Now this is not something new here, but AT&T and American Idol are at it again. The past few days AT&T has been sending out text messages advertising one of Fox’s TV shows. How do I know? I got one of them… Of course this message does not cost the recipient anything and they could easily opt out by responding to the spam with a simple “stop”. Even so, it still has the ability to be bothersome to AT&T customers.
Like I mentioned above this is not something new, I remember getting a similar text message last year when American Idol started. It would become a nuisance if it started to get out of control but a single text, I can live with that. Now imagine this — all TV shows start advertising this way, then add movies, random products, etc… Sounds like this has the possibility to become very annoying sometime in the future.
If what I just mentioned turned out to be the case, would you be able to opt out all together? Would you have to opt out on individual advertisements as they are received? We want to know what is your, our readers, take on all of this?
Sound off in the comments!
While many iPhone devs probably haven’t struck it rich (just as many of the apps flooding the store haven’t yet been strike-it-rich worthy), quality products that find an audience are still proving to be massive income sources for some developers reports Fake Steve Real Dan Lyons in Newsweek:
Greenstone, 41, has been writing games for Apple’s computers for 21 years. But he says he’s never seen anything like the iPhone apps phenomenon, which this year will deliver $5 million in revenue for him. “It’s crazy. It’s like lottery money. In the last four and a half months we’ve made as much money off the retail sales of iPhone apps as we’ve made with retail sales of all of the apps that we’ve made in the past 21 years—combined.” Business is so good that Greenstone won’t even bother writing for the Mac anymore.
Daniel wrote in to let us know the obvious: Apple rejected iBoobs from the App Store. Duh or d’oh, we guess, depending on your point of view. Did the dev think Pull my Finger made this okay? Cheer or jeer the video if you have to.
Tapbots developer Paul Hadda, whom TiPb interviewed a while back and whose awesome WeightBots app has just hit version 1.2, made a nasty discovery when searching the App Store: keyword spam:
I searched around for other high profile apps and found quite a few developers have chosen to SEO optimize their app description. So first we have apps naming themselves with blanks at the beginning to take advantage of alphabetical listing in the store. Then we have apps going from Free to Paid to take advantage of the top 100 list. And now this SEO hack, what’s next?
Since astroturfing and mechanical turk paid ratings are already taken, we’re betting “you may have already won…” scams, but who knows?
