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Quick Takes

Quick Takes: 3/6/13

In which I seek to get all these stories out of Evernote and into my car. Or something like that.

A thousand times this.

tweetdeck-logo-287x287I’m going to miss Tweetdeck’s iOS app, but the writing has been on the wall for a while. I’m actually more upset at the prospect of moving from the Mac desktop app to the web version than anything else.

I’ll admit to feeling a little weird I scrolled through a feed of my network’s Instagram updates on the web, but that’s exactly what you can now do.

Theaters are, amusingly, starting to charge movie studios in some instances to play their trailers. Studios obviously aren’t thrilled at theaters trying to get some extra cash by programming their trailer presentation like a commercial break but can’t exactly not participate since that’s still the primary way people become aware of new movies well in advance of their hitting their release dates.

It’s nice that someone has finally called foul on the idea that there is a best time, or a series of best times, to post a brand page update to Facebook. Studies that presume to lay out the ideal time for publishing to this, that or the other social network always drive me batty because such results are so variable from program to program.

Up All Night - Season 2TV Guide has an interesting story going into all the problems that have plagued Up All Night. I liked the show at first but soon found it to be a one-note story that, as the story points out, focused too much on Maya Rudolph’s character at the expense of the home-life of the characters played by Will Arnett and Christina Applegate.

That we’re still talking about the campaigns for The Blair Witch Project and even, to a slightly lesser extent, The Dark Knight as being the capstone of movie marketing efforts makes me sad and shows how little innovation there is in this field.

This is a classic case of a solution in search of a problem as companies vie to own the “same day product delivery” market that is of their own making and not something consumers are clamoring for at the moment.

blackhawks-logoWhile I’m by no means a huge hockey fan (though I have jumped aboard the Blackhawks bandwagon in recent years to a certain extent) it’s hard to imagine the Hawks not having the Detroit Red Wings as their primary divisional rival.

Years after it put it up and saw readership and revenue take a sharp decline, Variety’s new owners are tearing down its paywall and opening up stories to the masses.

Oscilloscope Laboratories released six-second installments of It’s a Disaster, its upcoming comedy starring David Cross, on Vine as a way to tease out people’s interest in the movie.

This is a great story on how the U.S., by ceding control of online access to private companies who often operate as controlled monopolies, is slipping in how its citizens can access the web and all the activities that are now taking place there. It’s also about how reliant we are on web-access devices and the data plans that come with them and is a really good read.

I wholeheartedly agree with the point made in this story about how, because your LinkedIn activity is tied back to your professional reputation, the quality of engagement and the potential for solid conversations is much higher.

Green PG-13_Hv_CS3The problem, I don’t think, is that people are unaware of what movie and other ratings mean. It’s that the ratings are so broken and out of date that they’re essentially meaningless to the point where a public awareness campaign isn’t quite the best answer. You need only watch just about any PG-13 movie from 1998 and compare it to a PG-13 movie from 2013 to see that the definition has changed so drastically that a new model is absolutely necessary.

The Chicagoland movie theater chain I worked for through most of high school and college has been profiled on the Google Developers Blog for their use of Google Apps. 

I get what this AdAge story is going for, but isn’t about 78% of the consumer products industry based on creating problems no one would ever have guessed existed and then offering a solution to them? So the advertising following suit doesn’t seem like a huge honking deal.

Discussion

3 thoughts on “Quick Takes: 3/6/13

  1. I’m absolutely sure you know of this already, but hootsuite is a nice alternative. It’s my primary twitter client.

    Posted by mattmaldre | March 6, 2013, 4:42 pm
    • Yeah I like Hootsuite quite a bit. I’m going to evaluate how things shake out in the near future but I am bummed to see Tweetdeck go.

      Posted by Chris Thilk | March 6, 2013, 4:57 pm
      • Yeah, I definitely do not like the trend of twitter limiting their API when it’s the very thing that made twitter popular in the first place. If there was a twitter alternative, I would consider it.

        Posted by mattmaldre | March 6, 2013, 5:49 pm

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