This is simply beautiful. You have to be a bit of a current tech geek to understand all this, but if you do, then you are in for a treat.
At least Pirillo didn’t give out my email address. I’d poison his Peet’s coffee if he did.
But "Best Buys", "Wall fire", "Web 1.1". He’s killing me. This is a guaranteed classic video.
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Phil Plait, the creator of Bad Astronomy, is an astronomer, lecturer, and author. After ten years working on Hubble Space Telescope and six more working on astronomy education, he struck out on his own as a writer. He has written two books, dozens of magazine articles, and 12 bazillion blog articles. He is a skeptic, and fights misuses of science as well as praising the wonder of real science.
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July 11th, 2007 at 1:31 pm
Wow. Those telemarketers are going for a ride and not getting it at all. BTW, I try from time to time to “implement concepts” – it’s not easy.
July 11th, 2007 at 1:51 pm
Good, but this one is way better.
http://howtoprankatelemarketer.ytmnd.com/
July 11th, 2007 at 1:52 pm
Sheesh.
That is hilarious.
If we are bored, we play with the minds of the telemarketers. Otherwise we tell them were to go.
Vista phone!!! Hah!!! Talk about dropped calls.
Good going, puddintame.
July 11th, 2007 at 2:11 pm
hilarious, but too bad about the racist comments scrolling across the bottom.
July 11th, 2007 at 2:25 pm
Chris has the chat room conversations piped directly into the live stream. He can’t control the commenters until after they do bad things, so that’s inevitable. There are lots of good people in his chats, and lots of, well, typical internet trollers. On the whole I think it’s positive, but that’s the web in a nutshell, eh?
July 11th, 2007 at 2:27 pm
I hate telemarketers and the businesses that use them, but I just imagine this guy sitting there sweating, with some manager listening in, wondering what’s taking so long. Most people I know who took that job aren’t too happy about being there, and wouldn’t have picked it out of a list.
July 11th, 2007 at 2:50 pm
Telemarketing is a thankless job, and I blame the companies more than the people themselves. Thankfully, since going on the national do-not-call list, I get very few, although there are still enough “charity” and “not-for-profit” calls (not covered by the DNC list) to irk me from time to time.
What I tend to do these days, if caller id doesn’t help, is pick up the phone and not say anything. If there is a computer on the other end, it usually waits until it hears a voice before connecting you to a telemarketer, otherwise it just cuts off the call after a couple of seconds. If there is a real live caller on the other end, you will get a “Hello?” soon enough, so you don’t tend to lose calls you want to take.
July 11th, 2007 at 3:16 pm
I haven’t laughed this hard in ages. Brilliant!!!
July 11th, 2007 at 3:23 pm
My old fashioned answering machine tricks the automatic dialers. I get lots of messages that consist of someone asking for me, and repeating “Hello, is anyone there?” That, and partial messages from machines. I still haven’t figured out how a machine can connect, give part of the message, then hang up before the call back number.
July 11th, 2007 at 9:25 pm
Oh my God, that guy is hilarious. Web 1.1, the Vistaphone, clicking on his email and going to The Google… he rocks my world!
July 11th, 2007 at 10:22 pm
Vistaphone… I can imagine: Constant crashes, dropped calls, and fake internet to boot! It’s not a phone, it’s Microsoft Vistaphoneâ„¢
Pirillo is a genius, really. Speaking of which… Time to evoke the Pirillo effect… Chris Pirillo, Chris Pirillo, Chris Pirillo!
But hey, dude has a point. Now we’ve got telemarketers trying to sell something that doesn’t exist! Sounds like capitalism is doing its job well.
July 12th, 2007 at 4:54 am
Thanks for pointing that out, Tacitus. Incidentally, I started reading your annals of imperial rome again for the first time in a decade. I think I apprec… wait, are you the same Tacitus?
July 12th, 2007 at 6:05 am
A brilliant waste of telemarketers time. 16 minutes of BS that was hilarious!
I am so glad the “do not call list” exists. Can you believe Canada is just now setting one up? My “junk phone calls” are less than one per day now.
If I upgrade to Web 2.0, and I get onto a “do not spam” list?
July 12th, 2007 at 9:52 am
I’ve never sat well with the “Web 2.0″ name anyway. Basically it’s just a label for sites that sort of already existed back in the very formation of the very net of inter. Myspace is geocities, except instead of hyperlinks they have friends lists. Web logs are guestbooks evolved. Wikipedia is a big message board in a neat format.
Don’t get me wrong, with tweaks and such they managed to get something truly innovative, but the groundwork was already laid out years ago. There’s nothing “2.0″ about it. The guy who finally was able to make clear it’s just a concept actually had it right, but it’s a shallow concept, and I have no idea what they actually intend to do to implement it. Why would I want to “make my own” youtube? There already is a youtube. I doubt they could really do much at all…
But of course, the big issue is this whole “script” concept. A robot could do what these guys do, and they seem to be expected to never deviate from this thing. I make it a point when I decide to have fun to have as unorthodox a conversation as possible to prove my point that if you are going to USE humans, maybe you should use them for what they are good at, and not something that a robot could do better. If I want a script, I’ll call movie phone. Give me a person that can actually think and react and maybe actually DO something and we’re getting somewhere.
But above all that, here’s a thought. Don’t call me. I didn’t want your stuff before you called me, and I won’t want it afterwards. I just feel sorry for the gullible old people these calls seem to specifically target…
July 12th, 2007 at 12:20 pm
Somedays I feel sorry for telemarketers and am polite. Somedays I’m not. But I always know it is a telemarketer the minute they ask me how I am. My friends don’t ask this. They just tell me what they want and we move on. So, one night, in a bad mood, when this poor lady called and asked about my health, I said, “Oh, you want Mr. X? I’ll try to get him to the phone.”
I laid down the phone and went about my work. In a few minutes I picked it up and said, “He should be here any minute.” I kept doing this for over ten minutes. At about 15 minutes I told her “He’s drying off now. I think he’s just looking for underwear. I’m sure he’ll be here any minute.”
She finally hung up after 20 minutes. And then she called back the next night, and we started this game all over. This time she lasted less than ten minutes. Remarkably, she never got mad. My wife would just tell them she’s the maid and that ended the call. Then we decided to let the answering machine answer every call. Sure, some people hang up, including friends. So what? What is this national obsession to take every call? My obsession is to have no obsessions, but a good deal of peace of mind, and the less time I spend on the phone, the more I have. Bring back the telegraph.
July 12th, 2007 at 3:59 pm
Either Pirillo is tiny or his monitors are gargantuan.
July 13th, 2007 at 3:25 am
MO Man, and anyone else who’s curious, there’s an episode of This American Life that I think might help you understand why the woman never complained:
http://thislife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?episode=205
It’s in act four if you want to skip to it.
July 13th, 2007 at 11:14 am
As partner / operator of a small phone company, I have to admit it; I played this for my staff this morning. Since then, no work has been done, what with everybody running around looking for the unopened Web 2.0 and the pallet of wall fires we ordered.
July 14th, 2007 at 6:43 am
Here’s the company’s website: http://www.phoenixweb.co.in/ Looking at that, I wouldn’t trust them to design a pencil…
July 16th, 2007 at 7:44 pm
Telemarketers.
I simply take down note of the Company, it’s mailing address and tell the Telemarketer Good-bye.
Then I invoice the Company $100 for use of my personal details for marketing purposes and mail it to their mailing address.
You’d be surprised how many companies pay up!
Folcrom
July 17th, 2007 at 12:05 am
My brother’s college roomate used to listen very patiently to their spiel and then, no matter what they were selling, said “But I don’t have a dog!” This would usually cause them to start all over again, and when ever they asked him a question, he would reply “Yes, but I don’t have a dog.” I guess you have to be a college student to have that much free time
July 31st, 2007 at 1:13 pm
Dark Jaguar:
You got me thinking back to the last big software project I was involved in. The way new releases came out was something like: 1.0 was the first stable version; 1.0.1, 1.0.2, etc. were bug fixes and minor changes. If a change introduced significant changes (FSVO “significant”) or broke compatibility, I’d bump the minor version number (go from 1.1.x to 1.2, or from 1.2 to 1.3).
Generally, going from 1.0 to 1.1 to 1.2 etc. involved adding new features, one at a time. After a while, I’d get an idea for the “shape” of where I was trying to get to, and I’d write down a list of criteria: when it has features X, Y, and Z, I’ll call it version 2.0.
So there wasn’t any big difference between 1.9.25 and 2.0: mainly bug-fixes. Sometimes there weren’t any differences; just a different version. 2.0 was significantly different from 1.0, but you could trace the evolution over time.
Similarly, I don’t see Web 2.0 as a radical new invention. Rather, someone realized that hey, people are doing things a lot differently from the way they did in 1997; maybe we should slap a label on this.