Back in April of this year, I did one of the largest lists I had ever done for Mashable: Dating Toolbox: 120+ Sites For Singles To Find Love.  I thought I had hit the majority of the dating sites out there when I even found one dedicated to farmers, but somehow I completely missed The Ashley Madison Agency.

As you can see, there slogan is, “Life is short.  Have an affair.”  I’m kind of surprised this didn’t end with an exclamation point, but oh well.  As you’ve guessed from that, this site is dedicated only to married individuals who are looking to cheat on their spouse.  I admit I didn’t bother signing up to peruse the site myself, but I would imagine there are more than a few single men in there also whom are sure they can provide some lonely housewife with just what they need, but in general it is for married folks.

Though the site has been around since 2002, I had never heard of it until the news came out that ESPN’s parent company, Disney, had instructed the network to stop running television ads for the service.

Wait…

They run television ads for a site built specifically for people who want to have affairs?  According to the article in AdFreak, Noel Biderman, president of the agency, doesn’t understand how the service differs from the beer ads run on ESPN and why those are allowed to continue while this site isn’t.

Er… well, you see, the thing is…

Honestly, I have a very “live and let live” mentality when it comes to other people’s lifestyles.  I have known people of of so many varied backgrounds that it would be impossible for me to be judgmental of anyone who chooses to do anything short of murder.  What I do have is a problem with is a website whose sole puprose is to profit from facilitating the breaking of marital vows.  I am not naive in that I don’t know this happens on other dating sites on a daily basis, but those sites are not built around that lone concept.  The site says they don’t encourage infidelity, and they say that just because it exists it won’t cause people to stray, they are merely providing a service.

urk… I think my brain just broke.

Just because you can build a site or service doesn’t always necessairly mean you should, and this is one of those cases.

Just me yammering at you this week folks, and I apologize in advance for my voice starting to go towards the end. Stupid pollen.

This week I talk about this story at Valleywag about people getting angry, again, about how Google Street View violates your “privacy”.

I give some thought to a comment left by Kim Greenblatt in regards to the post I did about The Dark Knight still not being profitable at the $314 million dollar mark.

And lastly I go on about this story of the band Buckcherry “leaks” their own music, and blames pirates. Stupid people.

Here’s

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for those who wish to download it.

A year and a day ago I wrote about how some bloggers had the idea that messaging on Facebook would replace email.

Yeah… anyone seen this happen yet?

As I have become more immersed then ever in the world of working on the Web, I have become even more convicned that thisis never going to happen.  This isn’t to say that something won’t eventually replace email, but it certainly isn’t going to be something like Facebook messaging.

When I was at the SummerMash Seattle last weekend, only one person asked to friend me on Facebook, and that was only because he had a computer right there he could do it with.  It is far too complicated to give someone your Facebook address as opposed to me saying “seanpaune@such and such”.  If you remember my name, you remember my address essentially.

You also don’t see anyone making a native way to gain access to your Facebook messages on your phone and other mobile devices.  Yes, there is now a Facebook application for you to use on the iPhone and iPod Touch, but that still isn’t as easy a concept as email.  If anything, I think services like Twitter are replacing the one line emails I thought Facebook might replace, and if anything, my Facebook traffic has declined in the past year.  Even more so than anything online, text messages seem to be being used more and more.  While I was in Seattle, I sent and received more texts in 2 days than I usually do in a month, and when not texting, I was getting messages on GTalk.  Even crazier?  People who usually don’t talk to me on the phone actually called me.

Total Facebook messages received while I was gone?  None.

While I do think the nature of communication is changing, moving to Facebook is about the last place I see it going.  It is still an enclosed system that takes too much work to access to be used as an effective messaging system for busy people.  So, one year on, I would have to call this concept even crazier than I did a year ago.

Fans of Joss Whedon may want to rush over to Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog before Sunday.

For those who haven’t heard about this yet, this is a wacky little project Joss came up with of a series of 3 short films to be broadcast on the Internet.  The story follows Dr. Horrible’s (Neil Patrick Harris) quest to get in to the Evil League of Evil while also trying to woo Penny (Felicia Day). The problem with both of the Doctor’s quests is that Captain Hammer (Nathan Fillion) is getting in his way by stopping his evil deeds and wooing Penny.

So, why do you need to watch these before Sunday?  Well, for now, they are free to watch, but after Sunday they will be taken down and you will only be able to purchase them through iTunes, or wait for some sort of DVD release.  Each episode is 13 – 14 minutes in length, and episodes 1 & 2 are out, with episode 3 coming out on Saturday.

Now, I am sure some folks out there are wondering how they actually are quality wise, and I have to say I have loved the first two episodes.  I get the feeling Mr. Whedon is a frustrated musician, but I would love to see him do a rock & roll musical film, or dare I say, a Broadway show?  I think he may actually have the chops for this after this project and the Buffy, The Vampire Slayer musical episode showing what he can do.

Anyway, it is great fun, and well worth your time.  It has his common theme that no one is black or white, but we are all shades of gray.  And, could someone please tell me when I started enjoying Neil Patrick Harris’ work so much?  I love him in just about everything he does now.  Nathn Fillion is Nathan Fillion as always, but his last line in episode 2 made me nearly cry I was laughing so hard at his delivery.

Get over there and watch it for free before it’s gone!

Back in May I publiched a post named “Microsoft Walks Away From Yahoo“… I’m not 100% sure that was correct.

In what has become a saga fit for any daytime drama, it appears that Microsoft and Yahoo started talking again, with corporate raider Carl Icahn thrown into the mix somehow.  Mr. Icahn has been calling for the ouster of Yahoo’s board of directors for some time now, and today made his proxy fight official by filing papers with the SEC to replace the existing board with his own slate.

All of this came about over the weekend as Yahoo rejected another offer from Microsoft that seems to have been quietly brewing for a while now.  The new joint deal between Icahn and Microsoft was proposed Friday night and would have reportedly put Microsoft in charge of the search business and Icahn controlling the rest of the company.  The proposal included ousting the current board, including CEO Jerry Yang, and replacing them with Icahn’s chosen people.

According to a story in the Wall Street Journal, Yahoo has been willing to talk about selling at $33 a share, but their current board must stay in tact.  This has been the main sticking point for Microsoft/Icahn, and their offer seems to have been more than generous.  Reportedly it would have paid $1 billion now, with $2.3 billion per year for five years, with a minimum payment of $1.6 billion for the length of the agreement.  Microsoft would have also purchased $3.9 billion dollars worth of shares and acquired $2.8 billion of Yahoo’s debt to pay shareholders a special dividend.  This would have covered just Yahoo’s search business, leaving them their content business.

With yet another offer rejected, shareholders are demanding answers, and with their annual meeting coming up August 1st, they’re going to want blood to know why Yang keeps rejecting these proposals.  Mr. Yang may very well find himself out of a job, with no money, if he keeps this up and doesn’t explain himself better to the shareholders.

It would be fascinating to know which part of this whole debacle was on Mr. Yang’s mind as he lunched with the Google co-founders in the pictures above.  Sure it is impossible to know all of the finer details in a situation such as this, but for the life of me, I can’t figure out why Microsoft is so insistent in their desire to acquire the company, or why Yahoo is so blasted resistant to the concept.  It’s obvious they aren’t going away, and the longer Yang and crew hold out, the worse this is potentially going to be for every one as Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, and Icahn get more and more aggressive.

Even from my far removed vantage point, I think it may be time for Yang to take the money and run with it.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) group, the people responsible for regulating the rules of domain names, passed a new measure today that could either be the greatest idea ever, or the worst.

According to Times Online, people will be able to purchase pretty much any top level domain they can think of, so instead of seeing .com, you might see something like .apple or .microsoft.  This is only going to be for big corporations, though as prices will start at $100,000.  So, lets say I bought .seanpaune, and then sold the right for people to buy domains on it just like you do a .com now, those are the type of people they are looking at.

My problem with this is that up until now I knew if I needed to go to a website, all I really needed to was remember the first part of the domain name.  So long as I remembered that part, I knew the last part had to be .com, .net, .org and so on, but now I will have to remember everything.  I know this doesn’t sound major, but lets say I’m driving down a highway, and I see a billboard for a company that I am interested in.  Instead of just having to remember one word, now I also have to remember the extension, and that may not be easy while going 65 mph.

The only big success story I can think of using one of the off-shoot extensions already is Del.icio.us.  They hit on a beautiful idea by using the underused .us extension, but how many times are you going to see something like that under this new scheme?  Sure some people will try it, but most of those styles of extensions will only be good for a limited number of domains, and the person will have trouble recouping thier $100,000 investment.

It is obvious that ICANN is doing this to make more money, but I feel they have done a horrible disservice to the Internet at large with this decision.  Yes, all the good .com names are gone, but such is life, and this will only lead to a rash ever increasingly confabulated names and user confusion.  This will only serve to confuse the Web at large and possibly frustrate people to the point of not even wanting to bother with it.

Then comes the idea of how fast do you think people will rush for things like .sex, .porn and any other number of popular Internet activities such as .betting and so on.  This will also cause a problem for small companies that could easily see their name snapped up as an extension because they can’t afford a $100,000 price tag, and even in just the scenario of needing to buy thier addresses with yet another extension.  I already have several misspellings of my main domain names locked down, now I will have to worry about a possible endless wellspring of new domain extensions I may need to snap up also to protect my company name?

The better idea would have been to release a few new extensions a year, but now we will just see a flood of bizarre names, people investing in extensions and domains that will do them no good and users that are just fed up. Good job, ICANN.

Message forum etiquette is one of those things that you could say seems to have disappeared over the years, but that would imply it ever existed.

Cries of “newb/n00b” whenever someone joins, insulting choices when one likes a piece of technology another member doesn’t, and on and on. Well, apparently I am not the only one who has ever found all of this to be silly as the guys over at Red Vs Blue put together a video of things you never read in forum posts.

If you don’t follow Red Vs. Blue, you won’t get a couple of those jokes (such as why the robot speaks Spanish and Caboose is… well… Caboose), but that doesn’t change that this may be the best thing ever said about the actions of people on the Internet.

As I have discussed several times before, the nastiness on the web seems to do nothing but get worse over time.  In particular, I have never understood the whole “newb” thing.  Like the people yelling about you being new to a forum weren’t also new at one time?  Were they somehow magically born with the knowledge of the forum, so they came into it knowing how to do everything?

One of the best comebacks I have heard to this was while playing an online game the other day.  Some people were mocking a “newb”, and a guy spoke up, saying to leave the new person alone.  Someone replied that they got mocked when they joined, so why shouldn’t they do it in turn?  The defender said, “Well, you know that you should mock all new people, but you don’t see me hitting my kids for not knowing how to do things.”

The newb got an apology from those mocking him.

Somehow I doubt we will ever see this age-old trend stop, but it sure would be nice.  So listen up the RvB guys… even they rant about Lost.

As part of the nature of the AnimeUSA business, we end up doing 26 conventions around the country each year. We go in, set up for the weekend, sell for 3 days, pack up and do it all over again.  As we currently work it, it is my parents who go out to the conventions as they both work for me, and I stay back at the office as I am the only one who knows how to work the websites.

On this particular weekend, that brought them within just a short drive of the diabolical Miss M that I mention from time-to-time here on the site.  See, this is the part about M I have not really ever pointed out to the readers of my site in that M and I have never met in person.  We met back in February of 2007 on a message board and hit it off in moments of the first time we talked.  Now, nearly a year and a half later, I actually consider M my best friend, but I tend not to discuss this because of the nature of how we met.  As if I don’t have enough strikes against me already with everyone thinking I’m a hermit!

Since they were in such close proximity to each other, M trekked over to the convention center and met up with my parents for dinner.  Mind you, M and I talk on the phone so frequently that she has talked to both of them just in the course of them answering the phone when I’m not around.  So, it wasn’t a completely cold meeting, but still odd that my parents have now met her in person while I still have not had the opportunity.

She and I have tried numerous times to meet up in person, but something inevitably gets in our way as adult responsibilities are want to do.  We think we finally have a safe date picked out for later this year, but we don’t want to jinx it, so I’ll just keep it to myself for now.

Why do I share all of this with you?  Well, I think it’s time people realize that as we live more of our lives online, that virtual friendships are going to become more common.  I have been on the Web since 1986, and have had many cyberspce only friendships over the years, but there seems to be a shift in them: while in the past they seemed to be only someone you would chat with on an aquitannce level, they seem to becoming more intense.  As we do everything online, from blogging like this, sharing videos on sites like YouTube, posting pictures on Flickr and so on, it is becomeing easier to let people become incorporated into your life, and the lines between virtual in real life friendships is blurring more and more.  All that is missing is that face-to-face element, but even that is disappearing with free video chatting capabilities being built into more applications.

Do I think will ever go completely virtual?  Of course not.  I think in 99.9% of cases, friendships forged in real life will always be tend to be stronger, but there will be the rare cases where friends made in an online environment can be as strong, if not stronger.  Sure there are chances for people to fib about themselves, be it their appearance or just making up facts about their life, but in general I think online cuts out some of the malarkey.  You don’t tend to hide as much because for the most part the person is faceless to you and it’s not worth exerting the effort to type it out.  There is also the chance to guard those parts of yourself you don’t want to share with others, but that is for everyone to judge personally if it is a positive or a negative aspect.

I will probably always prefer making friends in person, I can’t see that ever going away, but you do end up with those rare instances where you meet someone online that the only thing that really makes it different from a real life friendship is the distance.  Personally I find the distance interesting at times because it can allow you to get a taste of other cultures depending on where they are from.  I have had online friends from Mexico, England, Brazil, India, Japan and several other countries, and I have learned things about each of their cultures that I probably would have never known otherwise.  Not all of them were or are strong friendships, but it is still interesting to learn about how they view the world.  From M, I just learn how to formulate diabocal plans to take over the world… apparently it has a lot to do with designer shoes…

So what say all of you, dear readers?  Have you met any online friends you think will be life long friends?  Are they people you just “hang” with while your online?  Do you avoid talking with people online all together?  How do you say the nature of friendships changing in this digital age?

By the way, in case you were all wondering why she is simply known as “M”, well, if you were an evil genius, would you want everyone knowing your name?  Although, in her case, I know she just has managed to keep her name out of every search engine, so who am I to ruin her track record?

I’ve never been horribly comfortable with self-promotion, but sometimes you just have to bite the bullet and do it. With that being said, I would like to introduce you to my newest time consuming project, StarterTech.com.

This is a new blog which, as the tag line implies, tries to simplify technology so that anyone can understand it. The new project was born out of my own mother’s problems with trying to educate my 60-year-old father about technology, and her constant exasperations with him. She finally asked me one day if there was a blog that did nothing but explain various aspects of technology as simply as possible, I said I didn’t think so, and thus StarterTech was born.

Technology is something I have always been passionate about, but I don’t think it is nearly as all inclusive as it could be, and those of us who live with it everyday sometimes forget that people don’t just “know” all of the ins-and-outs of it. I learned several years ago to try to take a much more patient approach to teaching people about technology when I taught an adult education night course in computer basics. I had agreed to do it because a friend asked me, and it really opened my eyes to the fact that -gasp- not every one is computer savvy or a tech geek! After a few false steps, it really gave me a sense of satisfaction to convey my love of tech, and what it can do for us, to people that were just learning, no matter what their age.

I am hoping to do the same with StarterTech, just with a broader audience. And, no, it is not lost on me that people have to know how to use a search engine to find me, but there is not much I can do to teach them before they even find me. This is part of the reason I am trying to write the simplest headlines and phrases I can in the hopes it will aid them in locating the site.

While it is done in a blog format, I am trying to make it so people who go to a search engine and look for an answer to their problem won’t have any trouble finding it. Yes, it is being written in a normal chronological fashion, but it is much more about being a reference site and trying to explain how to do things on the web, as well as explaining basic concepts.

The first article went up on April 12th, so I am still trying to get the body of work up to speed, and right now I am trying to cover very basic ideas that will be referred back to numerous times, such as What Is Social Networking?, How To Pick A Password and even things like Web 101 Guide To Acronyms.

I am actually fairly excited about this project, and I plan on getting guest bloggers in to do articles about fields I don’t understand myself, such as capturing video from your TV. This is very much not just online tech, but all technology.

So, please stop by the site, or sign up for the RSS feed, and join me as I lose my mind as I add yet another project to the 5,000 things I already do! And to all my tech-guru type friends out there who will probably laugh at me, why not drop me an email or comment about guest blogging on a subject near and dear to your heart?

My much beloved Firefox web browser will finally be getting a new version on June 17th!  Hopefully with slightly less memory leakage, and a bit more stability, but a new version all the same.

In celebration of this release, Mozilla, the company behind Firefox, is going to try to set a record for the number of downloads in a single day for a piece of software.  You can click on the image to the left to sign up for a reminder email to be sent (they promise no more after that), or I imagine every blog on Earth will be mentioning this next week to remind all of you.

Some of the things you can look for include OS-themed appearance, new download manager, new password manager, new bookmark system with tags and a whole lot more.  I am so all over this on Tuesday!

Ever heard of Faceparty? I know I haven’t and I even work for the largest blog in the world for social networking, and recent news about how they are battling sexual predators is the first I’ve ever heard of them.

Melissa Gira Grant of Valleywag, the gossip rag of the Web 2.0 crowd, wrote this story up yesterday, and I am just blown away by it. It seems that in the United Kingdom, there is a proposal for a new law that would require websites to check member’s email address against a list of addresses registered of those used by known sexual offenders. Now, mind you, this is not law yet, but just a proposal, but Faceparty felt they should go ahead and comply.

This caused a problem for the social network because they have never verified the email addresses used bu their members were legitimate, so they had to come up with another plan of action. What did they decide was the easiest course of action? Why to delete all members over the age of 36 of course!

Yes! Why didn’t I see this before? You can identify all sexual predators by their age! There has never been a sexual crime committed by say a college-aged person, or someone in their 20′s, it is only those people over 36 that do this. A quote from the company tries to clarify their move:

“We understand that only a minority of older users are sex offenders, but you must understand that we cannot tell which”

Of course there is no way to tell which is which because this is a completely arbitrary decision with no real basis.

So, honestly I was willing to ignore this, contrary to popular belief, I do actually get tired of always being pissed off, but then I went and visited their site. Towards the bottom of their page, I found a link labeled “Adult Verification“, so I of course had to follow it, and I find a page all about protecting children… while using sexually suggestive models and telling you how if you sign up for this pay service, £8.95 a month, they’ll give you access to all the adult photos and unmoderated pictures that users just posted!

Does anyone see some conflicting principles at play here? On the one hand, they want to “protect the children”, but on the other hand they are willing to sell you the ability to see adult material if you are over the age of 18. I have never seen any other social network do such a thing, and I have to say the whole things reeks of bad decisions or ageism to me, but the company cut that off also:

“Despite malicious rumours spread by a few people on the website, it is not true that we have deleted members due to ‘ageism’”

Then explain the willingness to have such conflicting policies. Explain how you came up with the age of “36″ being the magical number to determine who may or may not be a sex offender. Why not 25? Why not 30?

Yes, I must admit I’m 36, but, no, I have never had a Faceparty account, but I do belong to numerous other social networks, so I do have a dog in this fight, and all I can hope that this is an isolated, ignorant, decision, and not a sign of things to come.

Is there good reason for people over 36 to be on networks? I think so. I’ve been able to reconnect with many people I lost contact with over the years, I can stay in easy contact with other friends I have spread all over the planet, and I know some people in that age range who are on networks so they can monitor what their kids are doing.

As I have said before when it comes to policing social networks for sexual predators, where are the parents in all of this? If people would realize that if parents were more involved with their kids, setting limitations on what they can do with the computer, and how, you wouldn’t have to worry about social networks doing it for you.

I’m not sure that this is what this particular case is about though. In my purely cynical opinion, based strictly on my random speculation, and I would be interested to see how many people over the age of 36 signed up for their age verification service. I would hate to suggest this was some bizarre way to cut some bandwidth expenses, but you kind of have to wonder if there wasn’t some possibility that this was a way to cut some of their least profitable customers.

I’m all for protecting children, but I certainly think there are more tasteful ways of doing it.

Well, the party is over.

Microsoft had finally upped their offer to $33 a share from the $31 they initially offered, but it seems Yahoo wanted $37 a share.  Steve Ballmer finally decided it wasn’t worth the games, not the protracted fight it was going to be, so he has opted to move on, leaving Yahoo to their own devices.

Where does either company go from here?  Who knows, probably plodding along on the same paths they already were.  I still can’t quite grasp why Microsoft wanted this deal so bad, but that si for them to know and the rest of us to never learn.  I for one am just glad this is over so it won’t be in the news every five minutes.