With some pleasure Arrington has been posting follow-ups to the original post that started a bit of a firestorm but that isn’t really the topic I want to talk about right now. Rather what I think is even a more important issue to come out of this mess is something that Arrington posted about this past evening.

You see it appears that that Zynga has been displaying an entirely different page to Michael Arrington than was being displayed to other readers checking out Zynga’s new game – FishVille. As you can see from the screen capture that Michael took he is seeing something entirely different than another person on exactly the same page.

So we were surprised yesterday to see a screen shot clearly showing a mobile subscription ad in a post on InsideSocialGames about the launch of a new Zynga game, FishVille.

I went to the game to check myself, but those mobile ads weren’t there. I assumed they had quickly been taken down, or there was some other reasonable explanation.

They weren’t taken down though. Or rather, they were, but just for me. Other users were still seeing the same mobile ads. And the filtering was clearly directed at me, since I logged in on the same IP address with a friends account and saw the ads.

What is bothersome here is not just that Zynga appears to have lied about pulling these types of scam ads in their games but rather that they are intentionally misleading people who have been calling them out on their practices.

The other really scary part about all of this is – how often is this happening and is this type of thing the end result of targeted advertising?

It’s bad enough that Zynga seems to be okay with carrying on displaying these types of ad but the fact that they go totally against Facebook’s terms of service an yet the company is doing nothing about it is even more problematic. If Facebook is willing to overlook this type of behavior and to the point that Zynga can target specific people as to what they can see and what they cannot see how trust worthy is Facebook?

As it is I already subscribe to things like Clicky for my blog stats and have paid for a license for WordWeb Pro but that still leaves quite a number of plugins I want to show my appreciation for. Hell I’ve even donated to developer’s whose software I may end up never using but can still appreciate the work that has gone into them.

It is easy enough to try all kinds of software and plugins and ease our conscience about using them for long periods of time because they have been created by developers who are good enough to let us use them indefinitely for free.

That doesn’t change the fact that these hard working people deserve recognition for their hard work; and what better recognition that a few bucks to maybe buy something that will let them build an even better product or even buy a case of beer to celebrate with.

So now if you’ll excuse me I’m off to check my list for this month and show some thanks.

Don was the face of Microsoft in the startup community that was constantly travelling and speaking at whatever conference and events that he believed would help promote Microsoft as a changing company. He was a well liked man who gave back from more to the community than he ever took back.

Unfortunately is a highly questionable move Don has found himself among those 800 people that will be getting a pink slip from the company. I find myself agreeing with Michael Arrington when he writes today

My opinion of Microsoft dropped a notch today. A big notch. Don invested years of his time making Microsoft seem more human. He wasted all that time, apparently.

Dumb move Microsoft – very dumb.

So while all seems to be steaming full ahead it turns out that Spring Design has gotten a little pissy about all the attention the Nook is getting since they feel that Barnes and Noble stole the idea from them. So in typical American fashion Spring Design is suing Barnes and Noble for violating intellectual property.

In tonight’s show Mark and Sean discuss this turn of events as well as the e-book reader market in as it stands right now.

Enjoy the show.

Nook v. Alex – a Don Quixote quest to recoup their losses

Everyone it seemed to want to have  blog, to grab their niche, and make their millions. In most cases that has proven to be nothing more than a dream unfulfilled. Sure there were some voices that have become one’s that re easily identified and the poster boys/ladies of success in this new medium.

But then I was reading a post by Hugh MacLeod the other day where he said this

Nobody will ever care how many Twitter followers I had or how SEO-optimized my blog was.

This got me thinking about the whole permanence of what we as writers on blogs can expect at the point where we either quit or die. After all at some point hosting fees will go delinquent, domain fees will go unpaid, which means that there will come a point where everything we have poured out for anyone to read will be gone.

It won’t matter how famous you were. It won’t matter if you were a Seth Godin, or a Robert Scoble, a Jeff Pulver, or a Chris Brogan. At some point – some longer than others – even what they have contributed will fade nothingness. For the rest of us chances are that this loss from the collective memory will happen a lot sooner.

The same can’t be said for Shakespeare, Russell, Rand, Thoreau or any number of intellectuals as with some of them their words and thoughts have lived on for decades or more. Their thoughts and concepts became ingrained within the human collective through nothing more than the written word.

Yet in our electronic world we have nothing that comes close to this kind of permanence because as soon as it is said and rallied around it quickly replaced by some other transitory thought that attracts our diminishing attention span. This transience is only exasperated by our beginning love affair with the real-time web.

Where famous thinkers and scholars of time gone by are still, and I bet always will be, remembered for their influence on human thought. The rest of us bound in an ever tightening dance with the Singularity probably won’t even be remembered as a footnote.

It is also worth bearing in mind that facts have shorter and shorter life spans these days ….

- Alvin & Heidi Toffler

Revolutionary Wealth

Well of course your host for tonight’s show, Sean and myself, aren’t so enamored with the whole idea. In the show we discussion Robert’s (re-)conversion to a Twitter evangelist, how in one fell swoop Mashable turned the whole thing into a game, and how Lists will be the new digerati A-List.

Here are Robert’s posts proclaim the power of Twitter and its Lists starting with his post about Friendfeed losing in the long run.

The chat room/forum problem (& an apology to @Technosailor) – Robert Scoble
Louis Gray’s “five stages of early adopterism” chart – Robert Scoble
Techmeme vs. Twitter lists? (UPDATE: vs. TechCrunch list) – Robert Scoble

Enjoy the show.

Twitter Lists, swing and a miss – It’s all now a game

The problem is that none of the blogs (my own and The Inquisitr) isn’t really the place to be posting this type of stuff – I have a hard enough time getting and keeping regular readers as it. So I decided to start up a new blog that will only showcase all the really – and I mean really – screwed pictures, videos, and stories that I run across on a daily basis.

So without any further ado I present to you – Whacking Your Brain. Oh and just to make sure you know this before hand … this is most definitely NSFW (Not Safe For Work). Let me emphasis this just so you can’t come crying about how your sensibilities where offended – this site is Not Safe For Work.

I was just reading a post over at The Next Web by Olivier Coudert concerning what Twitter’s next step might be. The part that really caught my eye and got me thinking was this:

Fast forward 10 years, and AdWords produced about 2/3 of the $22 billion revenue of Google in 2008. So this new stream of revenue could be more than substantial, and Twitter will be a major source for shaping it.

As social media grows over the next few years and real-time search becomes even more of a powerhouse with Twitter seemingly at the heart of it one has to wonder how much of a rock and a hard place position that Google and Microsoft have set themselves up for.

While the deal monetarily that both companies may have made reportedly isn’t that much that doesn’t mean it will always be that way – especially if real-time search proves to be the killer that everyone seems to think it will be. What happens if in two years, or even one year, Twitter is so ingrained into both search engines that it would be next to impossible to extricate it.

At that point what price would be too high for Twitter to expect for its firehose of data?

What kind of money would either company be willing to hand over to Twitter to keep that real-time data flowing?

One has to wonder if Google and Microsoft have just handed the keys to the bank vault over to Twitter.