Disenchanted.
Monday, 17. September 2007, 21:46:30
I was hoping to return home and be able to post an exciting new blog post about two of my favourite companies around; Pixar and Yahoo!, but as the title suggests, the tone is a little different.
For those that don't know already, I was really excited all day today - right from the moment Vikki told me that I had mail from Pixar. Being at work, I couldn't wait to get home, and all day the excitement was building as to what they could've sent me. I was expecting a response to a letter that I'd sent to them, you see. I wrote it little under a month ago and had only sent it off around two weeks back. I don't really want to detail of what was in the letter, because it was quite lengthy and I can't remember, to be honest.
Anyway, so today I got the response. It was described to me as an A4-sized envelope which read 'Please Do Not Bend' on the front. Oh, how I was excited to hear that... which made it all worse when it was a total disappointment. I opened it up as soon as I got home to find a letter inside. Rather than quote it, here's a scan of the letter:
As you can see, it's just a really generic auto-response; this is so offensive and impersonal that it makes me want to get in touch with them and have a rant at them some more. I understand that such a big company like Pixar must receive so much mail each day; but I'd prefer someone to read it and respond with something relevant ten years down the line than be just another crappy letter that's probably just tossed to one side.
Thank you for your letter to Pixar! We apologise for the delayed response, but we have been very busy working on our next feature animation film, "Wall.e", due out next summer.
First of all, I doubt the people in the mail room have been working hard on making the film. If someone's hired to do the mail, they're obviously sat replying to letters like mine all day, not just printing off auto-responders whilst waiting for their 3D model to render! Plus, one of the things I'd queried was why movie releases in the UK are months and months after US releases; and since they could clearly see from my address that I'm not from the US - this means their next feature animation film won't be released Summer 2008, but more like Winter 2008.
We love hearing all the great things you had to say, and we always appreciate any support and feedback we get from our fans.
As a simple token of our appreciation, we hope you like the enclosed photo of "The Incredibles".
What? I said one sentence of praise - the rest was questions I wanted answering about release dates, hi-definition movie releases and other matters I wanted to discuss. And your photo print is alright - I guess it's better than nothing - but I would've preferred a proper response and no silly print-out!! Maybe Pixar should save money in printing out all these photos and use the money they save to hire someone who will write back to fans properly!
Bah, it makes me sick. I took the time to write them a letter, hand-written on decent paper and everything; and their response made me dislike the company's way of handling things like this?! I would've preferred no response and then could pretend that someone has read my letter and taken in what I'd said, but is actually too busy to reply because they're busy on improving the product.
Anyway, rant over - on my blog, at least.
Today I got invited to Yahoo! Mash - this is the new social network from Yahoo! - who previously maintained Yahoo! 360 (nobody seems to really know what's happening with 360 at the minute; whether it's to be scrapped, merged or to be continued). Y! Mash is currently in it's beta stages and somewhat closed off to the general public (an invite-only beta) and I didn't quite know what to expect after hearing very mixed feedback from sources on the web.
Signing up is easy; getting an invite doesn't just send you an invite, it creates a profile page for you to 'claim' should you want to join. Of course, if you decline, you don't get your page and it's deleted - but I think it's nice that it's done this way because you feel that you're already part of the network and it would be rude not to claim and start editing (or 'Mashing').
Editing your profile is also simple, and within seconds I had my page looking different from the default theme by changing a few colours and adding background images in the 'basic' mode of the Profile Editor and whilst I've not looked into more advanced CSS editing, I'm sure the profiles are quite easy to transform should you know CSS.
Your profile consists of modules which are also easy to add, move around (click and drag), edit, remove and steal (add to your profile, from a friends page). Unfortunately, most of the modules are very basic, rss-based modules, or silly 'fun' activities. Upon installing the Last.fm module I admit that I was expecting a bit more than it just to fetch the information and display it as an uninteresting and unformatted list. It would've been nice to see some colour, or even the flash music player available in the Facebook app. However, Yahoo! are set to release a developer API to allow people to create their own modules (akin to that of Facebook's Applications) in future.
One thing that is instantly noticeable (and also very annoying from both a Yahoo! supporter and a Yahoo! user's point of view) is that there is little integration with current Yahoo! services, and what is there is poorly implemented. Bearing in mind that login to Mash is accomplished via your standard Yahoo! ID, a good example of this is the Flickr photos module. Once you add the Flickr photos module, you see a box to enter the URL of your Flickr Photostream appear on your profile. My immediate reaction to this was "hang on, I log into my Flickr account using my Yahoo! ID too; why isn't this automatically linked up?!" I guess in the case of the Flickr module, this is for if you wanted to add the photostream of a particular tag, or a friend's photostream instead? But if that is the case why isn't there a nicely implemented user interface, as if it were a Yahoo! Widget?!
Other good examples of bad (or non-existent) implementation is MyBlogLog which has been dubbed MyMashLog and only shows recent visitors from within the Mash Community as a list of profile names, as opposed to any MyBlogLog member (no account linking, again) regardless of Mash membership and a nice profile picture thumbnail, an absence of an Upcoming or del.icio.us module and also the presence of Google-owned YouTube video modules as opposed to Yahoo! Video or Jumpcut.
Personally, I'd be quite happy to use it as my primary social networking site if they can give me greater and accurate localisation options, it became fully integrated with relevant Yahoo! services (sometimes I wonder if Yahoo! even know what services they own) and also that I can convince a good circle of friends to join. As a social network, I think it has potential - it's also relatively ad-free, which is a bonus. However, it does seem to be missing any sense of evolution over what we've witnessed from sites like MySpace, Facebook and Bebo - the ability to customise a friend's profile for them isn't enough; and then there's also the question of whether the time's right for yet another social networking site.
