How spectacularly fresh. If there’s one thing the guys at Apple consistently get right, it’s aesthetics. Compare to the old volume bar:

Old iTunes Volume Bar

The song progress bar also has a nice two-tone look:

Versus the old one:

Part I: Algorithm
Part II: Features of the search engine results pages (SERPs)

Go ahead and Sphinn them, if you’re into that sort of thing.

Twitter is making an effort to combat spam accounts… Obviously, they didn’t go through and hand pick millions of fake accounts, so there must have been some type of standard for throwing them out. I’d say that users with less than 10 posts, more than half of which contained links, who follow 20 times more than they are followed – these may have been the metrics for who got thrown out. Who knows? I realize that more than a few sources are saying that the majority of the followers got removed, including some definitely legitimate ones, but I haven’t heard of any actual person complaining that their (non-spam) account was deleted.

…but they did it with poor communication. We’re left to guess about how Twitter distinguished spam accounts from real users. There’s a blog post on Twitter Status, but it’s short and obtuse:

“In particular, those with large followings may see significant changes as we correct for spam accounts and data inconsistencies.”

The phrase “data inconsistencies” strikes me as so ridiculously vague, I get the impression that Twitter as a company doesn’t know how obsessive their users are about followers. “Spammers Perish” and “How Many Followers” are trending topics about which hundreds of thousands of Twitterers are talking. The tone of the conversations is generally irritated, and more than a few nasty blog posts have already been published about the topic.

The questions that remain (for Twitter as a company to answer… soon) are:

1. How did you decide which accounts to delete?
2. Did any real accounts really get deleted?
3. Is this the beginning of a larger initiative or did you just do one massive sweep? Will it be harder to make an account now?
4. Using these same strategies, could Twitter one day be fully spam free?

The strangest part is that I’ve never owned a Bluetooth headset nor had Bluetooth turned on in the Settings. As you can see in the screen shot, the Bluetooth logo is nowhere to be found (it’s usually on the top right, by the alarm indicator) but the call audio pop up (when you press the volume control during a call) shows that audio is being sent to a Bluetooth device:

My iPhone stuck in Bluetooth mode

A little bit of background:

• I’ve restored the phone back to factory settings (completely fresh).
• I’ve done all the reset options under Settings > General > Reset, as well as numerous soft and hard reboots.
• I’ve tried it with a different SIM card, but the problem persists.
• The phone is acting strange, freezing occasionally and shutting off before battery runs out.
• This has happened to me before. I took the phone to the Apple store at Barton Creek Mall, and the Genius who was helping me ended up giving me a new phone.

Any help? Any Apple guys out there with Google Alerts on?

Hulu removes American Dad before timer expires

It may simply be that the timer script uses a different time zone than the script that actually pulls the video. Hulu engineers also probably didn’t expect anyone to be counting down the hours until a show expires. But it’s broken, and – for a company with about $500 million in venture capital – it should be a quick fix.

Collins English Dictionary on Google - Twitter

I guess I missed the memo that announced when company names became dictionary-worthy material. I’d start a petition but I think I’m going to wait for somebody else to do it. I don’t want to be that guy.

But I will take an anti-Collins Dictionary stance on this one. Just because the word Twitter is used in the day-to-day language of many industries (many industries referring to the internet marketers and mainstream media pundits who actually believe it’s the next big thing) does not mean it deserves an entry in a dictionary (even a less-renowned dictionary).

This is almost undeniably a well-played PR stunt that carries not only implications on the quality of HarperCollins as a publisher but also possible consequences to the Twitter brand name.

Outside of the (slim) possibility of brand genericide – which could eventually lead to Twitter losing its trademark rights – this solidifies the company’s choke-hold on the (downright unpopular) wider world of microblogging. Furthermore, it’s assuming that Twitter is still going to exist in its current form in the long run.

Remember when MySpace became a media sensation? Obviously, journalists (and investors) assumed that because of its massive audience, it was going to remain the most prominent social network for years to come. Now MySpace serves primarily as a big billboard for Sacha Baron Cohen’s third of three “foreign weirdo” personalities. I’m just glad Collins English Dictionary didn’t make MySpace a noun and verb.

A few weeks ago, I had a friend move from Austin. I bought all his furniture both as a final gesture of goodwill and as a way to make a little extra money.

This last week, I put his futon on Craigslist and the first 5 emails were definitely automated spam:

Craigslist spam

While the first guy was in Malta, the second one was just busy and deaf:

Craigslist spammers spamming me

I have some questions for more experienced Craigstlisters: Why do they want that information? What can someone do with the combination of my phone, address, and full name? This doesn’t seem like the “I’ll send you a fake money order, you wire me the remainder” scam, so what happens if I respond to this email?

Bing gives cashback eBay now

MSN always had a “Cashback” program, but it’s greatly expanded with the release of Bing. Around June 20, everybody started noticing that eBay was one of its affiliates.

I don’t know about everybody else, but I consider eBay one of the most advanced marketplaces that exists. Supply and demand seem to be perfectly matched in thousands of deals a day. It’s also where I get the majority of my sneaker collection, most of which gets resold for a 20-35% profit. (Much better than most of my stock picks – forget about it.)

The problem is I have to wait at least a year for shoes to appreciate (demand increases as an already limited supply of unworn sneakers dwindles), mainly due to shipping costs that I need to cover. If I can save 8% on an order, I may be able to save myself some time and closet space, too.

I can understand advertising being low brow. You don’t want to waste any impressions on morons by using a creative execution that’s above their heads.

But notice the proper use of their, as opposed to there or they’re (get used to it). Terrible advertising like Jeff Dye here selling his soul for bad beer is like people haplessly writing with terrible grammar: it seems like one is assuming everybody else is as dumb or dumber than you. And that assumption, my friends, is how you insult my intelligence.

But today it didn’t appear in the search results – not for “phone my phone” or any other variant of the site’s name, and not for “site:phonemyphone.com” either. I witnessed, ladies and gentlemen, one of my favorite sites be placed in Google’s supplemental results (commonly referred to as Google Hell).

It works fine on Yahoo, which returns PhoneMyPhone.com as the #1 result just as Google did last week:

What’s the deal with Google Hell? [ (c) Jerry Seinfeld]

Why is this site – which offers a relatively unique service and has a good amount of “buzz in terms of blog inlinks – not showing up on Google and assigned 0 PageRank? I have three initial guesses:

1. The site sells user information or is otherwise a scam (although this would likely incur Google’s dangerous content warning)
2. The site has been penalized for its malevolent application as a prank caller by some users
3. The site is being seen as spam by Google, either because of the keyword stuffing in the Meta tags, or because of the outbound links to reversephonedetective.com and freecellphonelookups.com

If it’s the first option, I have seen no evidence after using the service of any scammy behavior. The second option seems too far-fetched, as if Google employees penalize rankings of people who call them late at night. The third option is the most likely but I find it hard to believe that such minor infractions could bring about the quite serious repercussions of being removed from Google’s SERPs.