Todd Wasserman, reporting for BrandWeek:

By opting for these tin-eared retorts, AT&T does nothing but set itself up as a foe to consumers. At a conference in New York in early December, CEO Ralph de la Vega responded to charges that AT&T’s iPhone service was slow by turning condescending. “The first thing we need to do is educate consumers about what represents a megabyte of data,” de la Vega told reporters—this while floating the idea of charging heavy users more than others.

AT&T’s position seems to be that consumers are consuming way more data than the company had expected and everyone just needs to chill until the company can recover from this inconsiderate overuse. When the conceit is that ass-backwards, no amount of spin is effective.

If there's one company whose reputation has been steadily slaughtered over the past two years, it's AT&T.  The malign is deserved: I have followed the blogs, Twitter conversations and press releases as much as the next gadget/tech geek, and to me it's plainly clear that AT&T hasn't learned any lessons from brands who have had their business practices change due to consumers leveraging social channels.

But it's even worse than that.  They view iPhone users as the problem that led to their damaged brand, not their shoddy network to begin with or nearly flat capital expenditures since the iPhone's inception.

As a realtively new AT&T customer (who joined simply because of the iPhone), the vibe I get is that they believe it's easier to milk this iPhone thing -- however long it goes in exclusivity -- for all it's worth than it is to listen to your customers, address negative feedback, and build out your network to accomodate your users happily using your product.  AT&T had a chance to become something special, pehaps even to vy for extentend exclusivity, but instead chose to treat the iPhone deal as a racehorse: flog it as hard as you can until it dies, keep the share price at a decent level, get your bonuses, and move on to what's next.  That sort of myopia will be part of AT&T's enduring legacy, especially when they could have built a race team and made their customers their fans.

When the iPhone opens up to other carriers in the US, AT&T will see a hemhorraging of subscribers like never before.  Given how I drop at least a call day with AT&T, I will likely be among them.

Enjoy your early termination fees, Mr. Stephenson: they're the last vestige of what could have been.

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CNN:

A Facebook page stating that Friday was "Kick a Ginger Day," referring to redheads and possibly inspired by an episode of the "South Park" series, may have sparked the injuries at the middle school, authorities said.

Facebook and South Park are easy targets, and social media in particular has made it easy for like-minded people to implusively act on an idea, no matter how stupid.  In the past, galvanizing a message like this wouldn't have been so easy.

My problem with this is that, once again, there is no personal accountability in the equation.  What differentiates the kids who saw the Facebook page and didn't act from those who did?

Answer: Parenting, personal accountability and character.  Unfortunately, these things can't be taught by ESPN, Modern Warfare, or the Internet.

With every new advance in technology -- let's call them 'tools' -- comes and equal and opposite requirement for education on how to properly use those tools.  It's not easy to understand the unintentional liabilities they bring to our lives, both as users and parents/supervisors.  But we have to do it.  Blanket demonization of the tool when almost no effort has been put into personal education and proper parenting is, like anything else, a one-sided recipe for disaster.

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And I give these answers:

Am I on Twitter?  Yes.

Facebook?  Yes.

LinkedIn?  Yes.

FriendFeed? Yes.

Plaxo, MySpace, anything else? No.

There.  The mysteries of the universe, unraveled.

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I do this periodically because I get emails asking for such things, and when the emails collude in just the right way, I realize it might be time for a reminder about things you probably don't care about, but might, so here you go if you do. Thank me later, preferably with money. You can follow me on Twitter here. Email contact can be made via jsventura AT gmail DOT com, although I make no promises about response time. Get me on AOL IM with Cerberus9, or on Google Talk with the email address so masterfully encrypted above. I'm on Facebook here. The LinkedIn version is here. My employer is MiPro Consulting, which is the most amazing company I've ever had the luck to work for. I passed up going to Google in Ann Arbor for this, and I couldn't be happier. It's all too often a business cliche, but the people here are all top-notch and they know how to run an interesting and remarkable business, and it shows at every turn. We do ERP (PeopleSoft) and SaaS (Workday) consulting, and everyone here knows how to make that fun and interesting. Lots of companies say they're different from their competition, but few really are. This one is and I'm happy to be part of it. MiPro is on Facebook and LinkedIn, which helps us have conversations directly with those who are looking for our help the most. Occasionally I share things in my Google Reader feeds that I find interesting but don't necessarily blog. If you want to see what those are, go here. And there you go. Transparency ahoy.

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