy discs were, at most, 1.4 megabytes?  And that would hold all your Word documents for years?

– When you could cut a notched on the other side of the 5.25″ floppy disc and then write to its backside?  Instant double capacity!

– WordPerfect and Word were both in their 5.x releases?  Good word processing times right there.

– People might have actually linked to Lycos?

– Zip drives were the future, with their huge 100MB cartridges that would backup your whole hard drive for $10 a pop?

You know what?  It’s not that eBay is dying.  It’s just that people would rather buy something on-line in ANY OTHER FASHION.  There are too many eBay horror stories, too many fees, and not enough good deals anymore.  If a service doesn’t give its clientele what they want and can’t give them an adequate level of safety and comfort, it’s going to go down.  I’ll repeat what I’ve said before: Burn, eBay, Burn.

And if that’s not enough for them, eBay is now busy shooting itself in the foot:

eBay has struck a deal with the Web retailer Buy.com that allows the company to sell millions of books, DVDs, electronics and other items on eBay without paying the full complement of eBay fees.

Unbelievable.  eBay can’t die soon enough. I just wish someone would start up a competitive website for when eBay finally dies. I know I’m not alone.

• Bad economy?  No way — Yahoo has a ton of job openings!

• And when it comes time to quit, here’s your DIY Yahoo! Resignation Generator.

• Print your own magazine.  Pretty nifty self-publishing site, though not exactly producing cheap magazines.  It uses credit cards and PayPal.  Just upload a PDF file and away you go.  I’m just old-fashioned enough to enjoy a good magazine, though I only subscribe to a couple anymore.  (”Popular Photography” and “Wired”)

• Dear smaller eBay sellers — eBay doesn’t want you!  eBay is such a sad waste.

• Amazon might be coming up with another PayPal killer. Unless I can seamlessly transfer money from PayPal to Amazon’s thing, it won’t matter much to me.

I tried this and it worked for me.  You can’t have played “Contra” for the original Nintendo system without having tapped this code in dozens of times. Now, you can do it in Google Reader, too!  Crazy.
‘Konami Code’ Appears in Google Reader | Game | Life from Wired.com

By typing the code, sans the NES’ occasional “Start” and “Select” additions, (up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A) at the initial Google Reader screen a shrugging ninja pops up in the left-hand sidebar, as if to say … something. Honestly it’s a bit of a baffling easter egg.

Only a day late with these.  Sorry!

Follow me all the time at Twitter.com/augiedb

• Credit card company charged me a $13 fee for being short $8 on my last credit card payment. I just abused the ALL-CAPS button in my response

• Credit Card company websites are made to be confusing on purpose right? I never have any idea which number I’m supposed to pay.

• Good news — the credit card company refunded the silly $13 fee. Sometimes, acting like a self-righteous douchebag can save you a few bucks.

• UGH, Amazon is saying my STARMAN OMNIBUS won’t ship for two more weeks. That’s the problem with pre-ordering comics through them. . .

• Downloading new Weezer album now through Amazon. I love 2008.

• Secret Invasion is like a Mamet movie – lotsa stuff happens, but I know better than to believe ANY of it. Besides, it’s comics. Nobody dies!

• Another day, another four reviews posted to the CBR Reviews section.

• Attempting to parse the language of the Homeowners Association By-Laws for where I might be moving in about six weeks. My mind will explode

• I want to learn Ruby Cocoa and program iPhone apps in it. I have no idea if that’s possible or when I would learn it or what I would program

It’s amazing to me that with all the dozens of new Web 2.0 companies starting up on a daily basis, nobody’s taken a serious run at eBay.  Why are auction sites so afraid of eBay?  Even eBay’s users hate eBay these days.

Maybe today’s startups are smart enough to know that auctions don’t work anymore, period? I’m not sure that’s the case.  I think eBay’s structure and system has made auctions too annoying to use effectively.  A new flashy AJAXy competitor should be able to win over a chunk of eBay’s audience, if only from one popular corner of it.

More on eBay’s trouble:
Trouble at eBay – ReadWriteWeb

“I think [fixed prices] will disappear online, simply because it is possible – cheap and easy – to vary prices online.” That was MIT Media Lab’s Patti Maes in 1999, at a time when eBay’s business was booming and auctions were seen as the future of ecommerce. Flash forward 9 years, and BusinessWeek is today calling online auctions a dying breed, Nick Carr is wondering if auctions were a fad. Indeed, the fixed price (”Buy it Now” only) format is beginning to dominate eBay, and the company has taken recent steps push fixed price even harder. But the death knell of the online auction format is not eBay’s biggest problem — no, that would be the small exodus of sellers from the site.

Here’s how eBay is killing itself.  “Buy It Now, ” or “BIN”:

Fixed price BIN-only listings now account for 42% of the gross merchandise volume on the site, and the fixed price format has been growing at a much faster rate than auctions over the past 6 years.

eBay is turning into a virtual marketplace with price tags, not gavels and auctioneers. And they keep restructuring things to ensure it.

Meanwhile, I use Amazon, which gives me greater exposure, better fees, and an easier payment system.  I don’t want to venture into the world of eBay ratings anymore, thanks.  It’s a jungle in there.

It’s been way too long since the last link dump, hasn’t it?  Welcome back!

• Have you wondered how “Guitar Hero” might be played on the Nintendo DS?  Wonder no more.  But be afraid.  Be very afraid.  It’s one scary video.

• For my fellow webheads: Mahalo is the new Wikipedia.  Interesting.

• The new iPhone is likely only a week away, and here’s a nice round-up of the unconnected nuggets of news related to it.  It’s the first I’ve seen of Steve Jobs’ increased corporate jet expenses.  That man’s been flying around the world a lot in the last year. . .

• I am a “longtime comics reader and prominent columnist.”  I am so adding that to my resume and business cards. (Thanks, Tom!)

• These are some crazy bookshelves.  I’ll probably be buying mine for the new house at IKEA this summer, thanks.

This week, the DVD release list will appear on Tuesday.