Okay, let's admit it - I can be quite critical here of companies I have problems with, and quite vocal with my advice on how those problems can be fixed. Well, okay, let's really admit it - I can be a real fucking prick here to companies I have problems with, and an arrogant little know-it-all shit with my advice on how those problems can be fixed. And I'm not about to apologize for this, because it's the business world that brought this upon themselves; after decades of ignoring customer complaints, after decades of trying to rip us off in every form imaginable, as much as humanly possible, we consumers finally have an opportunity to air our grievances in a very public, very powerful way. And I for one am going to take advantage of this as much as I possibly goddamn can; and frankly, I don't care who the hell at these companies get offended by such a thing. And so over the last couple of years, as we grow into this Fabled Age of the Web 2.0, and more and more companies start soliciting me to mention them here at this site, such businesses have had varying ways of dealing with these angry, curse-filled rants of mine: some, for example, simply try to ignore me, and hope that I'll just finally go away; while others actively take fascist steps to try to shut me up, which of course just pisses me off even more, leading to even more devastating attacks on them.

Ah, but then there are the rare exceptions; the companies, that is, who are actually able to see that my criticisms are valid, that I might in fact be speaking for millions of potential customers who they simply haven't heard from themselves, and actually do implement the changes I suggest. Let's say, oh, David Xue for example, founder and owner of PixPulse.com. PixPulse at its heart is frankly not much different than Flickr; it's a photo-sharing site, in other words, where you can tag your images, add a description, let other people comment on them, etc. The "Flickr Killer" aspect of PixPulse, though, and how it's advertised to potential customers on the front page, is that this entire process can be done through your mobile device; that is, you can take the photo on your cellphone, send it to your account from your cellphone, add tags and a description from your cellphone, have your Friends' photos sent to your cellphone, and even comment on these photos straight from your cellphone. And this really would be a Flickr Killer, if such a thing was to work really impressively; I mean, I'm a big fan of Flickr, don't get me wrong, but it's hard to deny that their mobile service there is crap, just absolute fucking crap that shouldn't even be offered as an alternative to those on mobile devices in the first place. And so I excitedly signed up for PixPulse a number of months ago, ready to do all my photo work straight through my Treo.

What I quickly discovered, though, was that the promise was not the reality; that their mobile WAP portal, in fact, offered barely any options at all, other than to view photos and to add a short comment to them (and with a really crappy layout, too). And this pissed me off, frankly, because the front page of their site promises so much more, what with their happy little cartoon hipsters all smiling with their cellphones in front of them. So I wrote to David and pretty much said as much, and asked if they would please consider adding some actual mobile functionality to their service, instead of merely promising such a thing. And what do you know? Not even three months later, and they actually have - you can indeed now add descriptions to your images through your mobile device, navigate much more easily, just all kinds of cool options that don't exist at Flickr. And even better, not only did David write back to me about all this, but he's continued sending me semi-regular correspondence throughout it all too, actively seeking my advice, other suggestions I might have and the like.

And wow, where do we even start with how amazing such a thing is to me? I know I've been talking about this a lot here recently, but I think it's something worth talking about a lot; about how in the age we now live, even the fundamental relationship between companies and customers is rapidly and profoundly changing. I mean, it's not the desire that's changed - since the first company in history went into business ("Oog's Big Cave of Sharpened Sticks"), customers have always wanted the chance to tell those companies what they don't like, what they do like, what they'd like to see changed and what they don't want to see changed at all. And before the late 1700s, it was entirely possible to do this, too, because businesses before then were primarily what we would now call "speciality shops," where owners had no other choice but to directly deal with each and every customer they had, in person, because there was no other way to actually purchase the goods they were selling.

The Industrial Age, though, changed all this, and once again fundamentally changed the relationship between companies and customers. In an age where sudden new "megacompanies" are cranking out millions of pieces of product, where employees themselves are considered not much more than parts in a biological machine, of course they're going to take the same kind of attitude towards their customers, because that's the only way a company in that situation can survive. Hell, this is how the advertising industry came into existence in the first place, because these large companies couldn't figure out how to actually announce new products to these millions of potential customers; after all, before the Industrial Age, if you had a new product that you wanted to alert your customers to, all you had to do was simply point to it each time one of your customers walked into your store. In an age of catalogs and factories and a customer base that spans an entire nation, such intimacy was no longer possible, which is why the now-familiar alternative started appearing - that is, to purchase a page in a popular magazine to announce the new product instead, or purchase thirty seconds of time on a radio station.

But as I've said here many times, we're no longer living in the Industrial Age; we're living in the Information Age, in fact, which in my opinion actually began in 1946 and is just now reaching its first full maturity, although of course there are others who disagree with my timeline. And this new Age of ours is as different from the Industrial Age as the Industrial Age was from the Agricultural Age; which, yes, corporate executives, means that a radically different approach to doing business needs to be formed as well. Advertising used to work great, back when there was only a limited amount of places where it could be found, a limited amount of companies in the world, a limited amount of goods being produced, and a limited amount of ways to actually purchase said goods. In this new age, though, where suddenly everything that's ever existed is now for sale 24 hours a day, to anyone on the planet who wants to purchase it, we can all see what's happening - advertising is no longer working. But since these companies have known no other way of doing things for the last 200 years, they keep trying to continue using it; which has meant just this explosion in advertising in the last twenty years, with the average American now getting exposed to over 3,000 of them a day, each and every day. Which of course just dilutes the impact of advertising even more, which forces these companies to advertise even more, and to start making these advertisements as loud, annoying, intrusive and pervasive as humanly possible, just in a desperate attempt to cut through those other 2,999 we're dealing with every 24 hours.

These new companies that are starting to have success, the "Fords of the Information Age," if you will, understand the way the world is changing; they understand that this former intimacy between customer and company is now possible again, even while still having millions of potential customers scattered all over the world. I mean, just look at the rise of corporate blogs for ample proof of what I'm talking about; how it allows the owner of a company to have the exact same kind of intimate, personal conversations about new products and features, as the owner of a small shop might physically have with a customer over a counter in the real world, but in this case with millions of customers at once, not just a couple of them all standing around in your store at the same time. Like I said, this desire for intimacy, this desire for conversation, never went away with customers; it's just that such a thing was not technically possible during the Industrial Age. Now, though, it is again; and customers are starting to realize this, thousands of them every month, and are starting to demand in stronger and stronger terms that the companies they patronize realize this too.

What I think is the most exciting thing about the Information Age, though, is that it suddenly gives the customers the same kind of power as the companies have, using the same technology; and even better, the customers themselves don't have to spend any effort organizing into a pissed-off group either, because technology takes care of that for them, in a much more powerful way than they ever could on their own. I mean, let's just say for example that you're pissed off at NBC, for suddenly starting to charge money for the "Lazy Sunday" SNL skit that first went public about a month ago, and so you jump on your blog and write an entry about how pissed off you are. In the meanwhile, though, there might be, say, 2,970 other people who are pissed off at NBC too, and so they jump on their blogs and talk about it as well; and then suddenly something like that shows up at a place like Technorati, just this big glaring headline there that says, "Look at all these people who are pissed off at NBC." And then this in turn suddenly comes to the attention of newspaper editors, who are expressly checking out Technorati each day to see what people are talking about (or Digg, or Memeorandum, or del.icio.us, or Google Blog Search, etc); and they say to themselves, "Hmm, look at all these people who are pissed off; we should do a story about this too." And then suddenly they actually are talking about it, and suddenly that issue that pissed you off really is a part of the general mainstream public consciousness.

You see my point, right? In a case like this, you as an individual managed to convince the mainstream media to discuss this subject; and you didn't have to go protest in front of the NBC building, you didn't have to gather en-masse, you didn't have to form a mailing list and convince a bunch of people to take the time to actually attend such an event (if they were even in a position to do so in the first place). All you had to do was jump on your blog and say, "Wow, am I pissed off about this." The Information Age has given us something extraordinary, that has never before existed in the entirety of human history: a way for the collective thoughts of a million people to have the same exact power and influence that formerly only a place like the New York Times has had. That's amazing to me, I think, just absolutely mind-blowing; that if I'm angry about something, if I want something changed, all I have to do now is talk about it at my blog. And if enough other people want the same thing changed, that change will happen, whether the people involved with that change want it to happen or not.

So anyway - to David and the rest of the PixPulse staff, I just wanted to publicly thank you for taking the time to listen to all my complaints over the last several months, and for actually implementing some of the things I've been crowing on about to you. In my eyes, you've proven that you're one of these companies that actually gets it; that understands exactly how important it is these days to actually listen to your customers, to actively seek feedback from them, to actually implement the things they're asking for you to implement. Corporate executives, this is the way the world now works, and it's just going to get more and more this way with each passing year. You have a choice in front of you, right now, right at this moment in history: you can either be like PixPulse, and actually adapt to this new paradigm shift, or you can do what we're expecting you to do, which is to call bloggers a bunch of savage fucking animals, and try to ignore us as long as you possibly can, losing massive amounts of money and customers each and every day you continue doing so. It's up to you; and I humbly suggest that you choose wisely. Your very existence depends on it, after all.

Behold, people - the Jason Pettus Widget! Fuck almighty, Apple, are these things harder to do than your tutorial makes it seem! I've been working on mine for weeks, as a matter of fact, and still wasn't even close to understanding the complicated Javascript that makes them work; so in desperation, I just found another widget that already does what I wanted to do myself, and copied their Javascript into mine. (Thanks, guys! Please don't sue me! I don't make any money from this website!) Anyway, I'm sure this is something not a lot of you will be using at all, frankly; but it is pretty cool for those who do, or at least in my opinion. The widget, in fact, has feeds coming in from five of the six places on the web where I now regularly post new content: this main journal, of course; the Jason Pettus Instant Locator™; my Flickr account; my del.icio.us account; and my CoComments account. Cool! (Unfortunately my newest blog, The Heterotopia Report, won't work with this widget; and that's because it's been set up to use RSS feeds only, and feeds from Blogspot pages are Atom ones.) And even better, as you can see in the screenshot above, it's real easy to hop back and forth between the feeds as well; simply click on the black "information" icon found on all Mac Dashboard widgets, which in my case can be found right above my name, anytime you hover your mouse over the widget itself.

Anyway, hope all you fellow Mac OSX people will get a kick out of this; and if you do end up trying it, won't you please drop me a line and let me know about your experience? (And yes, I know there's some display issues going on with my scrollbar, but unfortunately I haven't been able to figure out how to fix it.) Coming soon: a version for Yahoo Widgets, so that all you Windows people can try things out too. Er, that is, as soon as I figure out how to make a fucking Yahoo Widget, which of course is done under a different protocol than Apple's. Of course it is!