Buy. Buy. Buy. Buy. Buy. Buy.
It is your duty to consume. Buy stuff. More stuff. Please.
(Ugh. I thought this sort of push notification spam was against Apple guidelines if permission was never granted?)
We are all just algorithms…
I’ve long joked that “we’re all just algorithms in some engineer’s machine.”
But it’s kind of true.
I recently finished reading Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow by Yuval Noah Harari, which imagines what the lives of our children, grandchildren, and beyond will be like and how technology will affect them.
We generate copious amounts of data each day and give our personal electronic devices and social networks almost unfettered access to all of it. Everything from how long we sleep, how often we exercise, where we go each day to the types of songs, movies and books we like.
There was one passage from the book that I found both amazing and frightening:
A recent study commissioned by Google’s nemesis – Facebook – has indicated that already today the Facebook algorithm is a better judge of human personalities and dispositions than even people’s friends, parents and spouses. The study was conducted on 86,220 volunteers who have a Facebook account and who completed a hundred-item personality questionnaire.
The Facebook algorithm predicted the volunteers’ answers based on monitoring their Facebook Likes – which webpages, images and clips they tagged with the Like button. The more Likes, the more accurate the predictions. The algorithm’s predictions were compared with those of work colleagues, friends, family members and spouses.
Amazingly, the algorithm needed a set of only ten Likes in order to outperform the predictions of work colleagues. It needed seventy Likes to outperform friends, 150 Likes to outperform family members and 300 Likes to outperform spouses. In other words, if you happen to have clicked 300 Likes on your Facebook account, the Facebook algorithm can predict your opinions and desires better than your husband or wife!
This is one of the main reasons why both Google and Facebook have some of the largest (and most effective) advertising networks on the internet.
They fundamentally know who you are and what you like and know us better than we know ourselves.
Indeed, in some fields the Facebook algorithm did better than the person themself. Participants were asked to evaluate things such as their level of substance use or the size of their social networks. Their judgements were less accurate than those of the algorithm.
Excerpts from “Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow” by Yuval Noah Harari.
Leaving Google
James Whittaker writes about leaving Google due to their singular focus on Google+.
Larry Page himself assumed command to right this wrong. Social became state-owned, a corporate mandate called Google+. It was an ominous name invoking the feeling that Google alone wasn’t enough. Search had to be social. Android had to be social. You Tube, once joyous in their independence, had to be … well, you get the point. Even worse was that innovation had to be social. Ideas that failed to put Google+ at the center of the universe were a distraction.
Suddenly, 20% meant half-assed. Google Labs was shut down. App Engine fees were raised. APIs that had been free for years were deprecated or provided for a fee. As the trappings of entrepreneurship were dismantled, derisive talk of the “old Google” and its feeble attempts at competing with Facebook surfaced to justify a “new Google” that promised “more wood behind fewer arrows.”
Nike’s 2010 World Cup commercial
The World Cup is almost upon us and Nike released a brilliant soccer commercial that debuted during yesterday’s UEFA Champions League Final. It’s called “Write the Future”, and features various players from around the world, writing their own destiny depending on what happens in the World Cup. It’s an epic and often hilarious commercial.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=idLG6jh23yE
My personal favorite Nike soccer commercial is from Euro 2008, called “Take it to the Next Level”, which shows a soccer player’s career evolve in first person view. (See previously)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=anwlpTgbQTE
Lastly, this soccer commercial from Euro 2004, pokes fun at the Italian national team’s propensity for “diving“. Via Wikipedia:
Diving in the context of association football is an attempt by a player to gain an unfair advantage by diving to the ground and possibly feigning an injury, to appear as if a foul has been committed. Dives are often used to exaggerate the amount of contact present in a challenge.
Rube Goldberg Machine of Beer
Hah, this commercial is pretty awesome. It's like the Rube Goldberg machine of beer.
Nike soccer commercial
Just saw this brilliant advertisement again. I first noticed it last year, during the Euro Cup. It’s a commercial by Nike, following the career of an unknown teenage soccer player through their eyes. In two minutes, the commercial goes from playing in a youth league, to playing for Arsenal, to playing for Holland in the Euro Cup.
It’s really well done and quite creative!
Chuck Norris has nothing on the Most Interesting Man in the World
Hah, I *really* enjoy these Dos Equis commercials. I think it's a pretty hilarious ad campaign.
Humorous sports advertising
Recently, the National Basketball Association and Nike teamed up to produce a series of commercials for the NBA playoffs, featuring puppet versions of arguably the best two players in the game: The Lakers’ Kobe Bryant and the Cavaliers’ LeBron James. Two of them in particular are quite amusing to me.
The first commercial features Kobe bragging about the three championship rings that he has won, compared to zero for LeBron.
The second video features LeBron and Kobe challenging each other to a game of 1 on 1.