The Social

It's been a long time since I was this cynical about Valentine's Day. I guess it's not as bad as the year when it was freezing cold and I had the flu, or the year when I had a blind date with that pretentious guy who thought he was destined to be a famous economist. But this year, I'm kind of bitter about the advent of everyone's favorite love-to-hate-it holiday for a different reason, and I blame my job.

I write about the Web. I'm used to an in-box full of press releases from Web 2.0's famous and not-so-famous. But in the week leading up to Valentine's Day, the barrage has reached a fever pitch with all kinds of themed gimmicks, promotions, and other syrupy pitches geared toward the tech bloggers of the world. You'd think it were third grade again, except instead of sparkly pink-and-red cards with bad puns printed inside, I'm dealing with e-mails with bad puns in the subject lines. Unlike third grade, none of them come from the cute boy with the freckles and the missing front tooth who put a mouse in my desk that one time.

Timeliness is usually a decent PR strategy. But the problem with Valentine's Day is that everyone else is trying to use the same holiday theme to get press. Here's just a sample of what's been fluttering into my in-box over the past few days.

There is, as one of my CNET colleagues already highlighted, a new "Blow a Kiss" app for the iPhone. SpeedDate.com. also has a new iPhone app, in case you have been putting all this madness off until the last minute. A price comparison site called DealNews sent out an e-mail with some recommended V-Day gift tips.

The big guys are in on it, too. Facebook not only configured its virtual-gift feature so that you can send "wrapped" Valentine's gifts in advance and then reveal them to your recipients on the big day, but it chose February 12 as the day to announce that the New York City municipal government had chosen a Facebook fan page as the promotional hub for its "Get Some" condom distribution campaign. (Hmmm.) There's even a new promotion out of Redmond that attempts to promote the maxim that "Microsoft is a super romantic love machine of a company."

Oh, it gets better.

A representative from a mobile photo-sharing service called SnapMyLife sent me an e-mail suggesting that camera phones were a great way to share photos from Valentine's Day excursions (so, I suppose, like "Check out this pic of our booth at White Castle. This guy is such a cheapskate.") And in a possible attempt to stand out, e-card and invitation service MyPunchbowl sent out separate pitches highlighting both its Valentine cards and its anti-Valentine's Day cards.

In perhaps the trippiest of the bunch, one e-mail announced to me that the normally invitation-only role-playing game Hello Kitty Online (yes, that Hello Kitty) would be open to the public on Valentine's Day. Great news for those of you who don't have dates!

To be fair, gimmicky holiday pitches are by no means exclusive to Valentine's Day. Journalists and bloggers are, by now, familiar with the Halloween pitch (big with photo-sharing sites), the call-it-anything-but-Christmas holiday pitch (gadget gift guides, anyone?), the quadrennial election angle, and this year we've all become familiar with the recession pitch. But it's February 14 that really gets on my nerves. Maybe it's because the holiday is all about being told how to tell people that you care about them. Or maybe it's just an easy target.

That said, in recent years we've seen some Web 2.0 holiday campaigns that have been spot-on. OfficeMax created that "Elf Yourself" e-card campaign for the holiday season a while back, gaining a massive cult following by encouraging users to turn their co-workers and bosses into dancing elves. None of these Web 2.0 Valentine's campaigns--no, not even Hello Kitty!--really strike me as anywhere near as creative. Is it possible that all possibility for innovative marketing has already been siphoned out of this saccharine occasion? Maybe that's the real reason so many of us get so annoyed when it rolls around every year.

Besides, if you're really clever, you won't be trawling the Web for the best e-cards to shoot off to your significant other. You'll be like that guy who created his own iPhone app in order to propose to his girlfriend. Dweeby, but impressive.

East Village Idiot blogger Chris O'Leary sounds off.

(Credit: Twitter)

Hey, guys, news flash: Twitter is good for something.

This morning, I crawled out of bed and headed to the kitchen to make coffee, but upon turning on the faucet, I noticed that the water flowing out of it was a sketchy brown shade. Not good--especially since New York is one of those cities that prides itself on having a water purification infrastructure so advanced that you can drink right out of the tap.

My roommates weren't around. My landlord had no idea what was up. And an hour later, the water wasn't back to normal. So in an attempt to find an answer to my most important question ("When can I take a shower?"), I turned to the Web.

All things "hyperlocal" were irritating the heck out of me. I found nothing on Outside.in or its neighborhood aggregator ilk, or on city blogs like Gothamist. Consequently, I posted a Twitter message saying I thought there was rust in my tap water.

I've been on Twitter for a while, have plenty of real-life friends who use it, and as a member of the digital-media press, I've managed to amass a few thousand followers. Sometimes, I'm not sure what to do about that, why the heck they want to listen to me, or even if I want to have that many people tuned in. But as I learned this morning, it can be darned helpful when you just want to know the answer to something.

Bright lights, brown water: Manhattan's East Village

(Credit: Caroline McCarthy)

The responses started flowing in (pun totally intended)--luckily for me, I live in a district packed full of bloggers. Toby Daniels, a digital-media dude who lives a few blocks away from me, replied that he had the same problem and that running "a whole bath's worth" of water didn't eradicate the issue.

Similar claims of mysterious brown tap water rolled in from Urlesque blogger Kelly Reeves, Dodgeball founder Dennis Crowley, Gawker Media finance guy Scott Kidder, as well as a handful of people I don't know who follow my Twitter account.

The dozen or so responses indicated that the tainted tap water had proliferated around Manhattan's East Side, with most of it in the downtown East Village, but with a few scattered claims in the Murray Hill and Upper East Side neighborhoods, further north.

One neighbor sent me a Twitter direct-message informing me that his landlord had said a water main was getting flushed out. Another response came from a woman who said she'd heard that some underground utilities work was responsible for the screwup that caused it.

Either way, within a few hours, the brown water was gone, for one reason or another. According to real-estate blog Curbed later on Thursday, this issue seems to hit the Stuyvesant Town neighborhood, due north of the East Village, every once in a while--and city authorities always assure us that it's safe to drink. Um, right.

Now I'll get to the reason for posting this boring urban anecdote to a blog that's ostensibly about social media. You'll hear the "social-media expert" types ranting a whole lot about the importance of building and maintaining an active network, a recommendation that's always seemed a bit canned and over-the-top to me (not to mention royally easy to mess up). But I'm not on Twitter to market a product or (shudder) "build a personal brand"--I'm there to keep in touch with friends and keep tabs on the industry.

Regardless, I've got to admit that having a solid pack of Twitter followers, both those I know and those I don't, helped a ton in this case, when neither my landlord nor the dozens of local blogs seemed to be saying a thing about it. And since all the digerati seem to tell us these days to "be part of the conversation" rather than just be a one-sided listener, I shot out another Twitter message thanking the random neighbors who'd passed tips along. Because I'm nice like that.

On an unrelated note: There's been plenty of media coverage concerning the emergence of Twitter as a teeming vat of citizen news in the midst of everything from natural disasters to presidential elections. But dealing with a situation involving water of questionable potability, it became pretty evident to me that the whole "Twitter as a news source" thing can be more than iffy.

Twitter doesn't have a fact-checking mechanism built in and probably never will; consequently, I wasn't about to take a "Don't worry, it's safe to drink!" message as gospel. And I hope that the hordes of starry-eyed new-media proponents who hail Twitter as an information revolution in and of itself will keep this in mind.

Oh, and New York City tap water: My confidence in you has been severely eroded. Maybe tomorrow I'll post to Twitter, asking for water filter recommendations.