The Writing On the Bathroom Wall

It's sunny outside.

I realized today that a great deal of what gets sent to the "Bulk Mail" (SPAM) folder in my Yahoo account is actually stuff that I've either explicitly or implicitly asked to receive over the past several years. Tired of seeing it pop up in my Inbox, I've just told Yahoo to treat it as spam and get it out of my face. I just have far too many unwanted "subscriptions"; opening each e-mail and following the instructions for unsubscribing would take more time than I'm willing to invest.

This leads me to an interesting idea: why not make an Internet subscription much like a subscription for any sort of printed thing that you ask to receive by regular mail? Why not define subscription periods (weeks, months, years, whatever) and require an action by the user for subscription renewal? If you're looking at the e-mails regularly, you won't have to worry about your subscription expiring, because you'll get a reminder in a prominent place within the e-mail's body. And if you are routing the e-mail to your spam folder, it will eventually stop coming.

As I see it, everyone wins. The company sending the e-mails is not left with a bloated mailing list that inaccurately represents how many folks are actually still interested in the mailing. The user never has to go out of his or her way to remove something that is already a time-stealer for him or her. The provider of the e-mail service would use less bandwidth because it would be transferring less e-mail. Sounds pretty good to me.

I suspect a good deal of people don't even know who or what Boost Mobile is. Long-story-short, it's just another prepaid cellular phone service provider. How did I know that? I used to have one of their phones.

The big appeal of Boost, at least when I used it, was that you could use the walkie-talkie feature for a flat rate of one dollar per-day. So if you knew someone that had Boost (or Nextel, too), and you were willing to use two-way exclusively, you could buy twenty days worth of unlimited talk for $20.

Boost used to market quite heavily to the hip-hop nation. Their slogan (which used to appear beneath a much less conservative-looking logo than the one that I've included above) was "Where you at?", rendered in a graffiti-esque font. The phones looked edgy—corny—and came preloaded with ringtones that featured "black voices" saying things like "where you at" and "yo, you're phone's ringin'; whassa matter, are you deaf?" If you called to check your available airtime, an obviously white woman said in a very plastic voice: "you're getting low on minutes. To avoid all the drama…"

So when I arrived at the new Boost site (indirectly through Jeff Atwood), I was very surprised to see that they've done a big rebrand. They still ask "where you at?", but it seems that they aren't willing to ask it in a prominent place on their homepage, reserving it for the title bar instead. The phones shown on the homepage are also much more conservative (or if not conservative, mainstream), and the site's images are now chock-full of white people.

I'd be interested to learn more about why they did it. Could it be that trying to exploit stereotypes into an entire brand identity was a mistake?

I'm not kidding.

I have a natural distrust for people who have a moustache with no other facial hair.

It's noone's fault. The moustache people never did anything to hurt me. They just look…shifty.

Here. Look at this guy:

Would you let this guy waltz with your daughter? He's probably contemplating how he can blow up Montana right now. You don't have to like Montana to know that's wrong.

I know what you're thinking—this isn't fair. He's making a serious face. Everyone thinks that serious faces are nasty. I'm sure if you caught him in the middle of the day when the sun is out and the bees are happy, he would look a lot less intimidating. I might even let my daughter waltz with him. I bet he loves Montana and vacations there as often as he can (within reason).

How about now?

He looks worse, doesn't he? Kinda looks like he just finished eating your pet bird. I don't know about you, but I find that pretty disturbing. You can take Montana, but my pet bird? That's just nasty.

But now you're thinking that all grown-up people must look a little serious, and that all of them can be a little (or a lot) intimidating.

No. To all three points. Here he is when he was just a kid:

Smiling. Young. Creepy.