FAIL: The New York Times Stumbles Out Of The Gate, Trying To Get The Toothpaste Back In The Tube
By now, some of the more voracious readers of the internet may have been hit with the Pay Us Now ultimatum from The New York Times‘ website. I’m more than certain that lifelong readers of the Times who are afraid of a life without the periodical have already signed up. They may have actually decided to pay for a publication which produces most of the content that Arianna Huffington’s team of gophers reblogs over at her AOL website. If you have not subscribed, reasons may range from culture articles that are five steps behind the trends to an op-ed section that no longer has Frank Rich (who New York Magazine quietly picked up), but can boast Ross “Pornography is Adultery” Douthat.
Those readers have, since Monday the 28th, read twenty articles from the Times, the arbitrary amount that the publication has determined to be the cutoff. This is rather amusing, since most monthly periodicals rarely have more than twenty articles that the average reader has any interest in. When readers do hit this paywall, though, confusion sets in. The pricing system is based around an assumption that if you’re paying for their services, you have a smart phone or tablet computer, as there is no offer for only accessing the website from a traditional computer.
Aside from realizing that their content is worth paying for, the myriad of decisions the Times has made all seem to be mistakes. To keep track of how many articles you have left, they will only let you know when you’re nearing the end of the free allotment, says the Times:
When you get close to your monthly limit, pop-up alerts will begin to appear at the bottom of pages you read on NYTimes.com. The alerts will tell you how many free articles remain in the current month. Note that the number of “remaining” articles does not include the article you’re currently viewing; the current article counts as an “already read” article.
Also, in a decision which contains a massive loophole, all articles which you found through social networking websites such as Twitter or Facebook are not counted towards your twenty. Once this was announced, it wasn’t long before the Twitter account @freeNYTimes was launched. Whomever is running the account is using the Times‘ own coding, which they allow access to, to automate a stream of links to all new articles on the Times’ site. This allows everybody access to a constantly updating stream of links to articles, none of which would count towards the pre-paywall allotment. One such tweet is as follows:
The Fix:
Aside from having a more savvy system of rates, and fewer loopholes, there was one big thing that the launch was missing: something to get the audiences excited. It’s a very ballsy move to think people will be excited to pay for what they’re already getting for free. Putting up a paywall needed to happen simultaneously with a website redesign that reconsiders how people get their news today. The Internet is not a newspaper; while that might be obvious to you, the web design staff at The New York Times needs to get this through their head. Their front page makes you squint to find out how recently something has happened. Their use of pop-under ads is the equivalent of someone dropping a magazine subscription insert on your floor. A clean, refreshed user interface that brought some life back to the publication would have at least made people a bit more likely to remember the security code on the back of their credit cards.
Fail: Tumblr Has A Case Of The Fumbles
The blogging platform Tumblr is increasingly popular, thanks to features that put it in the Venn Diagram sweet spot between WordPress and Twitter. The interface for making a new post is impossibly simple, posts have no character count limits, and if you have an account, you have an easy way to keep track of your favorite Tumblrs: The Dashboard, much like the stream of tweets offered by Twitter. I use it, and I recommend that others do too! There’s just one problem: Crippling Unreliability.
The above text-only error message was dropped after the great Tumblr Server Outage of last December, when the service was down for a couple of days. It was replaced with the equally uninformative Tumbeasts. Most of the time, though, the service restores when you refresh the page.
But even as Tumblr gets its act together regarding stability, their security is laughable, as the Tumblr Staff explained in a recent post:
A human error caused some sensitive server configuration information to be exposed this morning. Our technicians took immediate measures to protect from any issues that may come as a result.
We’re triple checking everything and bringing in outside auditors to confirm, but we have no reason to believe that anything was compromised. We’re certain that none of your personal information (passwords, etc.) was exposed, and your blog is backed up and safe as always. This was an embarrassing error, but something we were prepared for.
The Fix: Let Power Users Chip In
These Tumbeasts are Tumblr’s take on Twitter’s Fail Whale, which became a thing of the past once Twitter found people to invest in their servers. But since heavy investments from up high can cause problems down the road, leading to Promoted Tweets and the Quick Bar, I have a better idea for how Tumblr can improve their problems, so that those most invested in creating content on their site have less reason to complain. As Tumblr’s former lead developer Marco Arment writes about Gmail, “Let us pay for this service so it won’t go down.”
Fail: The Internet Can’t Get Enough of Rebecca Black
Vodpod videos no longer available.
While James O’Keefe might be the blight on the internet that never goes away, it’s Rebecca Black who needs to be taken down a peg or two. I’m not going to get any points for picking a fight with a how-ever-year-old she is, so I’ll direct this at the media which is bereft of taste, and my peers who, by way of even acknowledging her video without mocking it, tricked me into watching it myself. New York Magazine‘s Vulture blog has always been willing to dabble in the dark arts that are tween culture, but for them to have a post analyzing the lyrics of “Friday” is to mock the refined art that is time wasting on the internet.
Fix:
The only way to make anything good out of these earworms is to take dreck and apply talent. Even though I think it’s below them, Stephen Colbert and James Urbaniak brought some actual skill to the song, with spoken-word versions. All we can hope is that these attract more eyes to the works of actual talent.
Fail: RIM’s iPad Killer Couldn’t Even Harm a Fly
What makes a Blackberry a Blackberry? Aside from monospace type and a full keyboard, it’s the BlackBerry Messaging system, a free IM/text client for only Blackberry owners. Blackberry owners love their BBM, they promote it so much you’d think they’re in a Windows 7 commercial. So its more than a little surprising that the company that produces these devices, Research In Motion, is letting their iPad competitor, the PlayBook, out of the gate without support for email, contacts, or, you guessed it, Messaging. Wired.com found a leaked document for the upcoming product which has an excuse for customers saying that the PlayBook can work with a Blackberry to have these functions, but a future software update will have to bring the functionality over.
The Fix: Don’t Ship Incomplete Product.
I think that’s an easy one. Nothing more to say.
The Win: Google Chrome’s Personal Blocklist Plugin Tells Arianna & Jeeves To Take A Hike 
A lot of the time, the same bad sites will somehow make it to the top of my Google search results. Maybe that’s because for me, “bad site” means The Huffington Post and Yahoo! Answers. If you use Google’s web browser, Chrome, they have a way to help you cut the chaff out of your results before you even know what you’re looking for: an add-on called Personal Blocklist that lets you cut those websites out of your search results. It’s not an epic win, but it is damn useful.
Test 
In a world of ambiguity, Rebecca Black boldly addresses the human condition in aggressively simple terms. What does it mean to be alive and young, eating a bowl of cereal and going down to a bus stop?