Skype - Last friday night I signed up for skype service. Purchased 1 local number and paid for it. Then subscribed to the monthly unlimited USA & Canada plan. Also paid the annual fee up front.  (By the way, skype does not accept American Express. Only Visa, master card and direct debit. hmm.. I wonder why??) After I receive the confirmation email confirming my subscription and purchase, I logged in to the skype account from the skype console. It is then I realized that it shows my account $1.30 balance. I was surprised specially when I just paid for 1 year unlimited. I gave Skype aka Ebay the benefit of the doubt and decided to give it 24hrs to update their system. Remember this is on Friday night 9pm EST.

I login to my skype console on sunday morning and I still see a $1.30 balance. hmm.. I decided to wait till Monday 9am EST. May be its a weekend thing. I logged in again on Monday morning at 11:30am and the balance is still $1.30. This is when I thought that may be I will call up customer service and straighten it out. I searched and googled only to learn the hard way that skype does not have a customer service number. Everything is handled via email (hmm.. they must have off shored their stuff to Mars for cheaper labor). WTF? Ebay bought Skype. Last time I checked, Ebay is a billion dollar company. How come they do not have a customer service phone number?Any Tom, Dick & Harry knows that if you are opening a business you need a phone number so that your customers can reach you. Especially when its a phone company. To me skype is worse than those fly by night companies such as viaTalk and voip.com. Message to skype aka ebay executives: Remember you are in the phone business. You sell phone numbers. Get yourself a phone line. Listen to your customers before its too late unless you want to be the next Circuit City or CompUSA.

And the fact that they made it very hard to reach customer service aggravated me further. You can not email them directly. You have to fill out a form. I got so upset that I just decided to cancely my subscription with Skype. So I requested them for a full refund. Let’s see if I receive my full refund.

Back in mid November I was getting all happy and stuff for Google because I thought they hired a few designers. I’m talking about the release of Gmail themes. Well what the fuck happened? They just ruined YouTube with a make over.

Redesigns are supposed to make things look better. But, damn! YouTube looks like it was designed by a complete noob. Did you look at the navbar? That’s just fubar. Shit couldn’t get more hilarious. Microsoft fucks up Hotmail and now YouTube gets screwed by Google. Nice.

I don’t see what the point of the redesign was? Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t even notice any major changes. The header got shorter, the logo got smaller and the navbar got raped. That’s about it.

Sometimes I feel like I could do a better job than these designers who make the big bucks for making this fugly. Well enjoy the new YouTube.

Lets rant! Hate the redesign? I know you do. Tell me about it. Swear the fuck out. I won’t mind.

Every single blog on the web kept talking about Yahoo’s top searches for 2008. First of all, why make a big buzz about this? Do you know what Yahoo’s market share is? 10.47%! So, these stats aren’t even close to representing most of us.

And everyone is like worshiping Britney Spears because she was the top searched term for seven out of eight years. Well why wouldn’t she? She’s just so entertaining to watch. She’s like a monkey on crack. No offense, but I’m just saying.

When was the last time you saw someone using Yahoo’s search instead of Google? (Well its sad, but everyone uses Google.) Okay so what about the 10% market share? Who are they then? What kind of idiots are they? Which year do they think they’re living in?

Lets take a look at the 10 searches:

1. Britney Spears
2. WWE - Who the fuck still watches this shit?
3. Barack Obama
4. Miley Cyrus - Looking for her naked pictures?
5. RuneScape
6. Jessica Alba
7. Naruto - Is this the Asian anime porn?
8. Lindsay Lohan - People are still into her? WTF?
9. Angelina Jolie - She has the body of man! OMG!
10. American Idol

This top search result thing tells us a lot about Yahoo users, doesn’t it? I’m guessing most of them are (semi) computer-retarded, horny, lame teens and/or hilly billies. But, this is just my guess.

You wanna take a guess at what kinda people use Yahoo? Do that by dropping a comment and after that go listen to some Britney Spears while shopping for a purse.

YouTube is playing with their video player. Take a look at my screenshot on the left. Notice anything different?

They’re making the player wider and everything below it. They’ve narrowed down the stuff on the right (related videos, info, more from, etc).

Well these are good changes, my friend. I like it! Wider screen is always better. But, are these changes temporary? Like are they just playing around or will these changes stay for good?

Anyways, I’m off. I’ll get my people looking into this tomorrow. And until then I wanna hear what YOU think about this. Good? Bad? Excited?

Do you even know what bugs I’m talking about? Well there were two bugs that I found. One of them didn’t let me type in the textbox and the other one kept telling me to upgrade my browser even though I was on FF3.

So, as you’ve guessed I can now write emails and I don’t get that annoying upgrade notice anymore. But, there’s still one thing that really bugs the shit outta me. Its that huge banner at the top. I just fucking hate that!

Why would you put a giant ad banner all the way up there? It just screws up the inbox. It brings everything down. It doesn’t look proportional. If Microsoft really wanted to stick in some ads then why don’t they put it somewhere on the sidebar?

I don’t really care where they put it, but they should just take it off the top. One more thing, do they target an audience for the ads or what? Do I look like I’m interested in Disney shit? I’ve seen a lot of different ads on Hotmail and none of them seem to interest me.

And can they not add a few icons or something? It looks like someone’s grandma designed it. Like the design is alright, but seriously are they trying to copy Gmail? I think they are. They took off all the icons after the redesign. Wow. Hotmail, you faggot!

And please get a logo, Hotmail. Please. I can’t take this level of ugliness. Hey, would you get a logo if I said Gmail has a logo? Yeah that’s right Gmail has a logo. You better go get one for yourself, Hotmail.

1. Milos asks:

Best ways to market and promote a site/product/service? Go

It really depends on the type of site, product or service. But, in general I would say Twitter. Build a profile with your logo as your background and match the colour scheme to your site’s. And simply start tweeting about things related to the site. After that become friends with a few power tweeters and make them tweet about you or your site.

2. MarkCarras asks:

How do I get more people to try and fight for this free Ausus Eee laptop I’m trying to give away at HeavyAsHell.com?

Well did you promote your contest? Did you tweet and plurk about it? Did you talk about your contest on different forums (ex: Digital Point)? Did you submit it to blogs that promote about contests for free (ex: Submit Your Contest or Contestu.com)?

And try not to make the contest too hard to win. But, don’t make it too easy either (not worth your time and money). You want it to seem like its possible to win. And make sure you post updates about the contest regularly. You could also try making a leaderboard.

3. javierjrdg asks:

Ok, here you go. What’s the quickest way to promote a brand online?.
Thanks!

I just answered this question. Please take a look at what I said to Milos (question #1).

4. Shalltell asks:

Whats are the best forms of online guerilla campaigns?

The thing is no-one is going to promote your site for free or without a benefit for themselves. But, there is an exception. If you can make your visitors say “This site is absolutely amazing. Its got great content and a kick ass design.” then you might have a chance. People might Stumble you, might tweet/plurk about you or might spread the link to a few friends.

But, if you want the real deal then you gotta piss off a big fish. That’s probably the best one. Read my post about that and you should be able to get a few ideas. And good luck because not everyone can pull this one off.

5. neboor asks:

Hi, im a web designer/developer with an entrepreneur soul and i love the web, my goal is to be rich with an online project. Can you give me some advice ? Thanks

I don’t mean to be rude or anything, but let me ask you this. What makes you better than all the other people trying to make some money online? Dude literally everyone is trying to earn the big bucks online, but only a few can.

My advice to you would be stop trying to make money online! Build something that you’re interested in, promote it, grow it and money will come with it. The amount of money in your pocket is like the weather. Its good sometimes. Its bad sometimes. So, don’t worry too much about it.

And if you’re looking for an idea for your online project then I’ll say you should look at what people need. See what you need. Think about what you wish was online. The simplest things can be the most successful ones.

With every problem comes an opportunity. You need to be able to see that problem and use it your own benefit.

More questions for me?

Hmm so lets do this again. This went well. I wanna try it for another week or so. Drop your questions in the comments and I’ll get you the answers again next week. See ya around.

I’m pretty impressed actually. They’ve made 30 themes and some of them are just amazing. My fav one has to be the one called Ninja. Well you’ll get to see all of the themes as the slowly become available to us. When? They’re saying within a few days. I guess they’re just waiting till it gets all hyped up and everything. Good strategy.

Now I was also wondering if they did this to bitch slap Hotmail. I would say yes. Hotmail got a redesign and it was just fubar. And look at Gmail. Damn! This is something I like about Google. When they do something, they do it right (or at least take things seriously). Microsoft, dude what happened? You’re nothing but a failure right now.

I’ll probably start using Gmail more. But, their privacy policy freaks me out. I’ll have to do my research and see if they’ve made any changes to their policies. I hope they did.

Update (40 mins later): Holy shit! They just rolled out the themes to all of us. That was fast. Well go play them.

Update #2 (2 hours later): Okay not all of us can see the themes yet. So, don’t freak out if you can’t see the “Themes” tab under “Settings”.

Excited? Can’t wait to use them?

What do you think of the whole theme idea? Any fav themes? And do you think they rolled this out to show the finger to Hotmail? Oh and anyone switching over to Gmail? Or going to use Gmail bit more than usual because of the hot new looks?

Do you think McDonalds cares if they lose a few hundred customers? Do you think they’ll try to improve? Do you think they’ll start using real meat? Do you think they’ll stop serving food that’s gonna really mess you up?

TechCrunch… the web’s McDonalds? 1327K subscribers. Lot of readers, huh? Quality content? Not so much. Quantity of content? More than quality. Why do people read TechCrunch? Why do you people still eat at McDonalds? Is it because we tend to think that just because its big ‘n popular, it must be good?

What if you don’t want that (branded) crap? What if you want something that’s worth eating? What if you want something nice and simple? What if you want the real deal? Where do you go? Well the answer is simple. Go to a local restaurants.

Small local restaurants are like hidden gems. Its in your city, but you never knew it existed. Its got great food, but you never heard a buzz about it. You gotta work a bit to find it, but its worth the effort. Once you’ve had a meal there you’ll get hooked on it.

What’s my point? Next time when you stumble across a blog don’t judge it by the number of subscribers it has or a site by the number of users/visitors it has. Look around and see if its any good. Don’t jump off a building just because everyone’s doing it.

(I just hated how bloggers were showing off their Feedburner chicklet. You can fake it. I can fake it without anyone knowing I faked it. I just hated how people were judging blog’s by this fake number. I had to do something.)

You can ask me anything. Anything related to the web. Like domains, hosting, SEO, social networks, bla, bla, blah. You get what I mean, right? I’ll try my best to answer it. Oh and you can also ask for reviews or even ask me to predict the future. I’m pretty good that too.

Sounds good? Okay… so lets kick it off. Just post your questions here by leaving a comment and I’ll post all the answers next weekend.

Photo credit: Sean Dreilinger.

When I first heard about that I was like “Yeah Obama’s a cool guy. He’s using the web and stuff.” But, then I questioned myself if he was doing the right thing when Allen Stern tweeted that he hated this whole thing.

First of all, it doesn’t look professional. Like c’mon, you’re the leader of a country and you’re going to use YouTube? A place filled with idiots, copyrighted videos, retarded video blogs and spam. He could instead post the videos on Change.gov or make a completely different site for this. Its not that hard to make a flash video player.

Second of all, isn’t this like taking YouTube to the next level? Aren’t they getting like an unfair advantage? Isn’t Obama killing all of YouTube’s competitors? Everyone (literally everyone) is going to use YouTube and no-one will give shit if there’s a better alternative out there. And think about all the new users/traffic YouTube is going to get.

So, what’s next? Bin Laden ranting on YouTube? International conferences being recorded live from webcams? Leaders of different nations pissing each other off by video blogging? Change…we got that. But, this? I’m not sure if this is a good kind of change.

Update: There’s a big discussion going on about this on Plurk. Some great points have been posted. Take a look.