Sunday, May 18, 2008

What The . . . ?

One of the other reasons for my hiatus has been this:

This message was sent using the Picture and Video Messaging service from Verizon Wireless!

To learn how you can snap pictures and capture videos with your wireless phone visit www.verizonwireless.com/picture.

To play video messages sent to email, QuickTime� 6.5 or higher is required. Visit www.apple.com/quicktime/download to download the free player or upgrade your existing QuickTime� Player. Note: During the download process when asked to choose an installation type (Minimum, Recommended or Custom), select Minimum for faster download.



When short on time, not near a machine, or witnessing something interesting on the spur of the moment I'd snap a shot with my phone's camera and send it to the QA. Every picture on this blog, with the exception of a few that I've bounced in from elsewhere, is a camera phone shot. It was an easy way to blog, and add some visual interest to my posts. Easy, that was, until I noticed, while in Atlanta, that Verizon was appending the above junk to my photos. The last time that I checked, they were not paying me to drive traffic to their site nor to Apple's; nor have I added them to the contributor's list of this blog. This appendage has curtailed my use of my camera phone to do mobile picture blogging and really annoyed me.

The real drag of this whole thing to me is that some marketing wiz at the above mentioned phone company must have figured that this was a god idea. Sadly, it sort of is. By appending this garbage to an emailed photo they get instant "viral marketing" (all the rage these days with marketers). Even if the emailed shot does not go to a blog, it can still be passed around via email, so either way this nets them free publicity. For photos sent to blogs, the appendage increases the number of links extant on the web, and thus makes them more visible to spiders; virally sends itself through feed readers and is basically a cheap (free) way to get some rather large text ads. Now, my blog, with its three readers is certainly not going to do them much good, but it's still annoying and, I believe, improper for this phone company to do this. If they asked my permission and paid me, it might be a different story, but this is my blog, and I don't want to do any marketing for my wireless provider -- they are merely a vehicle for data transmission, not a contributor, or participant in this space.

2 comments:

case said...

i god damn agree. i dont read your blog, (i may start now!) but ive gone thru the same bs...i dont know if its a recent thing company wide, or due to my new phone (env2) but ive talked to multiple agents, all of whom are unaware of the issue, let alone able to help....
i'd boycott if i didnt have a years contract left...
BTW, any idea if this violates any TOS allowing me, us, we, to cancel early sans any fees? a thought...

Agricola said...

Case, thanks for stopping by and leaving a comment.

I'm unsure of TOS ramifications, but knowing telcos, I'm sure they've got us all over the barrel on this one. I can tell you exactly how recent it is: the second week of April 08. I literally had a post w/out the garbage, and the following day I had a post with it. It's incredibly frustrating, and not at all cool.