Get The Point
/ 08.Jan.2008
Boy, have I got a good one for you today. A concerned citizen showed me ThePoint.com yesterday, and I was very impressed. The basic idea is that you start a 'campaign' on the site, and when people join this campaign, they will agree to perform some sort of action, but only if a certain number of people have joined said campaign. This number is the 'tipping point', and is specified by the campaign starter.
Undoubtedly created by some people who read Malcolm Gladwell's idiot-accessible pseudo scientific books and have never even heard of a bifurcation diagram, ThePoint.com serves up a heaping helping of fail.
Borrone Sanitation
The feature of this website that I would like to concentrate on is the 'ultimatum' campaign. As the campaign organizer, you issue an ultimatum to a target. This target can be a person, company, whatever. The target must meet your demands or else all of the members of the campaign will perform the action you set forth at the beginning, if the tipping point of members is reached.
They actually give an example of this in action. A worker at a company is upset that health insurance is not offered. So, she starts an ultimatum campaign on ThePoint.com against the company. If health insurance is not offered, she says, then all of the members of the campaign, who are other employees at the company, will join together and go to the press with a story about how bad working conditions are. They have seen bad press drive the company's stock price down in the past, so they feel this is a good place to apply pressure.
Webistics
ThePoint.com calls this corporate responsibility. I call it extortion.
It is unclear what ThePoint's business plan is. I have an idea, though. Companies could pay them to prevent users from making that company the target of a campaign. Yeah, they could call it a protection plan. You asshats should hire me as a consultant.
Anyhow, because this hasn't been quite enough fun yet, I've created a campaign on ThePoint.com. I propose an ultimatum to ThePoint.com: you will either change your stupid tagline from people solving problems to extortion 2.0 or all of the members of my campaign will write negative blog posts about you.
Join my campaign here. Come on, I know there are like 3,000 RSS subscribers and ~2,000 uniques per day, so I have to be able to muster 500 of you clowns to write something negative about ThePoint. Bonus points for linking to this post with anchor text 'the point' to make Uncov come up higher than ThePoint.com in the Google Results for that search.
Internet: serious business.
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/n \n personal army of idiots
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