I got Rick Astley'd and I'm not amused

Yesterday afternoon, like many other thousands of people, I was sitting at my Mac eagerly awaiting the arriving of the iPhone 3.0 upgrade. As a traditional early adopter of techie things I confess to being caught up in the excitement and anticipation, and I had TweetDeck open to monitor the course of events in the early evening.

I continue to be puzzled at the range of emotions seemingly normal people show under such circumstances - hundreds of Tweets per minute were being flushed through the system with people 'shouting' and cursing at Apple because the update was not available at the crack of dawn. For goodness sake, it's an upgrade to a gadget - which worked pretty well anyhow. There's no need to get suicidal because your unrealistic expectations are not being met. Apple never issued a time, just a date - you simply presumed that it meant 00:00:01 on the 17th.

Anyhow, I patiently waited until about 18:05 UK time, and pushed the button and low and behold the upgrade started and completed about 20 minutes later, and I'm genuinely happy. Not ecstatic but genuinely happy. Unlike earlier when I did get TwitterRage.

Some idiot had earlier posted a Tweet saying that the upgrade was available on UK servers and included a URL in the message. In excited anticipation I clicked on it and I got Rick Astley'd. In other words my Flock browser was commandeered by this rogue and I was subjected to "Never Gonna Give you up" as well as each line of lyrics appearing in a pop-up window. Not to mention Rick's head appearing all over the screen. Despite the offending code also preventing me from quitting Flock, I managed to disable it fairly promptly and order was restored. But only after my eardrums had been punished, and my ego badly dented for being stupid enough to click on the damn thing in the first place.

But most of all I felt sad - do people really lead such sorry lives that this is how they get their kicks? After all, the person who created this didn't get to see my immediate reaction (and I doubt they'll ever read this blog entry) and I don't know who it was so I can't give them the "credit" they deserve. So, what's the point...unless the guilty party was actually Rick Astley trying to do a Peter Andre and resurrect his career in which case let's just point out that Katie Price is single again...

The Real Issues and the Trivia

For my sins, I recently joined the Twitter community. I had made a conscious decision to keep away from Social Networking (apart from LinkedIn which I regard as a business tool), but having been invited to join Facebook and become slightly addicted, I finally succumbed and went the whole hog, so I guess I'm now a Facebooking Twitteree.

To indulge my cravings I use a variety of 'tools' on a number of different platforms, Flock and Tweetdeck on my Macs, and Twitterific Premium on my iPhone. I have been completely overwhelmed by the Twitterific community and it's reaction to the recent so-called Twitpocalypse. For those of you in the dark, the Twitpocalypse refers to a Year 2000 type bug in which Twitter applications crash after a certain internal counter exceeds its boundary.

Twitterific users became a bunch of jibbering idiots because they were unable to get their fixes because their favourite tool was broken and updates were not instantly available. Tweet after tweet referred to the tweeter's despair, anger, fury, disloyalty, and every other emotion. All this at the same time as the Iranian election was reducing that country to genuine news meltdown and lockdown.

While I understand the frustration caused when tools fail (but let's remember that there were plenty of work arounds), it makes me really mad that people cannot seem to tell the difference between real issues and trivia - or sometimes even if they can, they are so self-centered that they choose to ignore those differences.