Death By Twitter: #USAirways OMG!

It has been awhile, guys. We haven't had a "Death By Twitter" entry in a few months.

Well, we sure do today. And warning, the content of this, or googling it further, will be NSFW! (For those acronym illiterate that is NOT SAFE FOR WORK!!)

We're gonna keep it PG on this site, though- don't worry!

Okay, so if you haven't seen online, what I am alluding to is the recent US Airways tweet in which a customer service rep was responding to a customer complaint and instead of posting a link to a survey, posted a link to a lewd image. And I'm not talking any lewd image. I'm talking nudity, explicit and dealing with airplanes. I am gonna leave it at that.

This, my friends, is so over the top. It is worse than the average "Death By Twitter" in which someone makes a comment that is borderline offensive or just not well thought out. The image was posted next to the tweet for all to see. Obviously it was a mistake but not the kind of mistake that you can fix by "take an extra breath before you tweet!!"

WHY was this image even anywhere near this customer service reps' computer!? There are currently not even speculations about how this might have happened, and US Airways has launched an internal investigation to find out what the HECK happened.

Of course, they've removed the tweet and responded with a PC apology:

"We apologize for an inappropriate image recently shared as a link in one of our responses. We've removed the tweet and are investigating,"
I don't even know what else to say about this one, guys. Just that I think this is certainly the most graphic Death By Twitter that I've seen all year!  Maybe the one who posted was one of the 40% of people who hate the jobs? Or more likely one of the 10% or so who want to hurt the company they work for?  What do you think?

 

Google's Pokemon April Fools Day Challenge

Google has a history of playing fun pranks on April Fools Day and this year is no different, although maybe a bit more elaborate than most!

In years past, Google has announced a fake beta test of a smell-searching product called Google Nose, pranked Gmail users that the new version was going to be better by making the whole interface blue and announced it was shutting down YouTube for 10 years.  But this year, Google opted for a prank a bit more 3-Dimensional.

In a video released yesterday (in time for April Fools Day in Japan), Google announced a fake competition combining augmented reality and Pokemon characters.  The person who finds the most Pokemon characters in Google Maps supposedly would win a trip to Googleplex to compete for a job with Google titled "Pokemon Master". 

So, let's think about this prank.  I personally have never been THAT into Pokemon (sorry, I know people are very defensive if they love Pokemon!) but there is one main reason I can get behind this April Fool's Day Challenge.

Augmented Reality!

There is so much that can be done with augmented reality and I hope that this play by Google is a hint that they will soon be launching more augmented reality functionality within Google Maps!

Have you tried the Pokemon Challenge? What do you think of it?