The reason eBay is no good for buyers

Well actually eBay the worlds largest tat bazzar is actually no good for sellers either but for buyers the saying buyer beware has never been more accurate.

Take for example the regular scams that appear. Okay some of them are not exactly scams but they are dubious. It would be easy for eBay to stamp them out but they get fees from the sale so they don’t really care if it’s good for the purchaser or if they get ripped off.

Take for example the idea of selling the URL for a website – crazy you think right? Well no. TV Catch Up is a website that allows you to watch UK freeview on the web or indeed a specially formatted version for the iPhone. Now I’ve been using it for ages and it’s really rather cool.

Now some wag has decided to take screen grabs of this running on their iPhone and sell this idea on eBay.

So for 99p or more you can pay to be sent the URL to a freely accessible website. More importantly you can sell the URL for a website you don’t own or work for or have any affiliation with. Money for old rope? I think so!

Feel free to search on eBay and pay to watch freeview on your iPhone but it will be cheaper and easier to do a search online or simply type in http://tvcatchup.com/ to your browser.

On another related note eBay should also ban people from posting in the wrong category. If I narrow my search by phone I don’t want to see adverts for ‘software’ or accessories, I want to see phones…

People do the silliest things…

Recently a lot of people have been talking about passwords and how they are too simple. What the researchers failed to mention is that it doesn’t matter how secure your password is it will not help.

There was a bit of a buzz on Twitter yesterday about an application called Twifficiency. It allegedly calculates “your twitter efficiency based upon your twitter activity. This includes how many people you follow, how many people follow you, how often you tweet and how many tweets you read.”

I saw the messages in my stream and thought they looked a bit spammy. Then I realised they were just automatically generated when someone took ‘the test’. Most memes and especially ones that stroke the ego. I must confess having worked in digital media for longer than I care to state I rarely go in for these online quizzes or automatic tests and popularity contests anymore. Still a few of my friends did. @greedoe @andyhewittlock @ianjamesdavies I’m looking at you…

Anyway back to the point about passwords. So you can plan a great secure password but people still authorise any old application on social networks without reading the small print. Although it states on the front page of the app that it will auto publish the result after allowing the app to link to your Twitter account most users didn’t read the caveat or didn’t know what it meant and selected ‘OK’. Now Twitter is ablaze with automatically generated scores. It’s almost like the ‘news’ that there is no official facebook dislike button. Is this really news worthy of the BBC and other media outlets?