Not literally.
I’m a fan of some things. Twitter, for instance. It’s great for one liners, and those little moments of bitching. It’s funny, because I complained about Fire Fox 3 crashing and about TweetLater’s password reset funkiness. Both parties responded on Twitter. I mean, that takes Customer Service (especially on FREE products!) to a whole new level.
Imagine being at home and you tweet (I’m such a kid, that makes me giggle) “#roadrunner is so damn slow. why am I paing $30 for this?” and ten minutes later you get a response from #timewarner saying “send us your account information and we’ll check it out” or – #AT&T sends a tweet offering me a discount to switch.
Two different aspects – customer service, and potential sales. Well, sales and spamming. Now the problem with spam on twitter is that people have different ideas of spam. Some people feel the need to read every tweet – I was in this category briefly until I started adding more twitterers (how many words and variations can you come up with involving twitter? It’s the new google.). I was – and still struggle with – this idea in my RSS feeds. I need to adopt GenuineChris’s method, but I’m too busy reading my feeds to do it. IRONY!
But what kicked this post off?
This little gem on Ajaxian. I have a love hate relationship with many things. Marketing being one of them. Brands being another. I constantly relate a story about a brand of vodka that issued three labels for the same vodka with different prices (cheap, better, best) and watched their sales soar when they raised the price of their vodka – because they introduced two cheaper kinds, as well as the story of a mismarked purse for $99.90 instead of $9.99 which lead to it being sold out. Re-Branding is an illusion in and to itself.
I get why some companies do it. The next time you get that phone call about “making a few extra grand a month not doing any work” google the company name. Every one of those I’ve seen tends to involve a few name-changes (*cough*rebranding*cough*). Businesses do it to escape association. The rebrand products to create new perspective (a la the Verizon/GTE reference at Ajaxian/Steve Yegge – which I have not verified). But to call JavaScript AJAX?
That’s perpetuating a myth. It’s official. AJAX has lost all meaning. It is now the new internet buzz word. When your client says “we need pizzazz, somethin that will help cocreate synergy, increase our CTRs and ROIs” you may be thinking SEO, SEM, DHTML, Javascript Frameworks, Flash, Flex… but all you need to say is “let’s AJAX it up a notch.”
Bonus:
Do you do PoT at work? PHP on Tracks. Funky fresh new fun word.
And I hate Calculus. Driving me up a wall.
