Audiences Shrugged

Box Office: ‘Atlas Shrugged’ collapses, even without a NY Times review

Overall, the weekend’s take was a scant $879,000 — a whopping 48 percent drop despite adding 166 locations. Which certainly suggest they’re running out of audience quick.

That means that at some locations, distributor Rocky Mountain Pictures will be writing checks to theaters to cover the difference between receipts and operating expenses. The only way they’re likely to get the 1,000 screens the producers say they want next weekend is to rent them. And, as Kyle put it at his personal blog, “Whether the sequels get made is purely a matter of how much desire the producers have for losing money.”

And this is based on a book that:

In 1991, a survey conducted for the Library of Congress and the Book-of-the-Month Club asked club members what the most influential book in the respondent’s life was. Rand’s Atlas Shrugged was the second most popular choice, after the Bible.

No. Don’t bother commenting on this one.

Check your premises first.

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Sony’s PSN Intrusion: Devastating

This is part of Sony’s official statement and it’s chilling:

Update on PlayStation Network and Qriocity

Although we are still investigating the details of this incident, we believe that an unauthorized person has obtained the following information that you provided: name, address (city, state, zip), country, email address, birthdate, PlayStation Network/Qriocity password and login, and handle/PSN online ID. It is also possible that your profile data, including purchase history and billing address (city, state, zip), and your PlayStation Network/Qriocity password security answers may have been obtained. If you have authorized a sub-account for your dependent, the same data with respect to your dependent may have been obtained. While there is no evidence at this time that credit card data was taken, we cannot rule out the possibility. If you have provided your credit card data through PlayStation Network or Qriocity, out of an abundance of caution we are advising you that your credit card number (excluding security code) and expiration date may have been obtained.

As bad as this is, it’s good that Sony is giving so much detail to its customers. The silence was bad for business.

Previously here:

Sony’s Playstation Network Woes

Number 29 And Plummeting

News curation: finally, social media’s killer app?

That article mentioned a site I’d never heard of before: Sulia. It claims to aggregate “experts” and divide Twitter into channels based on topics and subjects.

So I went to investigate “ebooks” and this is what I found:

What The Mobile Web Means

Square COO Explains Why The Web Is Dead

Rabois also predicted that Facebook will soon change its mobile strategy — instead of putting all its focus on building an HTML5 version of its Web site that works on all browsers, it will begin putting way more attention into mobile apps, particularly for the iPad. He said the change would be a defining moment for Mark Zuckerberg […]

Will Mobile Kill The Web? (Hell No)

Mobile apps feed on impulsiveness; anything that requires consideration will default back to the computer.

Impulsiveness is exactly it. Impulsiveness does not like delay, does not like effort, it demands immediate gratification. (Here’s a prime example using Facebook!)

And this brings up another thought about Twitter: How many people would bother to use Facebook if everything they posted just disappeared after posting it?

Beating Apple Sounds Simple But Isn’t

How to beat Apple

1. Apple doesn’t do social well on a large scale. Ping? Game Center? Please. Social applications don’t seem to be in Apple’s DNA…their best applications are still single-player or 2/3/4-player.

Well, this is ironic given the series of videos I just posted today.

The Blind Spot

Don’t Do What You Love

The best writers, [Charlaine] Harris said, don’t fall in love with their characters, or their words. They don’t mind being edited; in fact, they’re open to any suggestion that makes them better. Writers who get too close to their work and take criticism too personally never improve.

Steve Jobs Demos Interpersonal Computing

This is a fascinating set of YouTube videos with Steve Jobs demonstrating the NeXT computer software. You can see many ideas that were later incorporated into iOS and perhaps even hints of things still to come.

How different is “interpersonal” computing from social computing? Steve Jobs understood the power of groups back then. I’m sure he also understands that today. We could see some exciting things coming from Apple in this regard.

More About Twitter

twitter communities/the living dead

For those of you who don’t know the Smashing Magazine Twitter, it’s pretty much set up like a direct feed of interesting links on web development. Because of that it garnered a pretty extensive base of followers. Current numbers are flirting with the 400.000 mark, so when they present a question on Twitter it reaches 400.000 people without any form of further social intervention. That’s a lot of possible replies, right?

I did my reply count a couple of days later, by then not many new replies where added to the list. Since it was the first time I was trying out filtering on hash tags, I really had no idea what the multitude of replies would be, but even then I couldn’t have imagined how poor the actual results looked. From a potential audience of roughly 400.000 people, came … 50 replies.

Emphasis in the original.

Some people think their Follower counts mean something.

They mean nothing.

Twitter has positioned itself for ephemerality. So why should this be a surprise?

Twitter is so unfocused, so just about fundamentally useless for lasting things, I marvel that anyone remains there at all and puts up with all the frustrations.

For the past several days, I’ve tweeted a few links to new blog posts. I think I’m going to stop that now.

Previously here:

Facebook Wakes Up While Twitter Snores
Twitter’s New Sign-Out Page
Bailing On Twitter: Timing!
Another Lost Opportunity For Twitter
Now Only Here

The Great Devaluation Is Coming

Let Them Eat iPads

Inflation is poised to do the kind of lasting, deep damage to the American economy that two long wars, unconscionable wealth inequality, labor-union excesses, and the best efforts of banking robber barons failed to do. And it can’t be stopped, because the government won’t even acknowledge it’s happening.

Not inflation. Currency devaluation. Let’s get the proper perspective and keep it.

And:

We’re in dangerous waters. There’s a very real possibility of things we never envisioned.

Hey, welcome to my world, circa January 2008!

They’ve been slamming on the brakes for three years now, but that cliff is still up ahead and we’re going straight for it.

And then over it.

Sony Debuts Android Atrocity Tablet

Click = big

Sony S1 and S2 dual-screen Honeycomb tablets get official (video)

Because, you know, that dual-screen phone that’s out there has just been killing the hell out of the iPhone. Not!