Interscope And Best Buy Team Up To Give You A Free Twitter Application For Free (With Purchase)

from the well,-hot-damn dept

Dear major record labels: when we suggested you learn how to embrace "free" in your marketing and promotions, this isn't quite what we meant. Consumerist points out that Interscope (part of Universal Music) has put together a promotion with Best Buy, whereby if you buy a CD from certain Interscope artists, you get a free copy of the software Tweetdeck. Well, that's nice... other than the fact that Tweetdeck is already free. Great deal! Now, to be fair, the copy of Tweetdeck you get is a special "customized" version that automatically has you following 16 Interscope artists (even if you only bought a CD from one of them). Of course, you could also just follow any of those artists yourself (again, for free), so it's not quite clear what the promotion is. But, they sure seem to suggest it's a big deal in the Best Buy newspaper ad: Now, I guess, to some extent, we should note that it's a good thing that a major record label is admitting publicly that "free" can act as a good promotion -- so kudos to Interscope for taking that big step. It's also nice to see Interscope recognize that an infinite good (software) can potentially help sell more scarce goods (CDs). But, on the whole, it definitely seems like this promotion could have been handled a lot better. Pumping up the "free" aspect of something that's already free just doesn't seem that compelling.

Filed Under: free, music, tweetdeck
Companies: best buy, interscope, tweetdeck

NY Times Says No To Useful App Rather Than Improving Memory

from the backwards-thinking dept

I have to admit that, while I became a fan of Twitter a while back, it jumped up to a new level when I started using a client-side app called Tweetdeck. While the app has many problems (it is still beta), it allows you to make use of Twitter in a very different way -- laying out a series of groups and searches in near real time, such that it turns the stream of information into a series of very useful flows. From the perspective of trying to stay up on certain types of news, it's become the most important app on my desktop. There are many, many things I wish they would improve upon, with a big one being memory management. It sucks up memory like crazy. However, my solution was to go out and buy some more memory for my laptop. Apparently, the NY Times has gone in the other direction. Mathew Ingram points to an internal memo at the NY Times where it says that due to Tweetdeck's memory issues, the paper is asking employees not to use it anymore -- though, to their credit, it doesn't appear to be a demand, but a request. On top of that, the NY Times suggests that other apps can do the job. That may be true, but I've tested a bunch of different competing apps (hoping they could get over Tweetdeck's other shortcomings) but I'm back on Tweetdeck because those other apps have even more problems, but Ingram again explains the better solution: "I agree that Tweetdeck can be a memory hog, and can sympathize with the NYT-- but the solution is buy more RAM, not exclude Tweetdeck."

Filed Under: apps, memory, tweetdeck
Companies: ny times, tweetdeck