Thanks, MTA

The Long Island Rail Road hikes fares this month, bringing the cost of my monthly ticket + Metrocard to an unprecedented $345.10, and then turns around and delays promised service improvements mere weeks later.  In fact, this announcement came just a few weeks after the head of the MTA was touting these improvements.  It's just wonderful to deflect criticisms about how your quasi-governmental public corporation handles money with promises of improvements, only to turn around less than a month later and fail to deliver on promises made. Among those promises?  Extra trains, one of which may have gotten rid of the many folks on my evening train who get off at Hicksville and take up much-needed seats for those of us in for the long haul (heading to Ronkonkoma).

Want to turn up some money, MTA?  In addition to the wonderful fare hike you just got, you could try cutting the advertising budget.  (And this would be the first time I've ever recommended cutting an ad budget to save money...)

The LIRR spends money on designing and printing all sorts of material, from posters to leaflets, reminding people to be courteous.  That is, as an LIRR rider, you're clubbed over the head several hundred times a month with cheeseball messages like "Don't be Cell-fish" and "One Seat, No Feet."

Known collectively as the "Courtesy Matters" campaign, these mini ad campaigns do nothing but annoy the hell out of riders.  On Wednesday's train, I still see just about everyone putting their bags and feet on seats I would like to sit in.  I stood until Hicksville.  I still heard people talking obnoxiously loud on cell phones or using ring tones that would cause most people to strangle the closest living organism.  But I recognize that it's none of my business and that these problems tend to solve themselves.  (Like when I looked at a guy spread across three seats on a crowded evening train when I was looking for a seat.  I shot him a look and asked him if he was comfy before he stopped hogging the row and let me sit down.)

You know what?  I don't think it's the MTA's job to tell its passengers to be courteous.  We step all over one another when we're walking the sidewalks in NYC.  We run over one another in Penn Station trying to get to trains in order to get a seat.  Why the hell does the MTA care how we treat one another on the train?

Take that design and printing budget away.  Roll it back into service improvements.  Maybe passengers would be more courteous if they weren't so miserable from having to stand on trains they should be able to find seats on.  Maybe they'd be happier if the cost of their rail commute didn't approach the cost of driving to the city every day.

There It Is

Man, this is so off-strategy for Apple.

After days of seeing posts about how Apple is using its software update tool to push copies of Safari, I thought they'd get the hint and stop doing it.  Nope.  Here's mine.

It's bad enough that I get prompts to install Quicktime just because I once installed iTunes.  The app is a software UPDATER, Apple, not an application for delivering NEW apps to people.  Getting prompts to install Safari is contrary to the expectations people had when they gave you permission to have this app run on their systems in the first place.  So cut it out.

This is just dumb, dumb, dumb.

Undisclosed Stops

I'm tired of booking flights and then finding out later that they're stopping someplace other than the city I want to travel to. The latest example is my flight back from the iMedia Summit last night.  On the way out, I flew from Islip to Las Vegas and then took a short flight from Vegas to Ontario, CA.  On the way back, I go from Ontario back to Vegas, I'm getting ready to board my connecting flight, and then I find out it's going to be stopping at Chicago Midway on the way back to Islip.  Thanks, Southwest!

How Southwest avoids disclosing this on the website is beyond me.  Yeah, I probably should have been tipped off by flight duration, but that's just sneaky.  Does Southwest think this is good for business?

Has Facebook Jumped the Shark for Adults, Too?

After looking at the past few days' worth of activity, I'm wondering whether Facebook has outlived its usefulness. I like letting people I haven't  met yet "friend" me, because most of the time they end up being fans of my column or of other things I've written and they just want to get to know me.  I always look to see if we have friends in common before I accept friend requests, because it's usually a good indicator if they're friends with Masha Geller, Mark Naples, Jim Meskauskas or other folks who write about the space.  Increasingly, I'm finding out that a few of the people I thought were casual fans are actually multilevel marketers and spammers who infiltrate friend networks a few levels deep and then start sending out wall spam and private messages about MLM Work from Home opportunities or whatnot.  So today when I get back from client meetings I'm going to have to de-friend a bunch of people.

Then there are the friend whores.  Most of them are just people who have no lives outside social networks, and you run into them in almost every social network.  They wear their number of friends like a badge and pretend that they actually have relationships with everyone in their network.  You look back at your interactions with these people and find out it's all artificial.  Or worse, creepy.  I've got a couple of people to de-friend that have done nothing but send me mail trying to get me to join their tangentially-related groups, or they've done weird stuff like dedicate strange songs to me on iLike.

I'm thinking a lot about the ways apps propagate through Facebook, too.  And I think that there's an unhealthy concentration on the numbers, kind of like there are a bunch of apps out there that weren't built to extend functionality, but to address the viral effect as an end unto itself.  So you get all these apps that go ahead and message everyone on your contact list without your permission, or try to trick you into spreading it to all your friends.  I guess app developers and the companies that underwrite them don't understand that once this flurry of useless apps becomes too burdensome, people are going to flee from Facebook in droves.

Facebook's January uniques are down, and I don't think that's just a continuation of the greying of social networks.  I think people are tired of maintaining their accounts, seeing as how the signal to noise ratio has decreased quite a bit.  Ask yourself this: What percentage of your requests have been declining useless apps?  Declining unknown "Friends?"  Clearing out spammy FunWall posts?

Hmm....