Releases, Delays, Twitter and Windows
It’s been a busy couple of days, kicked off by the unexpected release of AmbiScience: Galactic Chill. Given Apple’s backlog of approvals from the OS3 release, I wasn’t expecting to see it until sometime next week at the very earliest — and then it goes and shows up on the App Store last night. Obviously that kicked me into overdrive mode, creating a banner (which I should have done earlier), arranging a promo code giveaway on touchArcade (which went well), initiating a Twitter-powered giveaway which went down from noon ’til 9pm this evening, and contacting a bunch of app review sites offering promo codes to review the app. The banner I think looks nice enough, the promo code giveaway on tA went well and has already generated one 5-star review (more reviews may be pending in the moderation queue), and the Twitter giveaway went … well, it just went. I can’t say how well because I only saw one tweet from a reader who grabbed one. I can only assume the other 9 were snagged. Despite entreaties to tweet when a code is snagged, pretty well no one did. (The one person who did tweet didn’t @respond, but rather just tweeted from his own account that was enjoying it — here too I can only assume he got it from a code because he followed me before tweeting that.)
Twitter, being a new thing for me, has been a bit enlightening. I’ve discovered a few things about it:
1) It’s cool to keep up with other iPhone folks, and it seems to be a handy tool for exposure — presuming you can get followers.
2) Attempted spam is rampant. Apparently there are Twitter accounts that are constantly searching for keywords and then auto-following anyone who uses them. The moment I posted a promo code for AmbiScience: Pure Meditation, some meditation guru who has nothing to do with the iPhone started following me. I’m talking mere seconds between the code being posted and the follow. And then there are all the beauty product pushers. What the hell do I have do do with beauty secrets? Why do I even care? And what keyword did I use that they found me with? It’s not like they can spam me if I’m not following them. Are there really Twitter users who opt-in to this shit?
3) Then there’s some idiot (probably lots of idiots, but I only got the one so far) who’s pushing some site(s) that gets you hundreds of followers instantly for FREE! Da hell? Why would someone want hundreds of strangers who couldn’t give a rat’s ass about their banal goings-on (assuming these followers are even real people) following them? Is it just about the numbers to look important or show up on “most popullar Twitter people” lists? How sad an individual do you have to be to sign up for that sort of thing? Christ, I hate idiots that game systems in ways that piss people off.
4) I can’t tell if the people I’m blocking are actually blocked. It tells me that they’re blocked when I block them, but then they remain in my followers list, still with a button to block button.
So, yeah. Twitter is showing is dank underbelly pretty fast. It’s pretty easy to avoid the spammers and morons, at least: Don’t follow them without taking a look at what they’re tweeting about.
Anyway, so I’ve pretty much taken care of the stuff that needed to be done for Galactic Chill’s release. Now I just wait and hope it gets some positive reviews — on iTunes and off. But where there’s an unexpected arrival — truly in Murphy’s footsteps — there’s an unexpected delay. I ordered two iPhone 3GSes from Rogers on release day, but I did it in the evening. Last Wednesday my wife told me that she’d heard they sold out by sometime in the afternoon. Since I ordered in the evening, I decided to call customer service at Rogers and find out if maybe I was unlucky enough to have placed my order after the sellout — or if the sellout indeed happened at all. The Rogers dude assured me that yes, everything’s cool, your order was placed and processed, but if I don’t get anything by Friday, call back.
Sure enough, Friday came and the phones didn’t, so I called back. They transferred me to the tracking department, which entailed a lovely 30 minute wait on top of the 5 I spent jumping through the security hoops and explaining what it is I was calling about. (Thank Og for Bluetooth) It bears mentioning that Rogers has intermittent “Thank you for holding” messages interrupting their hold music. The one. freaking. song. It isn’t even a specific song, just some generic Muzak thing. I think they do that to drive you stark raving hatstand so you’ll hang up. Anyway, tracking department answers, I go through the spiel again, and am told that it’s freakin’ BACKORDERED. Gee, thank you, Wednesday evening customer service jerk, for telling me. So insetad of the 3-5 business days it’s supposed to take, I’m on schedule for the 5-10 business days it will supposedly take them to receive their next shipment and send mine out. *sigh*
On a good note though at least that means I should receive it this coming week sometime. I’m told they’ll E-Mail me when it’s shipped out. In the mean time though the work I have to do this weekend isn’t over. My Windows 7 beta expires in… *checks watch* two days. I have the RC though so I’m going to be upgrading to that either later tonight or tomorrow. Pain in the ass that is, but that’s what I signed up for when I went with the beta. I’m liking Windows 7, I admit. I’m hoping the RC will clear up some issues I’m having with it though.
Anyway, enough chit chat. I need coffee, STAT.