Swooping

It’s October 2008. I’m in an AT&T store shopping for an iPhone. At the register, I agreed to oblige myself to AT&T for two years in return for their “generous subsidy” on my phone which, they tell me, would otherwise cost me $699.

Holy cats! They’re subsidizing me $500! Thanks, AT&T! What a pal.

I also got my wife a new phone that came for free with our new Family Plan. It’s a very capable Nokia, which – the sales guy tells me – actually has better voice quality than the iPhone, can take pictures, can send MMS … oh, but not to the iPhone … but to other free Nokia phones and a bunch of Sony phones and Blackberries etc. Anyway, it can also play music too, even can sort of surf the Web. But I digress. The main point: free just for signing up. I mean, yes it’s subsidized, but I could have gotten the same very capable Nokia phone free without the two year contract.

So then I left the AT&T store, new iPhone in my pocket, new Nokia in the bag.

On our way over to the Apple Store, I started thinking back to Steve Jobs’ keynote at Macworld Expo 2007, where he introduced the iPhone as “a widescreen iPod with touch controls, a revolutionary mobile phone, and a breakthrough Internet communications device.”

We head to the Apple Store, where we’re looking at the iPod Touch. In Steve’s terms, the iPod Touch is two of these: iPod + Internet communicator. The only thing separating it from it’s cousin is the phone part.

The 16GB iPod Touch cost $299.

That Nokia in my bag was free. Gosh, if Apple could just somehow figure out how to get the free phone part of my Nokia into that $299 iPod Touch, AT&T wouldn’t have to “subsidize” me $500.

Hmmmm…

A few things to point out, then some jackassery:

1. Apple sells iPod Touch to me at a profit
2. Nokia sells that phone to AT&T at a profit
3. There is no way that the circuitry that defines the difference between iPod and iPhone costs Apple or AT&T anything resembling the difference between $299 and $699.

Now, the jackassery:

The fact is that the $199/$299 price tag for the iPhone is the result of AT&T’s—or any other carrier, since the situation is the same all around the world—subsidy. Without subsidy—and tying you to a new two year contract—the iPhone is not different from something like the Nokia N97, which is $700 unlocked. Or the contract-free, unsubsidized iPhone 3G itself: The iPhone 3G costs $770 and $877 unlocked for the 8 and 16GB versions.”

Just because “the situation is the same all around the world” does not mean we should just shrug our shoulders and accept it.

I think a lot of the grumbling we’re hearing (and if we own 3G iPhones, doing) is not because we don’t feel like we should pay SOMEthing for this new bit of Apple magic, but it’s because our gut tells us that we’re being scammed by AT&T due to the rules that the wireless industry has managed to sucker us into accepting as standard procedure.

The question I have is this:

Where would Apple have to price the iPhone 3G S to get it the same profit margin that they get when they sell an iPod Touch?

Is it $299? Probably not.

Is it $699? No way.

I am personally torn on this topic.

In the spirit of brevity, I’ll approach this question voter’s pamphlet style:

Question: Shall marketers be permitted to use Twitter to forward information about special offers they are promoting?

Argument in favor:

Yes. Twitter is in effect a “double opt-in” system in email parlance. First, a potential sender of the marketing message has to agree to the idea of sending the tweet in the first place. If a sender deems a marketing message not appropriate for their audience, they don’t have to agree to send it. Indeed the sender must press the “Update” button themselves. Second, any potential recipient must have opted-in to follow others whose tweets will appear on their respective Twitter feeds. If a recipient thinks a received tweet is inappropriately spammy, they can simply block further inbound tweets from the sender.

Additionally, this fits Twitter’s mission statement pretty well: the idea of trusted relations sharing knowledge and what they’re doing at any given moment.

Argument in opposition:

No. Twitter is not for marketers. If it becomes loaded up with marketing messages, it will become irrelevant and annoying, and will wither. No one who signs up to follow another person on Twitter does so expecting that they will start receiving even occasional canned third party marketing pitches from that followed individual.

The spirit of Twitter is to offer a mechanism by which friends or associates can provide the answer to – quoting Twitter’s mission statement here – “one simple question: What are you doing?” Appropriate answers might be “I’m at a club hearing this great band” [link to club address] or “I’m reading this awesome book [link to description] or EVEN “I just found a great deal on Mac software [link to MacHeist.com].”

Twitter is a forum by which individuals voluntarily share information. Paying people to spread your message is one thing. Paying people to slap an ad banner in their friends’ Twitter feed is akin to paying someone to sneak up behind their friend and put an advertisement for a product on their back without their permission. Twitter is not a place for marketers to offer this kind of chicanery.

How do I vote?

My first instinct was from my gut: No. I thought about why I felt that way, and started making associations with my time at the helm of a 1999 email newsletter when confronted with the idea of sprinkling ads in with my content. “They signed up to read content, not ads.” A truism. But look where we are now, 9 years later. Pretty much all email newsletters have at least one ad. I personally have designed ads, placed them, and bought them. When I see them in newsletters to which I subscribe, I may or may not look at them, but am almost never insulted by their presence.

Likewise with my Twitter client, Twitteriffic. The free version is ad-supported. The first time I saw that ad, I was surprised and a little appalled. Now it’s more of a game to rate them. Sometimes. Or not. Whatever.

MacHeist did not dictate what should be said. Yes their scheme pre-populated the Update box on my Twitter page with suggested text and the requisite link, but there was nothing saying I couldn’t change that text. I read it, looked over my list of followers to determine if I thought any of them would be really offended, weighed that against how much I wanted Delicious Library, considered if any of my followers might want the MacHeist bundle, and fired away.

Twitter is an open conduit for information flow. Its user community is discerning. It is as easy to block someone as it is to follow them.

An analogy I thought of in the Your Mac Live IRC chat the other night:

Guy: “Hey kid, do you want a cookie?”

Kid: “Of course I want a cookie!”

Guy: “Ok, to get this cookie, you have to put nipple clamps on your friend and shock them.”

Kid: “Uh, dude. That’s not cool.”

Guy: “Ok listen, it’s a REALLY GOOD cookie. And it’s just a little shock. Not only that, but your friend can also have a cookie if he or she agrees to the same deal! Seem fair?”

Kid: “A really good cookie, eh? All right! I’m in!”

Steed is writing now. Please stay tuned.

I remember two things about this class, in chronological order:

On the first day of class, as I was looking to my left as the stack of syllabi headed my way, I heard people seating themselves to my right. I took my syllabus, and as I swung the stack to my right, time slowed down, Matrix-style.  My senses registered a change in temperature (warmer) and a distinct fragrance (perfum-y, feminine). My reaction was to slow slightly, use both hands to pass my now precious delivery while turning and allowing my eyes to experience the source of the warm loveliness that my skin and nose had already been absorbing for all of .39 seconds.

I was rewarded. Slim hands grasped my package, a nice voice murmured thanks, and light eyes met mine for an eternity measured in single-digit nanoseconds. But for a 20 year old male human whose nose and skin are already on high alert, those 6 nanoseconds of locked eyes were enough for mutual visions of courtship, blossoming love and procreation.

And by “mutual,” I mean “ricocheting between my brain and groin at the speed of testosterone.”

“Good day,” I said, smiling, “and welcome to Mass Media and American Politics. I’m Steed.”

“Kristina,” she replied, “Kristin Hera. And this is my boyfriend, Biff.”

( poof )

That was the first thing I remember, and is ironically (you’ll see why), it is not germane to my thesis.

The second thing was the horror I felt as I finished my first paper. It might have been “Write an essay discussing the most influential incidents wherein mass media has impacted American politics in the last 50 years.” It was not this, probably, but something similarly broad. This was my kind of paper. I could touch on all the things I knew, wittily weaving together seemingly disparate thoughts in ways that, through most of high school and thus far in college, had served me well and hid the fact that – at least 50% of the time – I only barely knew what I was talking about. As I hit “Save,” I was feeling pretty good. Seven pages of dancing prose, solid intro and conclusion with 3 well-supported points in the middle. And it’s not even due till day after tomorrow. Win, win, win.

Cue the horror music as I looked over the assignment one last time.

“Essays longer than 500 words will not be graded and will receive no credit.”

“F-f-f-five HUNDRED? (runs quick word count) But my 7 pages is 1,784!!!” (500 words turns out to be almost exactly two double-spaced pages).

A quick review: the paper was due in two days, so there was time. I had plenty to say on the topic. All I had to do was something I’d never done before, really: Edit.

The process was daunting. Torturous.

I’d look at a paragraph and immediately see my favorite part – “ok, I can’t get rid of that funny/insightful/witty part. I’ll have to make the rest of the paragraph work around it.”

What I learned is that when I’m writing, I want to be entertaining. But when I’m reading, I want the words to be efficient. When I had to fit my entertaing prose into a bounded space, I realized that structuring my work to incorporate those extra thoughts and explorations meant that often, merit would be sacrificed rather than augmented.

Up until going through that process – writing, editing, thinking, editing some more –  I mistakenly made the assumption that I was communicating my main points so well that I could get away with the flourishes I sought to inject into the work to make it more fun to read.

The 500 word “bounding box” forced me to go critical, and I then saw it as a game: “is there one word that could replace those seven?” Amazingly, English is pretty accommodating.

The final paper weighed in at 499 words, and fit on two double-spaced pages. I was still nervous about it, and said as much to Kristin when they were due. She replied “Really? I thought it was fine. But … I’m a Journalism major, so I’m used to writing succinctly.”

Ouch.

The day we were to get our papers back, Professor Medler left a few minutes early, assigning the task to his teaching assistant. I don’t remember his name, but my mental picture (20 years later) has him as a young Don Johnson, but in Army fatigues instead of Miami pastel.

Anyway, young Don hauled his Army duffel bag up to the desk, saying “We were very surprised with your work, and not in a good way. Limiting the length of the papers was an intentional push to get you to be more concise. And with one exception, we were disappointed.” Kristin sat up straight and got ready to receive accolades. She’s a Journalism major. There were more words from the front of the room, but I was not hearing them as I braced for my disappointing paper to be returned.

Then he handed it back. 36. 36 percent? No, no – there it was right there: 36/40. But didn’t young Don say that there was only one person in the class who scored well, and that they got a 36?

My elation was even greater than the indignity that burst from Kristin’s space as she received her paper (a 32/40. Respectable, perhaps, but no 36.)

Moral of story: Journalism student or not, the more you think about your words, the better they’ll be.

And yes, I am aware that this here essay is not a great example of a tidy bit of writing, but it’s helping me get engaged in writing. The way things are going, I’m happy with 32/40.