Archive for January, 2008

Sprint was once a great phone company and now it is in collapse

Sunday, January 27th, 2008

I’ve already written about my troubles with Sprint. So I was, of course, interested to read this article about big job cuts at Sprint:

Sprint, the No. 3 wireless carrier behind AT&T (T) and Verizon Wireless (VZ), has struggled since it merged with Nextel in 2005. The $70 billion merger, engineered by Hesse’s predecessor, Gary Forsee, was supposed to create a wireless behemoth that could steamroll the competition while pushing boundaries in wireless.

Instead, Sprint stumbled as it tried to blend starkly different cultures of the two companies while trying to reconcile their incompatible wireless technologies.

Sprint wound up alienating customers, who bolted by the thousands. Sprint’s dismal performance eventually cost Forsee his job. Hesse, a former AT&T executive with long ties to wireless, was recruited from a Sprint spinoff, Embarq, to replace him.

Dawson says it’s not too late to save Sprint, a grand name in global telecommunications. “But they need to make some big changes and do it quickly.

“The challenge for them is to figure out how to save the Nextel customers,” and move them to Sprint’s network “rather than let them walk out the door,” Dawson says.

Actually, they should worrry about losing their Sprint customers. I’m a Sprint customer, and I’m frustrated that their automated bill paying service keeps telling me “You do not have an account with Sprint.”

Posted in broken websites, cell phones, mergers, mergers gone bad, nextel, sprint, sprint pcs | No Comments »

Who owns your data online?

Wednesday, January 23rd, 2008

This is an important story to read, for anyone who uses an online service. Steve Portigal had thousands of images, tags, and comments on his Flickr account, and they all got erased when his account was hacked.

That means that my 5000 photos are gone. Those I can upload. But all the people I’ve linked to are gone (I’ve spent a few hours trying to reconnect with those I can remember). Anyone who watched my photos via their contacts has lost me (and I’ve lost much of my audience). All the photos that were marked by others are gone. All the groups which I participated in by contributing illustrative images are gone. All the titles, tags, geotags, view counts and comments are gone. All the descriptions and stories and dialog with others in is gone.

My document, my story, my part of the community, is gone.

But the whole social media movement that we can’t ever stop hearing about is asking us to contribute content to their websites; we’re building the value for them. YouTube wouldn’t sell for $1.65 billion without our videos. Flickr has our photos. LiveJournal has our stories and pictures.

But is it ours? Do we know who owns it? If the data is on our hard drive, we know where it is, we may even take the trouble to back it up (I’ve got an external backup at work, at home, and online). But if the data is on someone else’s site, how can I keep a copy of it? It may be against the site rules for you to do that, in fact, as the high profile Scoble story demonstrated.

Posted in flickr, online social networking sites | No Comments »