Wednesday, January 5, 2011

Free Making Money

It’s being reported by BGR that some Best Buys may be unable to activate new T-Mobile lines at their stores. Normally, you may think “What’s the big deal?” but it’s causing issue for those hoping to buy the new Nexus S superphone. With Best Buy unable to activate a new service line through T-Mobile, some BGR readers are reportedly having to pay the full retail contract-free price of the Nexus S ($530) in order to assure that nobody else nabs their phone. Brutal!

According to the reader, he couldn’t activate the new line in store, and after heading home, he called back and after repeated calls, they said that if he wanted to get a Nexus S, he would have to pay full retail for the phone. Now, this seems to be an isolated incident, and who knows if the guy was black listed by T-Mobile or something.

BGR reached out to Best Buy’s press relations people, who apparently didn’t respond to their questions. Have any of our readers had this issue? We’d love to find out. Tell us about it in the comments section.

To briefly recap the specs of the Nexus S, it’s not a bad phone, though it’s basically a Galaxy S with Google branding and a curved display:

  • 4-inch OLED contour display
  • 1GHZ processor
  • 512MB RAM
  • 16GB storage
  • Android 2.3
  • 5MP Camera w/ LED flash

Fishing for compliments is something of a misdemeanor in most social circles — unless your circle is the Internet and you’re fishing with a shiny, new vanity app.

ThreeWords.me is making the rounds this week. It’s a simple app that lets you solicit three-word responses from your friends around the web. Each respondent simply goes to your unique ThreeWords.me URL and enters three words about you.

Your friends can also add comments along with their three words, and you can reply to any entries. In your dashboard, you can see which words people entered the most.

You might get a lot of complimentary words, but be warned, o ye of little self-confidence: The app allows for anonymous commenting, so steel yourself for trolls, profanity and put-downs. You can delete any of the entries at your discretion. You can also choose to make all your responses private.

The premise is ever so grade school, which adds to the app’s charm. While ThreeWords.me is without question a slightly narcissistic game aimed squarely at the perpetually insecure social media scene, it’s nevertheless cute and catching on like wildfire through class='blippr-nobr'>Twitterclass="blippr-nobr">Twitter and class='blippr-nobr'>Facebookclass="blippr-nobr">Facebook.

Its UI is simple, as well. You get to upload a background image and profile photo; other than that, the pages are decidedly bare-bones and lacking in the design department. Then again, the design isn’t what matters about this app; getting people to talk about — and hopefully compliment — you is what drives traffic to the pages in this case.

*Words blurred to preserve the author’s lingering sense of humility.

You can connect the app to Facebook, but sadly, you can’t use Facebook or Twitter to find your friends who are also using the app. You’ll have to do that part manually, a major shortcoming that’s likely holding the app back quite a bit in terms of adoption and growth.

ThreeWords.me puts us in mind of Formspringclass="blippr-nobr">FormSpring, Facto and a slew of other vanity apps we’ve been watching lately.

The app was created by college freshman Mark Bao, a teenager who’s been trying his hand at web-based entrepreneurialism for quite some time already. While we don’t see ThreeWords.me as a money-making endeavor right now, we’re sure the exposure can’t hurt.

Have you tried ThreeWords.me yet or seen others in your circle using it? Let us know what you think in the comments.

For more Social Media coverage:

    class="f-el">class="cov-twit">Follow Mashable Social Mediaclass="s-el">class="cov-rss">Subscribe to the Social Media channelclass="f-el">class="cov-fb">Become a Fan on Facebookclass="s-el">class="cov-apple">Download our free apps for Android, iPhone and iPad


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