Got hit by the SlideShare April Fool’s joke today that I’ve become a RockStar because one of my presentations has been getting a ton of views in the past 24 hours. I went into my account and, indeed, the Beyond Bootstrapping presentation I did for an Amazon Web Services event in NYC 18mos ago has over 100,000 views.I didn’t think it was a joke until someone pointed it out to me. Subtly changing some data on an otherwise legit web page is not cool.
Subscribe
About Simeon Simeonov
Events
Get invited to events I am organizing or speaking at.
Top Rated
- Startup Founder Agreements
- Founder Agreements - Vesting, Vesting and more Vesting
- The best vesting schedule
- Repurchase agreements: what you should know before you sign
- The Art of Viral Distribution is Becoming a Science
- The fastest way to learn a new programming language
- Shopping vs. Buying
- JSON and JSONlines from the command line
- Top Five Suggestions For Entrepreneurs From IDEO
- For the MIT 100K Participants: Executive Summaries
-
Latest Content
- Unicorn pressures and startup failures
- Advertising marketplace design
- Angel investing strategies
- JSON and JSONlines from the command line
- My most favorite math proof ever
- Monitoring Redis with MONITOR and WireShark
- Google and the ecosystem test
- Anatomy of an online ad
- Startup anti-pattern: platform risk
- Startup anti-pattern: ignorance
@simeons on Twitter
- The flagship vehicles you can't stop reading about bit.ly/2qgndjs 5 days ago
- Automotive Digital Brand Exposure Index - Q1 2017 - Swoop bit.ly/2oJZLKt https://t.co/KFWVbV57xG 1 month ago
- Transparency and Brand Safety - Swoop bit.ly/2omqlJT 2 months ago
- @FRosnerd Running Spark and/or sbt tests with Spark will melt these right off. All four of mine are gone... 2 months ago
- Automotive Digital Brand Exposure Index - Q4 2016 - Swoop bit.ly/2m8vabi 2 months ago
- ack09 Adobe Advertising AJAX amazon web services angel investing Apple Automattic AWS B2C Better Advertising Blogging bootstrapping Broadband Bubble 2.0 business cloud computing customer development Digital Media e-commerce entrepreneurship Facebook FastIgnite Flex founder agreements FutureOfWebApps-SF06 Geotagging Google IE7 Industry News iPhone lean startup Life Long Tail Macromedia Flash marketing Metcalfe's Law Microsoft Microsoft Office 2007 MIT 100K Mobile MySpace Nantucket Conference network effect Office 2007 OpenOffice opensource Plinky Polaris Venture Partners privacy Ruby Ruby/Rails SaaS Security Shopximity Social Advertising Social Commerce Social computing social media social networking startup anti-patterns startups Swoop technology TechStars The Long Tail Thing Labs VC Venture Capital virtual worlds Web 2.0 Weblogs Web Services Windows Vista WordPress
Turns out a lot of ppl are getting the same email and it’s frustrating a lot of people.
http://www.thisisgoingtobebig.com/2009/04/slidefail-making-fun-of-yourself-ok-getting-your-users-to-embarrass-themselves-in-front-of-their-own-networks-not-cool.html
So here is the interesting part–they are saying my preso got 100,000 views. So their April’s Fool joke involved subtly mis-representing data on their site. Not cool at all.
I found this from their blog:
http://blog.slideshare.net/2009/04/01/happy-april-fools-day/
I agree with you that the misrepresentation of data isn’t so much of a joke.
I agree Sim… it smacked of desperation, too, trying to get everyone to promote SlideShare using this faked data.
April Fool? Maybe but its more like the Village Idiot. Stupid? Yes. Dangerous? – well as Emerson said ‘I believe that the mind can be permanently profaned by the habit of attending to trivial things, so that all our thoughts shall be tinged with triviality.”
I think the prank was perfectly crafted to appeal to somebody who’s large ego is stroked by the idea that everybody is craving to look at their powerpoints. And you all fell for it. Here’s one definition of a successful prank: Exposing the pompous and the self-important.
We’re sorry if we upset you and caused trouble for you on April 1st. We reverted back to the real view count later on in the day. We weren’t trying to pull a marketing gimmick, just trying to be funny. And we’re not, sadly.
Check out PPTshare. It’s the anti- slideshare. For presentations with real ROI attached to them — sales, training, etc. It’s private, secure sharing where only the sender knows who viewed the file, and when they viewed it.